Rojos at UIC Tonight, plus Nair, Shaw, Atomic West and Democracy and the Built Environment - still more for February!

You might think that at this point, we were just waiting for March and spring, and that February was pretty much finished.  You'd be wrong.  This is one active week on the February Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.

Today, Monday the 25th, the School of Architecture of UIC kicks off its spring lecture series with Luis Rojo of Rojo/Fernández-Shaw arquitectos of Madrid.  

On Tuesday, the 26th, the Chicago Loop Alliance has its 2013 Annual Meeting, and superstar structural engineer Dr. Shankar Nair lectures of Skyscrapers-Past, Present and Future at CAF for the Structural Engineers Association of Illinois, while down at the Koolhaas Campus Center at IIT, Peter Onuf and Marshall Brown will deliver the Benjamin Franklin Lecture: Democracy and the Built Environment.

Wednesday, the 27th, Terry McDonnell talks about engineering the (Sears) Willis Tower Skydeck lunchtime at CAF, while over at the Driehaus Museum, a/k/a/ Nickerson Mansion, Stuart Cohen will discuss The Architecture of Howard Van Doren Shaw: Reimaging the Traditional House.

It all wraps up on Thursday, the 28th, with Navigating Change, an all-day conference of the Midwest Ecological Landscaping Association, a Friends of the Parks lecture on Walter Netsch's Legacy, Robert Chattel talking about the The Atomic Wild Wild West at SAIC, and Fritz Haeg discussing Domestic Integrities at the Graham.

To give you a small preview, March begins with a bang on the 1st with the barnstorming new dean Wiel Arets at the College of Architecture at IIT stopping by Frank Lloyd Wright's Unity Temple in Oak Park with A Wonderful World.

More on March later.  For now, there are nearly two dozen great items still to come this month.  Check them all out on the February calendar of Chicago Architectural Events

Spectatorium (Pocket Guide to Hell), Global Cities, the Reopening of Mies' Villa Tugendhat - still more events for January

Still more new items for  the January 2012 Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events

We've got two new exhibitions opening this Friday at the Gallery 400 at UIC.   

Global Cities  Model Worlds "explores the spatial and social impacts of 'mega events' such as the Olympics and Word's Fairs, and the means by which their host metropolises work to secure their position as "global cities."

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The World Finder: Pocket Guide to Hell, explores the story of Steele MacKaye and his plan to build the "Spectatorium" at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, a massive display of the spittoon-ridden era's compulsion for spitting.  No, wait.  That was the Expectoratorium.  The Spectatorium, in contrast, was to be "the world's largest theater," hosting an epic depicting Columbus' voyage to America in four Wagnerian acts, complete with an ocean with real water and a cast of thousands.  I'm hearing it didn't go exactly as planned.

There's an opening reception for both shows, which run through March 3rd, this Friday, January 20th from 5:00 to 8:00 p.m.

Another addition, Celebration of the Reopening of the Villa Tugendhat: Mies Here and There, is an all-day symposium on Mies van der Rohe's famous house .  It takes place this Saturday, January 21st,  in the auditorium of the Rem Koolhaas-designed Campus Center at IIT.  The free event will include talks from architect Iveta Cerna and Chairman Ivo Hammer of the Tugendhat House International Committee, as well as from Dirk Lohan and Professor Petr Pelcak of the School of Architecture, Brno University of Technology.  Tugendhat is also the focus of two other programs this Thursday, the 19th, with Pelcak lecturing on The Architecture of Brono Functionalism, 1919-1939 at noon at AIA Chicago,  and Hammer and Cerna talking on Mies Here and There - Restoration of the Villa Tugendhat, Czech Republic, at the Chicago Architecture Foundation at 6:00 p.m.

Also on Saturday the 21st, there's the Future City 2012 Chicago Regional Finals at Student Center East, UIC.  On Thursday,  the 19th,  Edward W. Wolner discusses his excellent new book, Henry Ives Cobb's Chicago, for Landmarks Illinois at the Cultural Center at 12:15, and Tom Beeby talks on Connecting with the Past: The Harold Washington Memorial Library Center, for ICA&A Chicago-Midwest at the Driehaus Museum/Nickerson Mansion at 6:00 p.m.

Check it out.  There are still nearly three dozen great programs to come on the January 2012 Chicago Calendar of Architectural Events

Visionary Chicago: 140 years, 100 broken dreams, brought into the 21st Century via UIC exhibition

Everyone knows about the Burnham Plan.  How about Marion Mahoney Griffin's master plan for post World War II Chicago?  Many remember Richard J. Daley's 1960's proposal to build a third Chicago airport in Lake Michigan, but in 1945, long before O'Hare, Andrew Rebori was proposing a new harbor airport north of Navy Pier on a mass of landfill that would have put Northerly Island to shame.

