On a Neglected Landscape, Amanda Williams Creates a Powerful, Beautiful Statement - with Tulips

 

Traveling on the CTA's Green Line means looking at greystones and other classic buildings standing amidst vast tracts of vacant lots, most empty since the destruction of the 1960's riots.  

On several of those vacant lots around Prairie and 53rd, Chicago artist Amanda Williams has created a remarkable installation of sprawling beds of 100,000 red tulips. Lovely in themselves, the work's title "Redefining Redlining" tips off its greater meaning, the long era where banks deliberately starved of investment the areas most in need of it.

"We're planting the tulips in the shape of houses that should exist, "Williams told the Chicago Sun-Times, adding that she also took her inspiration from Dutch tulip mania of the 1600s, a craze in which, at is peak, a single flower sold for the price of a house, before values collapsed.  

A few blocks away from the plantings is Alfred Alschuler's 1914 B'Nai Sholom Temple, which became Greater Bethesda Baptist only decades later. Nearby is the George Maher designed mansion that eventually became home to White Sox owner Charles Comiskey.

Good bones" exist in the area's surviving buildings. Slowly, very slowly, new infill construction is filling in the gaps, but the emptiness remains. In Williams's flowerbeds, in its symbolism of past injustice expressed in visual delight, a terrible beauty is born, and a better future foreseen.
https://chicago.suntimes.com/2023/4/21/23689614/tulips-redefining-redlining-amanda-williams-artist-washington-park-planted-53rd-prairie

Relief for NATO Weekend, at the Lurie Garden

click images for larger view

 

 this one's a cheat - taken at the Widow Clarke house.

 . . . and this one's from somewhere along Archer avenue.  Now back to Lurie:

 Buckyballs.

more after the break.

Organic Construction in the Garden of Lurie

click images for larger view (highly recommended)

Through this portal, some of the most amazing engineering in Chicago can be found.

Check out those fractals!

From Louis Sullivan, to Frank Lloyd Wright, to Cecil Balmond, Zaha, and beyond, architects periodically convince themselves they've arrived at the organic, at a grasp of the informal that breaks the bounds of the traditional construction, and rivals the fecundity of nature.

A look at a single flower betrays how short even our best designs fall. The most abject plant is a marvel of adaptation, form and function far beyond even our most sophisticated attempts.

In the end, it's not an emulation of natural form, but geometric abstraction - the circle and square, the right angle and the straight line - that stand most human in their aspect, encapsulating both the mastery of our intellect, and the tragic denial of the primacy of our existence as living entities arising out of nature.

 Set against this splendor, our proud towers seem paltry reductions.