Chicago Architects' Post Mortem on Mayor Richard M. Daley: Too Much Spun Sugar? A Manifesto for Fresh Thinking

Robert E. Thomas and Alan G. Brake of The Architects Newspaper asked eleven of Chicago's best architects "to reflect on Daley’s impact on the city’s architecture, planning, and landscape, and to ponder the challenges facing the next mayor."  You can read the results here. 

To be fair, the responses were restricted to the length of little more than sound bites, and how the piece was edited could have heavily effected how opinions were places and shaped within it, but for 11 of the most brilliant minds in the city to come up with such a vacuous pile of platitudes makes, at least for me, some highly dispiriting reading.  It's so soft a marshmallow would be jealous.  We even see the mayor being credited with helping the city lose its association with Al Capone, the vampire mobster previously claimed to be killed off by everyone from George Solti and the CSO to Michael Jordan.

According to the responses, Mayor Richard M. Daley's over two decades in power resulted in not a single negative worth mentioning.  The closest we come is Carol Ross Barneys comment, "The jury is still out on housing and the airport."  Mostly, it's the kind of eulogizing you find at a funeral of a guy who was so intimidating in life that the mourners fear an unkind word might cause him to leap out of the coffin and strike them dead. 

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Not that the Mayor's accomplishments that were mentioned fail to impress.   Millennium Park, of course, comes up.  It is, without a doubt, a triumph for which Richard M. Daley deserves some of the credit, but also a lot of blame.  Not mentioned are the cost overruns due to rework caused by city bureaucrats racing to fulfill the mayor's whim to get a new park up and running by the start of the new Millennium (hence the name, in case you wondered), overruns that in one of his famously crabby press conferences the Mayor, whose allergy for accepting responsibility was a mainstay of his reign, angrily tried to palm off on Frank Gehry.

That aside, the Mayor's greatest contribution to Millennium may have been in starting the ball rolling and then getting the hell out of the way when Cindy Pritzker's took charge and enlisted Frank Gehry to design the bandshell,  jump-starting a chain of events that would see Jaume Plensa, Anish Kapoor, Kathryn Gustafson, Piet Oudolf, and Robert Israel enter the mix to transform what would have been a pleasant public space into an international sensation, a process made possible by the leadership of Ed Uhlir, the incredible fund-raising of John Bryan, and the hijacking of funds from the TIF district across the street. And yet it's always "Daley's Millennium Park"  Was there not even a cook in his army?


For nearly two decades, Richard M. Daley was unable to get Block 37, one of the city's most critical pieces of real estate, beyond anything more than a dirt-surfaced vacant lot, and when development finally came the results fell far short of expectations, dominated by a troubled shopping mall that has been placed in receivership.  Far more importantly, over a quarter billion dollars sits buried at the bottom of Block 37 in a "Superstation" that was shut down before it could ever open, left uncompleted because no one could see where the cost overrruns would end.

In any other city, that kind of scandal would have run a mayor out of office.  In Chicago, the city of silence, it was never even a blip on the radar.

The Superstation from Hell was just a subset of a far larger scandal, the massive TIF scam, which siphoned off billions by designating Chicago's wealthiest districts as economically challenged while leaving the city's most desperate neighborhoods to stew in their own juices.  An architect recently wrote to me defending TIF's as making viable projects perceived as economically marginal, neglecting the fact that most projects are designated marginal for a very good reason - they are marginal.

How much  was  Chicago's housing collapse exacerbated - and the recovery delayed -  by the wild overbuilding of new condo projects subsidized/encouraged by TIF's?  How much was any comprehensive, co-ordinated, city-wide planning process eviscerated by the way TIF districts balkanized the city, carving up revenues and spending into a hundred individual fiefdoms?

The next mayor of Chicago faces a financial abyss because Richard M. Daley essentially punted the city's financial crisis to his successor, buying himself time by selling off assets - in the case of the parking meter leases, at fire sale prices - for 75 years or more, stripping the revenues within just several years to keep his administration afloat, while leaving three future generations of Chicagoans holding an empty bag.  Where will the money come from to fund Chicago's future?

