When Relationships Between Sculptures Turn Ugly

The Spearman thought his macho posturing had put the woman in her place. He never even saw the giant leaf-fist as it came towards him.

An innie and an outtie - Zaha and van Berkel in Millennium Park

That's Joe Rosa's description for the two pavilions to be erected on the Chase Promenade in Millennium Park as part of the centennial celebration of the Daniel Burnham's 1909 Plan of Chicago. The two designs were unveiled at a Friends of Downtown event at the Chicago Cultural Center late Tuesday afternoon. Read all about it and see all the renderings here.

Buckingham Fountain Re-opens: Gravel Banished

Is it possible to have too much sparkly brick paving?

Big Red is Back

Since it's 1972 completion, the 601 foot-high CNA Plaza has had a dominant role in Chicago's skyline, not so much from the quality of its architecture, as from its fiery red color. It's a Miesian box devoid of Miesian grace - a heavy-boned structure with inset windows like morning-after eyes. The thick framing actually provides a larger canvass area for the red paint, helping the building stand out even more.

CNA Plaza was originally Continental Plaza III, an annex to the shorter, 333-foot Continental Plaza II, just to the north, which was repainted red to match it. Continental Plaza II, in turn, was built as an annex to the company's original home, the 1924 Strauss Building, at 310 South Michigan, the Mausoleum-topped tower (if only Artemisia had only had the presence of mind to replace the bronze chariot with a beehive borne by four bison), Chicago's first 30-story building, now a condo warren renamed the Metropolitan.
Over the years, CNA retrenched its operations into Plaza III alone. In 1999, Plaza II reverted to the gray of Naess & Murphy's original 1962 design. On III, now the CNA Tower, the red paint faded to a very tired, very flat ghost of its former glory. Until now. You can see the difference below.
Close up, the new paint job seems more orange than I remember, but from a distance it resolves into a deep flame red. The CNA now pops in the skyline with renewed vigor.

Me on Monday, plus Zaha, van Berkel revealed, and Inside Out at NPHM: additions to April Calendar

I'm sure it will be a relief to all, but Monday at 12:15 P.M. at the Chicago Architecture Foundation, 224 South Michigan, will be your last chance to watch me stumble towards coherence at a gallery talk for the Boom Tooms! Chicago Architects Design Worlds that I guest curated. Lest you become too complacent about your future safety, however, later this month, on April 29th, I will also be presenting a 12:15 lunchtime lecture at CAF, Before Burnham: Private Planning and the Town of Pullman. You are encouraged to bring a brown bag lunch; gum only if you have enough for everyone.

Two new additions to the April calendar:
Burnham Pavilions Unveiled: This Tuesday, April 7th, 5:30 to 6:30 at the Chicago Cultural Center, Friends of Downtown will present a program unveiling designs by Zaha Hadid and Ben van Berkel for two temporary pavilions to open in Millennium Park in June as part of the celebration of the 100th anniversary of Daniel Burnham's 1909 Plan of Chicago. A Friday email from Friends of Downtown has the event in the Claudia Cassidy Theatre, but the FoD website has it in Preston Bradley Hall. Flip a coin and check it out.

Inside Out: An Exhibit in the future home of the National Public Housing Museum. - On Friday, April 17th, from 6:00 to 10:00 p.m., the National Public Housing Museum will be presenting a series of audio and video installations in the former Jane Addams Homes, 1322-24 W. Taylor Street, which is being redesigned as museum by Landon Bone Baker architects.

All told, there are over 14 events on this week's calendar, including a free conference Thursday afternoon at DePaul University, Daniel H. Burnham meets Vincent de Paul, a discussion co-sponsored by Manila's Adamson University College of Architecture "about community engagement and urban poverty reduction in Chicago and Manila on the occasion of Daniel H. Burnham’s centennial celebrations for the Plan of Chicago and the Plans of Manila and Baguio."

Check all of this week's events here.

Burnham Bizarro

The story of the AIA/Chicago-run competition to design a memorial to Daniel Burnham on the museum campus just keeps getting curiouser and curiouser.

Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin is reporting that the AIA has announced three finalists: David Woodhouse Architects; Hoerr Schaudt (the firm of Douglas Hoerr and Peter Lindsay Schaudt) and Boston's Sasaki Associates.