These were just two of nearly 100 unrealized Chicago projects, from the 1870's on,  that UIC School of Architecture professor Alexander Eisenschmidt presented to his graduate History and Theory students, who chose 22 as "Architectural Visions of the City", to research, analyze, and place in a contemporary understanding.  Frank Lloyd Wright's unrealized skyscraper for National Life Insurance, Stanley Tigerman's Urban Matrix and Adolf Loos entry to the Tribune Tower competition, and Ludwig Hilberseimer's 1940 Plan for Chicago were among the other subjects in the mix.

Through September 2nd, the results of all that work are on display at UIC's Art & Architecture Building.  As described by this review by Phillip Berger in the Architect's Newspaper, don't expect the show, Visionary Chicago,  to be entirely easy to take in - boards rise as much as 12 feet above the viewer's head. 

There's also a catalogue, which Eisenschmidt describes as . . .

. . . the beginning of a research project to collect, record, compare, analyze, and extrapolate these architectural dreams . . . All of the projects were reconstructed through drawings from a limited set of information (sometimes only a single sketch), bringing the ingenuity of the student researcher in proximity with the project they analyzed. Some schemes are well known but not well documented, while others had disappeared from the architectural consciousness and are here reintroduced into the discourse through drawings, programmatic analysis, and historical and contemporary references. Therefore, the catalog functions simultaneously as a collection and invention of evidences – a constructive and opportunistic re-inhabitation of these visions. Ultimately, the catalog is a directory of ideas, ideas of how to engage the city.

Remove the word "young", and the epigraph, a quote from Louis Sullivan's Kindergarten Chats,  could be describing the city today.

“Chicago is young, clumsy, foolish, its architectural sins are unstable, captious and fleeting; it can pull itself down and rebuild itself in a generation … it has done and can do great things when the mood is on … One must indeed be incurably optimistic even momentarily to dream such a dream.”

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Again, the show runs through September 2nd in the Ramp Gallery of UIC's Art & Architecture Building, 845 West Harrison, Monday through Friday, 9:00 a.m., to 5:00 p.m.  It's been described to me as being "kind of tucked away" at the back the building, but it looks like something well worth checking out, and I'm told signs have been posted to help you find it.  Info here.

Coffee Tables Everywhere Rejoice: Festival of The Architecture Book 1511-2011

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On May 22nd, 1511 - at 3:00 p.m., I think, as he always liked to take the daily bacteria count from the Grand Canal around 2:00 - architect Fra Giovanni Giocondo published the "first illustrated architecture book ever to be printed."  There was so much excitement that La Schiavona put Titian on hold just to go and take a look.  By 4:00 p.m. Giocondo's shop was packed.  By 5:00 p.m. it emptied out at word of a team of jugglers arriving at the Piazza San Marco, and by 6:00, after  it became known that Giocondo's product was nothing new, but a reprint of a 1,500-year-old tome by Vitruvius, the book was showing up on the remainder tables right next to a stack of copies of  la Divina Commedia, Illustrated for Dogs.

Chicago's cultural institutions have, nontheless, taken the 500th anniversary of Giocondo's publication of De Architectura libri decem, to put on the Festival of The Architecture Book 1511-2011.

The Festival of the Architecture Book will demonstrate the broad range and intrinsic value of the illustrated architecture book as a work of art and imagination. By having numerous venues under separate curatorship, the series hopes to present both a survey and in depth views on specific aspects of the medium. Over 300 books, and other related materials will be displayed, featuring highlights of the Western tradition, including many of Chicago interest. The programs surrounding the anniversary of the 1511 De Architectura libri decem celebrate the history of the illustrated architectural book and give rise to questions about its future.

Through June 30, the UIC Richard J. Daley library, 801 South Morgan, is offering up Illustrated Architecture Books: Highlights from 500 Years of Theory and Practice a selection of architectural books from the past 500 years from Venice, Rome, Paris, London, Antwerp and Chicago.  The library is open Monday through Friday 10:00 a.m. to 4:30, Wednesdays to 7:00.  Northwestern University, Loyola, and the U of C are also offering up their own exhibitions, with From Vernacular to Classical: The Perpetual Modernity of Palladio opening at Notre Dame June 10th, and The Story of a House opening at Glessner House on June 1st.

Are we now at the end of the line? Do printed architectural books - any more than any other kind of book - have a future in our digital age? Will they be cramped onto an iPad, or blossom in the expanse of a wall-size flat panel? Will the illustrations of today's architectural books become postings on Flickr and Facebook, and their theoretical musings 140 word tweets? Or has it happened already?

You can check out the festival and festival events on its website, here.