This is a mayor who arrogantly fought to force a favored heiress's private museum into the city's front yard, the same Grant Park zealously defended by A. Montgomery Ward, and who sought to silence all opposition by smearing dissenters as child-haters and racists.  This is a mayor who illegally sent bulldozers to tear up the runways at Meigs field in the middle of the night so he could seize the site.  (And you wonder why Chicago still has an Al Capone reputation).  This is a mayor who frantically and recklessly demolished Chicago's irreplaceable Bauhaus legacy at Michael Reese Hospital for an Olympics that would never be, leaving another gaping open wound in the heart of the near South Side.  (Or as Blair Kamin calls it, the new Block 37)  How can you preserve and rebuild a great city on a single man's whims?

The irony, of course, is that the eleven architects surveyed by The Architects Newspaper have been pretty much frozen out of major projects sponsored by the City of Chicago and its agencies.  In Cesar Chavez and Little Village, Carol Ross Barney's created some of the Chicago Public Schools' best new buildings, but she hasn't been involved in any of the newest schools.  She's recently designed an award-winning library for Champaign, but has had no library commissions in Chicago since the 1990's, and her redesigns of CTA Brown Line stations were severely compromised by  cutbacks.  John Ronan builds schools that have received national praise, just not for the CPS.  Studio/Gang's handsome new pavilion for the South Pond Boardwalk had the Lincoln Park Zoo as the client, not the city.

What has been built over the last decade, in my view, has often been extremely mediocre, as in the faux Prairie styled libraries that have gone up across the city.  Until Millennium Park came along, the Mayor had a reputation, after being smitten by Paris, for favoring traditional design.  How true this was we may never know, but it certainly traveled down the bureaucratic food chain, stifling innovative design.

I have been noticing, however, some solid work from smaller, less known firms, such as GREC Architects recent Engine Company 18,

 and Schroeder Murchie Niemiec Gazda-Auskalnis Architects, Ltd's Mark Skinner Elementary.

Designs such as these enrich the urban fabric, and provide the kind of visual anchors that give a neighborhood a distinctive, inviting character.

Mayor Richard M. Daley has a deep, passionate love for the City of Chicago.  That is undisputed.  His accomplishments are many:  Stability? Absolutely.  While the rescue of the Chicago Theater has proved something of a financial sinkhole, his bet on subsidizing the restoration of the Loop's other great surviving theaters - the Oriental, the Palace, the Schubert - as well as the new Goodman, has paid off big time,  beyond even what he might imagined.

Unattractive, if not downright scary neighborhoods all along the periphery of the Loop and beyond have become thriving, revived communities.  I could do without some of that infamous metal fencing, but I'm not among those who disparage Daley's efforts to bring more flowers and landscaping to the streetscapes of Chicago.  It's easy to see it as marginal, but it's like Rudy Guliani's broken window theory - a street that is clean, well maintained and attractive even looks safe - it's one of the best investments you can make for reviving a neighborhood.

We can learn much from all that things Richard M. Daley did right, but only if we also look unflinchingly at all the things that went off the rails, and why.  Silence is not an option.

In The Architects Newspaper piece, Clare Lyster, an exceptionally talented architect and thinker whose writing has an unfortunate tendency to veer towards the style of a grant proposal, still has the most lucid final words:

The city has multiple young design firms with great ideas for the future of Chicago. Local architecture schools are think tanks for both practical and visionary explorations. Both the academic and professional design communities are ready to engage the public and help transform the city. Are you listening, Rahm?

Or, I might add, Tom, or James, or Gery or whomever else winds up running this deeply troubled city that endures as among the world's greatest.

And the time to pose the questions is not after the election, but during.  To try to make the candidates go on record about their intentions for Chicago's built environment, to be sure, but even more importantly, to force making a discussion about this crucial topic a core part of the campaign debate.

In a time when election campaigns have become saturated with vile attack ads created by slick, amoral specialists in slime who, in the case of the upcoming mayor's race, in all probability won't even live in Chicago and whose interest in the city will disappear the moment their last invoice is paid,  Chicago's future depends on displacing reckless smears with informed discussion.  Instead of articles that are little more than a snapshot poll, we need a series of panels:

• inclusive
• incisively conceived
• participants expert, engaging and unleashed
• accessible and inviting locations, venues and times
• aggressively and relentlessly promoted

Rahm, CAF, AIA, the Graham, APA, are you listening?