The mondo bizarro part of the announcement is that the AIA is refusing to release any of the three designs to the public. Kamin quotes an AIA spokeswoman as spinning, " "We want to let them keep their ideas to themselves."

So let's get this straight. The final three designs for a public site are being withheld from the public to keep the finalists, as Kamin has the AIA explaining it, from stealing from each other's designs.

???????????!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I've covered a lot of competitions in my day but I can't remember any of them hiding the work of the finalists from public view, and the AIA's excuse is risible. Are they saying the jury will be too stupid to notice if a final design cribs from the preliminary entries of its competitors?

What is becoming clear is that while the AIA's competition, as a memorial to the work and vision of Daniel Burnham, is increasingly becoming a non sequitur, as a commemoration of process, itself, of the in-bred, arrogant, behind closed-doors way planning in Chicago has become corrupted since Burnham's day: it's choice.

Ancient Mystery at AMA: Pyramids Appear, Disappear

Those passing by the plaza of Kenzo Tange's AMA Building Thursday morning were confronted by what appeared to be a rogue art installation, a series of perfect plywood pyramids set in counterpoint to the diagonal seams of the plaza's paving.
Actually, as a construction worker at the scene explained, the devices were about to be lifted onto the roof of the building's lobby pavilion to protect its skylights from the construction of the adjacent 505 North State Street.
Why this protection was being provided after most of the construction has been completed was not immediately clear, but I'm sure I'm just missing something.
The construction guy estimated the pyramids would be removed by the end of June, after which they will be bundled off to the Art Institute and put on permanent display in the garden of Renzo Piano's new Modern Wing.

Ada Louise Huxtable on Charlie Rose tonight

" . . . a conversation with architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable, author of 'On Architecture: Collected Reflections on a Century of Change'"

5:00 and 11:00 pm on WYCC, Channel 20; 1:30 am., WTTW, Channel 11, 12:00 am, Lakeshore Public TV.

Revised Central Area Action Plan Seeks to raid Chicago's massive TIF piggy bank

Chicago's Central Area Action Plan is back, and it's taking no prisoners. An amended update of the original 2003 plan is now nearing completion. It offers an enthralling overview of the challenges and potential of the city center, even as it raises a terrifying spectre of bottomless pork barrel megaprojects leaching onto Chicago's corrupt Tax Increment Financing system to bleed the city's finances dry.

The inflation of estimates and ambition over just six years is staggering. According to the 2003 plan, "The total cost of transportation improvements over 20 years will be between $2.25 and $3.5 billion in capital in investment." In the 2009 revision, that figure is now over $13 billion.

The 2003 plan correctly predicted - who knew? - that the huge Central Loop TIF would actually be allowed to expire, and didn't see much future in TIF financing:

Fourteen other TIF districts exist within the boundaries of the Central Area. Of these, four - Chicago/Kingsbury, River West, Near South, and Canal/Congress - are structured to permit funding of transportation. But the amount of increment generated within these districts is limited, so they would not be major sources of revenue.

Flash forward to 2009, and the CAAP folks, like Paul on the road to Damascus, have undergone a revelation:

Tax Increment Financing could serve as a source of funding for capital projects within the Central Area. Although it might not cover all of the City’s local share of costs, TIF can provide a source of funding for initial activities, such as preliminary engineering or site preparation.

The established TIF districts will remain essential to funding the recommendations of the CAAP. They should be protected, expanded, and aggressively used in a coordinated way to ensure a secure funding framework. (emphasis mine)

A useful statutory feature of TIF districts is the ability to share revenues among contiguous districts, to accommodate large-scale projects that may exceed a given year’s incremental revenue collection or that may span multiple districts. Of the nineteen TIF districts located in the Central Area, sixteen districts are contiguous. The sum of total budgets for the Central Area TIF districts over their twenty three year life spans is $3.2 billion."

The CAAP recommends focusing TIF spending on major public works projects.

The revised CAAP marks the final transformation of TIF's from a vehicle for helping re-invigorate depressed urban districts to a gigantic, largely unaccountable slush-fund-in-perpetuity for financing money pit boondoggles like the proposed $3 billion Clinton Street subway and a $2 billion West Loop Transportation Center that would burrow commuters like moles up to four levels below the street. Of questionable value and utility, they threaten to become Chicago's version of Boston's Big Dig, which went from initial estimates of $2.8 billion and wound up at $14.6 billion and counting. And if you think I'm being alarmist, remember this is the city of the transit "superstation" under Block 37, where, as cost overruns hit $100 million, the CTA chose simply to write off the quarter billion spent to date and walk away, leaving behind a project that was half-finished and unusable. Other parts of the new CAAP seem nothing less than hallucinatory, such as a proposed subway running under Monroe street from The Loop to Union and Ogilvie stations that the CAAP actually thinks can be done for $200 million.

