Tigerman, Adrian Smith, Dominque Perrault, Toyo Ito, Playboy Architecture, Open House Chicago, Edgar Allan Poe and much more - it's the October Calendar!

Stanley Tigerman receives AIA Chicago's Lifetime Achievement Award

Will we be adding more? You betcha, but right now, there's almost 60 great items on the just-published October Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.

Things start fast and furious this week, with Adrian Smith talking Wednesday. the 2nd, about Supertall Towers and Green Cities at the Logan Center for the Arts. Also on Wednesday, Anthony Denzer is at CAF talking about his new book, The Solar House: Pioneering Sustainable Design and 6:00 p.m. at IIT, Christophe Cornubert of PUSH is in from L.A. to deliver a lecture at the McCormick Tribune Campus Center.

Architects? At IIT, at Crown Hall we've got Dominque Perrault  on Tuesday, the 8th, and Iñaki Alday, founder, Arquitectura y Paisaje, on Wednesday the 13th, Alphonse Sarthout and Hugo Haas of Ciguë Agency at the Alliance Française.

Monday the 14th, and 2013 Pritzker Prize Laureate Toyo Ito at the Art Institute on

Tuesday, the 15th. Ito will also participate, along with Yusaku Immura, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Moon Kyungwon and Jeon Joonho, at an Art Institute Public Forum, A Conservation on Beauty earlier in the day. Then, on Friday the 25th, Stanley Tigerman will receive AIA Chicago's Lifetime Achievement Award at the 58th Annual Designight, at Navy Pier.

Princeton's Beatriz Colomina's talks about Playboy

Architecture: 1953 - 1979 at the School of the Art Institute on Thursday the 10th, the same day that Tony Tasset of Eye fame is at Unity Temple in Oak Park.  On Thursday the 4th, the Graham is screening Drop City, a documentary about artists who created their dwellings from “the scrapheap of a wasteful society.” This Saturday the 5th, Hedrich-Blessing's Dave Burk will be leading an Architecture Digital Photography Workshop at the Chicago Architecture Foundation.

Open House Chicago is back for its third year.  The Chicago Architecture Foundation event  will give participants access to 150 buildings on Saturday the 19th and Sunday the 20th.

Jeffrey Boyer and Sachin Anan of dbHMS will be at the Chicago Center for Green Technology to talk about the Decarbonization Plan and Triple Net Zero Design of Nalanda University. CAF lunchtime on Wednesday the 16th, there'll be a presentation of Design Evanston's Jack Weiss, Stuart Cohen, Kris Hartzell, Heidi Hoppe and Laura Saviano on the new book, Evanston: 150 Years, 150 Places. The next week - same time, same place - Michael A. Hirsch of Pelli Clarke Pelli and John Culbert, Dean, will discuss their new Theatre School at DePaul University.

Meg Kindelin of Johnson Lasky discusses Highland's Park International Style Battledeck House at the Cultural Center for Landmarks Illinois on Thursday the 17th, the same day that Dianne Harris will be at the Graham in the evening discussing her new book, Little Houses: Race, Space, and the Ordinary Postwar Home, at the same time that Patti Philippon will talk about The House (Mark) Twain and (Louis Comfort) Tiffany Built at the Driehaus Museum. Also at the Driehaus on Thursday, the 29th, architect Richard Economakis will discuss The Civic Hall and New Town of Cayalá, Guatemala.

Architect and urban designer Marshall Brown will talk about The Speculative City at the American Planning Association Tuesday, the 22nd. Also on the 22nd, Steven Monz talks about the Architecture of Benjamin Marshall at the Glessner House Museum, where, just in time for Halloween, the museum sponsors its 27th Annual Edgar Allan Poe Readings on Saturday the 26th.

On October 24th and 25th, there's not one, but two, two-day Facades+Performance at IIT, and Building for Sustainability at the Center for Green Technology. On the 25th, Openlands has its 50th Anniversary Luncheon at the Hilton Chicago.   On Monday the 28th at the House of Blues, there'll be a special Pecha Kucha Chicago/Chicago Tribune Photojournalism, featuring the work and stories of a dozen photojournalists.
symposiums:

As you might imagine, these are just some of the highlights.  You can check them all out on the October 2013 Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.

Architectural Healing: Toyo Ito Wins 2013 Pritzker Prize

Toyo Ito - photograph, Yoshiaki Tsutsui (click images for larger view)

71-year-old Japanese architect Toyo Ito was named Sunday as the 2013 recipient of the prestigious Pritzker  Architecture Prize.  This year's jury was again chaired by former Farnsworth House owner Lord Peter Palumbo, as well Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena, U.S. Supreme Court Justicer Stephen Breyer, architect and MIT professor Yung Ho Change, 2002 Pritzker winner Glenn Murcutt, Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa (who will be lecturing at IIT April 2nd) and Pritzker Architecture Prize Executive Director Martha Thorne.  The award will formally be presented at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston on May 29th.

Museum of Architecture, Omishima, photograph: Daici Ano

The Jury citation concludes  . . . 

Toyo Ito is a creator of timeless buildings, who at the same time boldly charts new paths. His architecture projects an air of optimism, lightness and joy, and is infused with both a sense of uniqueness and universality. For these reasons and for his synthesis of structure, space and form that creates inviting places, for his sensitivity to landscape, for infusing his designs with a spiritual dimension and for the poetics that transcend all his works, Toyo Ito is awarded the 2013 Pritzker Architecture Prize.

Ito began his career in the offices of Kiyonori Kikutake & Associates, one of the founders of the  Metabolist movement, which sought to rebuild post-war Japan by drawing on the principles of biological growth  to create an extensible cellular system of design and construction.  Ito founded his own firm in 1971, beginning with residences like the Aluminum House in the Kanagawa Prefecture.

Sendai Mediatheque, photograph: Nacasa and Partners Inc.

This led to more complex and ambitious projects such as the 2001 Sendai Mediatheque, supported on a series of open steel tubes.

Sendai Mediatheque, photograph: Tomio Ohashi

 On the exterior, each floor was its own unique finish.  Read Ada Louis Huxtable's eloquent take on the building here.

The next year, Ito collaborated with engineer/architect Cecil Balmond to create the target="_blank" 2002 Serpentine Gallery in London's Kensington Park as a structured made from an algorithm of multiple interlocking iterations of a rotated cube.

Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, 2002,

Ito's entry in the luxury brand bling building was a store for TOD's in Tokyo, whose intricate concrete cross-bracing was said to emulate the form of the elm trees along the street. 

TOD's Omotoesando Building, photograph: Nacasa and Partners Inc.

In July of 2011, in the wake of the devastating Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, Ito, in a  postscript in the Rem Koolhaas/Hans Ulrich Obrist book  Project Japan: Metabolists Talks wrote  . .  .

Since around the time I set up my own office in 1971, urban proposals such as those made by the Metabolists are rarely seen.  We are still in the mode of introversion and abstraction.  I think now is a good moment for us architects to break away from this mode and regain a viable relationship with nature.

Ito led the "Home for All" project to create a communal space for people who had lost their homes during the tsunami.   The concept won the Golden Lion for Best National Participation at the  2012 Venice Biennale.