Chicago Streetscene: Stanley Wave

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Chicago Skyscene: Cloud Zipper

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The Rise and Fall of Garrett Kelleher and the Calatrava's Chicago Spire

John Meagher in Britain's Independent has a great story on the Gatsby-like saga of Garrett Kelleher, the ambitious Irish developer who went from rehabbing lofts on Chicago's web site to partnering with architect Santiago Calatrava for the 2,000 foot high Chicago Spire. Faced with multiple liens and foreclosures, the Spire appears to have had a stake driven through its heart, just in time for Halloween. Read Meagher's great piece here. And read ongoing coverage the story of the Spire, as it happened, from what Meagher describes as one of "Chicago's foremost architecture critics" (me) here, and also here, and here.

Halloween attacks Chicago architecture - Giant Spider on Rush, Poe at Glessner, PC at Cobb's dungeon

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No, your eyes were not deceiving you.  That was a giant, scabby spider you saw climbing up the side of the 1883, oh so stately and sober Nickerson Mansion on Rush.  If his huge rhinestone eyes are bulging with anger, it's because he just found out the Nickerson Driehaus Museum is closed on Monday's, and he's grown way too big to scamper through a crack in the window.

If you want to move inside, there a number of Halloween events coming up.

Tuesday, October 26th, 6:00 to 8:00 p.m., Preservation Chicago is offering up Paranormal Preservation at the Excalibur  nightclub on Dearborn.

Eat, Drink and Be Spooked! Join us at this haunted historic landmark for a Halloween celebration and be possessed by one of the scariest of places in Chicago, the Dome Room. Sean Parnell author of Historic Bars of Chicago will be giving a brief talk in the haunted history of the Dome Room and will be signing books.

The building that is now Excalibur, of course, was built in 1892 as the home of the Chicago Historical Society, done up in architect Henry Ives Cobb's best fortress dungeon style.  One little known fact about the structure is its basement crypt were Laeddis was kept shackled before he was shuffled off to Shutter Island

The $30.00 tariff for Preservation Chicago's event includes 2 drink tickets, appetizer buffer, a one year membership for new members to PC, and a real shock if you choose to investigate that last stall in the washroom with its door half open.  Information and reservations here.

Unfortunately, Unity Temple has already suffered a repugnant "trick"  when 58 of the 72 tarnished bronze letters spelling out "For the worship of God and the service of man" were stolen from the sides of Frank Lloyd Wright's masterpiece. 

Fortunately, on Thursday the 28th from 7:00 to 9:00 p.m., there will be a more positive event, Wine, Chocolate & Architecture: A Haunting Halloween Trio that will take place in a candlelit Unity Temple. The event will also feature clothing, jewelry and accessories "in hues of wine and chocolate" (makes it so much easier when you spill some of it on yourself) from Oak Park's Takara boutique.  $30.00 in advance, $35.00 at the door, 50% tax deductible. Get information about the event and how to purchase tickets here.

Finally, the Glessner House Museum will be offering actors from Lifeline Theatre presenting staged readings of Edgar Allen Poe's "terrifying stories and poetry. A holiday tradition!" (nevermore,  schmevermore), Saturday, October 30 at 5:00 and 8:00 p.m.  And, by the way, if you catch sight a huge ghostly figure, hooded in a monk's black cloak, remember it's bad manners, even on Halloween, to remind him that if he had just eaten more sensibly he would have had time to make a lot more buildings.  The event is $25.00, $20.00 for museum members, pre-paid reservations required.  On Saturday and Sunday, October 30 and 31, the Glesnner is also offering Haunted Tours of Prairie Avenue at 7:00 and 8:00 p.m., "Tales of strange sounds, unexplained sightings, and untimely endings as your explore Prairie Avenue after dark." $10.00 per person, $8.00 for members. Information about the events and how to order tickets here.

What?  You say we still haven't come up with anything that really scares you?

Ok.

how

about

THIS! : : : : : :

 BOO!