There are, however, a lot of great things in the plan, which I hope to discuss in much more detail in the not too distant future, and some of them are very reasonably priced. Two projects I discussed last week - the re-greening of Congress Street as a "Signature Parkway" and the reopening of Queen's Landing - get major play in the CAAP. Without resorting to one of Bob O'Neill's pricey gossamer bridges, "Pedestrian mobility between Buckingham Fountain and the Lake will be restored. An at-grade street crossing is preferred." Estimated cost: $500,000.

For residents of River North and the Fulton River District, the plan will be presented at a community meeting put on by 42nd ward alderman Brendan Reilly, tonight, Thursday, April 2nd, from 6:00 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. at the Erie Cafe, 536 West Erie.

For the rest of us, you can view the original 2003 plan on the City of Chicago's website here, and courtesy of David Roeder and Fran Spielman and the Chicago Sun-Times, you can download this year's revision here. Compare and discuss.

iTunes offers free John Cage: 4'33

Ok, you still have to come up with $1.98 to download the entire piece, but iTunes is letting you download the first movement of American composer John Cage's landmark work, 4'33", for free. It's one of most distinctive compositions in contemporary music, and once you've heard it, you won't forget it. If you have iTunes, you can download 4'33" here.

This is Learning from Vancouver?

Separated at birth? One Museum Park (left), Edgar the cat (right)

cat photograph: Yukari

OK, not everybody has to be Kate Moss, and not every building has to be supermodel skinny. Still, Chicago, which has long heralded the Vancouver example of tall, thin buildings that bring density to the urban core while maintaining plenty of light and air circulation, talks a good story, but once there's money to be made, it all tends to go out the window. That was confirmed when Sam Assefa, director of land use and planning policy and a key advocate for the Vancouver approach, was recently unceremoniously dumped in a reorganization of Chicago's planning departments.

The Trib's architecture critic Blair Kamin has been singling out the high-rise work of architects Pappageorge Haymes for praise, but the fact of the matter is that they've provided cover to city bureaucrats inflicting major damage on the city's lakefront, especially at 600 North Lake Shore Drive. It's an handsome building, split into the two as a sop to provide more light, but it still often places the adjacent Ohio Street Beach into deep shadow.
To be sure, it's not Pappageorge Hayme's fault, but 600 North is a structure that should never have been built. A clown car load of aldermen muscled it through as they huffed and puffed at protesting activists. "This is not a communist country!" the Trib reported then alderman Burton Natarus as railing. "You act as if this beach belongs to you personally," Bernard Stone ranted. "It belongs to all the people of Chicago," he lectured, even as he was stealing a finite and irreplaceable resource placed in his trust for the benefit of all the city's citizens - sunlight on a public beach - and handing it over for the profit of a single private developer.
The situation at Roosevelt Road lacks that kind of venality, but a building with the massiveness of One Museum Park still plays havoc with shadows and light. It's an interesting problem, as the original concept was to create a southern street wall to Grant Park that would complement the historic landmarked street wall down the west side of Michigan Avenue. That street wall, of course, is the opposite of Roosevelt, composed primarily of medium rise buildings standing shoulder to shoulder with nary a gap.
That kind of scale apparently no longer offers an adequate level of profitability, and so we get east Roosevelt Road, composed entirely of just four huge towers, one completed, one under construction, and two more planned (in the current economy, don't hold your breath). Continuous podiums at street level, portly towers above, with gaps that dissipate any visual sense of a street wall's feeling of closure. And would anyone really want a continuous street wall 60 stories high? At this point in Chicago's development, is a truly civil streetwall like Michigan Avenue any longer possible?

And who knows? With its rounded, stepped massing, One Museum Park, amiable and Rubensesque in a lost spaceship kind of way, could actually wind up becoming an object of affection, just like Edgar.

Chicago Streetscene: Getting the Account

Tigerman, Wright, Gropius, van Berkel, Maas, Endres, Garofalo, ∑liasson, de Leon, Bucky and Becker - 70 events on April calendar

I must be sick. I'm actually publishing the April calendar of Chicago events before the month begins. But then, you'll probably need to a couple days preview to let you decide how many of the 70 - count -em - 70 events you'll be able to shoehorn into your calendar. (Google and iCal to come.)

Everyone's running at full cylinder right now, with Stanley Tigerman discussing the backstory to his new Illinois Holocaust Museum at CAF, Eric Lloyd Wright at Unity Temple, Sharon Johnston + Mark Lee, Carme Pinós. UNStudio's Ben van Berkel, U of Ky's Michael Speaks and MVRDV's Winy Maas at UIC, Paul Endres, Tom Leader and Ming Zhang at IIT, and Arturo Vittori, Office dA's Monica Ponce de Leon, and Matthias Böttger at the Art Institute, whose Meredith Mack will discuss Renzo Piano's new Modern Wing at CAF.

Doug Garofalo and Eric Ellingsen give gallery talks at the MCA's big Buckminster Fuller exhibition, where Olafur Eliasson will also lecture even as he's putting the finishing touches on his own MCA show opening May 1st. Clyde Baker will talk about engineering foundations for the world's tallest buildings for SEAIO and the Structural Engineers Foundation and SEAOI holds its annual Bridge Symposium.

DePaul's Chaddick Center offers up an afternoon conference on Daniel Burnhams's plan for Manila and Baguio in The Phillipines, acting commissioner Chris Raguso talks about changes in Chicagos's planning departments for Friends of Downtown. Richard Kieckhefer discusses Architecture for Reformed Liturgy at the Loyola Museum of Art.

An especially troubling aspect of the month's events is that I will be foisting myself off on the public, not once, but twice, at CAF, on the 6th with a gallery talk for the Boom Towns! Chicago Architects Design New Worlds exhibition that I guest curated there, and again on the 29th with a lunchtime lecture on George Pullman and his privatized town planning. Apologies to all in advance.

One of the most important events in April will undoubtedly be Grahm Balkany's April 20th presentation, Gropius in Chicago: A Legacy on the Brink, which will cover his expanding research on Gropius's role in planning and designing a series of striking buildings for Michael Reese hospital, now gravely endangered with being bulldozed into a characterless tabula rasa for an athletes' village for the 2016 Olympics.

Amazingly enough, this only scratches the surface of all the great events being offered up in April. Preview them all here.

It's Spring in Chicago!

Last Thursday:

Today:

Tomorrow - frogs and boils

Symbol vs Substance: Chicago's memorial to Daniel Burnham

Does a proposed memorial to architect and planner Daniel Burnham represent an overdue tribute or a colossal failure of nerve? Should 2009 be the year to finally begin realizing Burnham's vision for a grand gateway to Chicago's lakefront? A story in three parts
I. The rebellion against a closed competition to design a memorial to Daniel Burnham.
II. Is There a Disconnect Between Competitions and Chicago Architecture?
III. Restoring Burnham's Vision for a Grand Gateway to the Lake.

Own Your Own Calatrava, Krueck, Gang, Summers

Ok, so you're not in an economic percentile that allows you to commission a building from one of Chicago's top architects. Courtesy of the Graham Resource Center, the library at the College of Architecture at IIT, you can still have your own artwork, suitable for framing, as they used to say (fish wrapping not allowed).

On April 2nd, to benefit their endowment fund, the Graham will be holding an auction,
both live and silent, of dozens of striking items., from Santiago Calatrava's sketch for the Chicago Spire - dating from those halcyon days before liens began to fly - Ron Krueck's early color pencil study for the Spertus Institute, Jeanne Gang's ink drawing of her Aqua Tower, a Gene Summers etching (bottom), a first edition of Learning from Las Vegas signed by Venturi and Scott Brown, and Ralph Johnson's watercolor of his l'Universitiare Catholique de Louvain in Belgium (top). Other architects represented include Martin Felsen, Peter Pran, Helmut Jahn, Joe Valerio, Gordon Gill, John Dubrow, Steven Brubaker, and Peter Ellis. You can check out all the items, and see the full information on the event. here.

Thursday, April 2nd. Cocktails at 5:00, dinner at 5:30, silent auction 6:30, live auction 7:15. Tickets are $75.00, and include a one year membership in the Friends of the Library. The auction, itself, is open to the public, and for those who can't attend in person, bids from remote parties will also be accepted. For more info, and to RSVP, call 312/567.3263.