Studio/Gang and the new Lincoln Park Nature Boardwalk. Part one: Raising the Dead - Necropolis as an urban eco-system

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Let's talk ecosystems.  When you come right down to it, anything beyond an amoeba is an ecosystem.  Each one of us is an ecosystem.  The worlds we find ourselves in, the worlds we create for ourselves, the obstacles and the fulcrums encountered on the way.  The family you grew up in, the relations of power between you and your parents, your siblings, your friends and adversaries, the house you grew up in, the neighborhood, the street, school and church. 

And no less than a bird building a nest or a rabbit digging out a burrow - if with a measure more ability and presumption - we also fabricate our own environments, in structure and landscape. Winston Churchill once said, "We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us."  That's an ecosystem.

It's easy to walk the site of the stunning new Nature Boardwalk, designed by Studio/Gang around the South Pond of Lincoln Park, and feel as if it must have been there forever, but in fact it, too, is a fabrication, the end point of a succession for urban interventions.

Read all about it here, pictures, in abundance.

"The collection of energy must be the ground of form" - not said by Louis Sullivan, but . . .

“ ‘The collection of energy must be the ground of form,’ ” he recited, and laughed. “What it means I do not know.”

That's  composer Arvo Pärt talking in an extensive and quite good profile by Arthur Lubow in the New York Times Magazine this past Sunday.  He was leafing through pages of a 1976 notebook described by Lubow as consisting of  "musical notations, there were comments — in Estonian, Russian, Latin, German and English — that recorded his thoughts as well as quotes from texts."  But later in the piece, as he describes the concept of tintinnabuli that has been central to his work since he moved away from classic 12-tone composition in 1976, the meaning becomes clear:

The two lines. One line is who we are, and the other line is who is holding and takes care of us. Sometimes I say — it is not a joke, but also it is as a joke taken — that the melodic line is our reality, our sins. But the other line is forgiving the sins.” One line is like freedom, and the triad line is like discipline. It must work together.

 It's something that was also quite clear to Louis Sullivan . . . 

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The organic, whether in architecture or ornament,  is a synthesis of a fantasy of variation and development growing out of a determinist spine of form.

I may be the only person in Chicago who really liked Pärt's Symphony No. 4 "Los Angeles" from the moment I heard it in its CSO premiere conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen, and that affection only grows as I continue to listen to it in an L.A. Phil performance on my iPod.  For many,  Pärt's music is a case of "There's no there there."   For me, it passes the Mies test of being simple but not simplistic.  For someone for whom Boulez or Ligeti are still my idea of a contemporary composer,  Pärt still packs a punch.

If you didn't catch it in the paper on Sunday, you can read the Lubow profile of Arvo Pärt here.

Marilyn Monroe and JFK's birthday. This is the way the world ends: not with a bang, but with dessicated sugar

I am riding on a limited express, one of the crack trains of the nation.  
Hurtling across the prairie into blue haze and dark air go fifteen all-steel coaches holding a thousand people.  
(All the coaches shall be scrap and rust and all the men and women laughing in the diners and sleepers shall pass to ashes.)  
I ask a man in the smoker where he is going and he answers: “Omaha.”

Carl Sandburg - Limited

A long time ago, when it was only two hours long, the first hour of NBC's Today show was broadcast live in Chicago, followed by the first hour.  This was made necessary by the time difference between Chicago and New York; it was made possible by the quality of videotape, which made a live broadcast and a rebroadcast visually indistinguishable.  This is why I have a great love for old videotape in pristine condition.  An event as much as half a century in the past has a raw immediacy.  It looks like it's happening know.  The strikingly different decor, fashions, and personalities may give things a slightly weird vibe, but otherwise it looks exactly the same as if it were a live news report today.  Videotape is the visceral idiom of the here and now.

Film, on the other hand, distances the past.  We experience our world in color.  A film in black and white abstracts that experience into a subset presence.  When the film goes soft and blurry through age, the events it depicts become less a historical record than a kind of dream.

This blurry film - apparently the only one to survive- has exactly that dreamlike state.  Little more than a minute long, its montage, from the standpoint of today, takes on an almost Godfather-like narrative.  There's Marilyn Monroe, perhaps best remembered for playing the big band chanteuse Sugar Kane in the classic Billy Wilder comedy, Some Like it Hot, singing Happy Birthday to President John F. Kennedy at a 1962 celebration in a Madison Square Garden in New York packed with 15,000 guests, everyone from Jack Benny and Henry Fonda to Jerome Robbins, Ella Fitzgerald, Jimmy Durante and Maria Callas.