New Transsolar/Behnisch exhibition opens Saturday, Stefan Bennisch lectures

Ecology. Design. Synergy. is the name of a new exhibition opening Saturday, March 28th, that features the work of Behnisch Architekten and Transolar ClimateEngeering. The press release quotes Behnisch partner David Cook as stating, "The exhibition is not necessarily intended to present models for sustainable architecture. By drawing on the five senses, the exhibition attempts to provoke a re-definition of the term 'sustainability' by focusing on the complex series of relationships between human beings and their immediate environment."

The exhibition will feature such projects as the LEED Platinum Genzyme Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the Norddeutsche Landesbank in Hannover, Germany.

This Saturday, March 28th at 11:30 a.m, there will be a public lecture by Stefan Behnisch and Transsolar partner Thomas Auer at the Loyola University Museum of Art, 820 North Michigan, where the exhibition will run through May 17, 2009. Hours are Tuesday, 11AM–8PM; Wednesday–Sunday, 11AM–6PM. Admission: $6 general; $5 senior; free for students and children under 14; free Tuesdays.

Chicago Streetscene: Sea of Glass

Chicago Architecture News 3/24/2009 edition

The National Public Housing Museum receives $40,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The grant will support planning of Our Stories: Resident Voices of Public Housing. The PHM is working towards a 2012 opening in a structure that is the last surviving building of the Jame Addams Homes, which opened in 1938 as the first federal public housing project in Chicago. Read the full press release (pdf format) here.

The Society of Architectural Historians receives $213,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to "develop the first online architecture journal that will incorporate moving Google Earth maps into articles about the build world." The first issue of JSAH Online, to be co-published with the University of California Press, is scheduled to be release in March of next year. "JSAH Online will be the first online journal to the arts and humanities that incorporates such cutting-edge features" as simultaneous viewing of both text and dynamic images including film and video, zoomable images, digital maps and 3D models.

Spertus Museum launches Ground Level Projects, to be on display in the glass-enclosed Michigan avenue vestibule.
On April 30th, an installation by Chicago-based artist Deb Sokolow will be the first of four "creative encounters curated by Staci Boris that investigate, challenge, and expand traditional perceptions of the Jewish experience" in the museum's new Krueck & Sexton designed home, and will be visible "from the street, connecting public and private spaces." While admission is required for the museum proper, access to the Ground Level Projects will be free. More info here.

Future Perfect: Mid-Century Modern Design Drawings extended through May 30th at the ArchiTech Gallery, 730 North Franklin, Suite 200. The show displays design from drawings from the mid-1940's to late 1960's "that mark the beginning of the most accelerated period in American consumerism." Designers include Henry P. Glass, R.G. Martelet, Vincent Raney and Bertrand Goldberg. More info here.

Yikes! Venice Biennale, 2016 and Northerly Island - Still another four events added to March calendar

Yeah, as if what we had for the balance of the month wasn't already enough. There's the New Yorker's Paul Goldberger talking about Frank Lloyd Wright at Unity Temple this Thursday, Larry Beasley on the The Dream for True Urbanism in the Middle East: Recent Planning and Development in Abu Dhabi at CAF on Tuesday, where Jeff Renterghem of Pappageorge/Haymes discusses Museum Park and Central Station lunchtime on Wednesday, with Mies fashion show birthday party at Crown Hall that same evening and the Chicago Modernism Show and Sale this weekend.

Now we've added FOUR - count 'em - FOUR more events to what should be the waning days of the March calendar. On Monday, at Glessner House, a panel moderated by Vincent Michael for the Western Great Lakes Chapter, Association for Preservation Technology takes on Authenticity and How it Shapes Historic Preservation. On Thursday, Aaron Levy and The Architect's Paper founder and editor William Menking give us We, the Unsigned: Dispatches from the U.S. Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, at the Graham Foundation. On Monday, March 30th, author Phyllis Ross adds another lecture on American modernist furniture and industrial designer Gilbert Rohde for the Architecture and Design Society of the Art Institute, and on Tuesday, March 31st, the Grant Park Advisory Council will offer a presentation on the impact of the 2016 Olympics on Grant Park and Northerly Island.

Get ready to update your Blackberries. Check it all out here.