Monroe begins haltingly, as if almost paralyzed with stage fright, a quality that seamlessly morphs into the slow, sultry purr that has made the performance infamous.  The song is brief; we see a huge, towering cake being borne through the crowd by two bakers.  Just behind the podium, Monroe exhorts the audience to join in an orchestral reprise of happy birthday.  She leaps into the air, her arms gesture in emphatic, desperate, almost defiant strokes.

We see the young, handsome President stride down the aisle to riotous applause, skip up the stairs to the stage, and stride confidently to the podium, where Monroe now, in an instant, has completely disappeared.  When Kennedy quips that, "I can now retire from politics after having Happy Birthday sung to me in such a sweet, wholesome way," he turns back as if acknowledging Monroe, but she has vanished into thin air.

image source: Wikipedia.  click for larger view

The photograph above was taken after the party at Madison Square Garden.  Despite numerous encounters between them, it is the only known photograph showing Monroe with either of the Kennedy brothers.  The Secret Service was charged with making sure no such images ever saw the light of day, confiscating the photo's, including invading the dark room of White House photographer Cecil Stoughton after he took the shot you see here, which survived only because it was overlooked in a dryer.

In the picture, John F. Kennedy is looking away from Monroe.  He had had a brief affair with Monroe that past February.  For him, it was just another in his string of conquests, but Monroe became obsessed, repeatedly contacting the White House and trying to re-establish contact.  Like Tom Hagen being flown to California to "request" a favor of producer Jack Woltz, Bobby Kennedy was dispatched to Hollywood to tell Monroe to stop calling the White House.

Little more than two months after the birthday affair at Madison Square Garden, Marilyn Monroe died of a drug overdose.  On November 22nd the following year, John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas.   The murder of the country's most powerful figure was a shock to the system of unprecedented force - the last assassination of a president - McKinley's - went all the back to 1901.  Few had personal memories of such an event, and there had been no radio or television to  transmit each new, dreadful detail as it happened, to every corner of the nation.

Kennedy's death marked the United States' long descent down a rabbit hole of chaos and violence that would become the 1960's, culminating in the murderous fever of Vietnam, the killings of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and a spinning out of control that would see Chicago, during the 1968 Democratic convention, blister between anarchic provocation and brutal repression, and a wave of riots across America that set city after city ablaze.

The Kennedys and Monroe have all turned to dust.  To most Americans alive today, the past they lived is no longer a shared experience.  It survives only in books, photographs, blurry film and memorabilia.  The rhinestone encrusted dress Monroe wore - not white, as it appears in the photographs, but flesh-colored pink - sold in auction in 1999 for over a million dollars.  A print of the photo Stoughton took after the 1962 party - one of only 10 surviving - was expected to bring in $23,000 when it, also, was put up for auction earlier this year.

Which leads us to the photograph at the top of this post.  This one last artifact - whimsical, unsettling, obscene.  The Presidential Seal rendered as a decoration for that giant cake we saw in the film of the 1962 Madison Square Garden event.  It is being auctioned off at Heritage Galleries at their Dallas headquarters, about a mile from the site where John  F. Kennedy died, on November 17th, five days before the 47th anniversary of his assassination.  The pre-auction estimated price is $5,000.

It's part of a lot of items assembled, as described in the press release,  "to mark the 50th anniversary of his 1960 election, including treasures such as a gold presentation watch worn by JFK throughout the campaign, and what may well be the only example of Kennedy's trademark rocking chair to come with an authentication from the Kennedy family."

The Presidential Seal decoration "is being offered by the family of decorated New York Police Department Detective Patrick "Patty" Larkin. Larkin, who was working security detail the night of the event, took a shine to the piece, and was in the right place at the right time to get it out of MSG and back to his home, where it has been for the last 48 years."  Larkin's widow notes:

It was not preserved in a spirit of reverence, however, but merely a curiosity the family shuffled from residence to residence over the years, occasionally taking it out on Thanksgiving or St. Patrick's Day to get a laugh or an astonished shake of the head from friends.

". . . this delicate creation, nothing but so much sugar, really," is how Heritage Galleries' Tom Slater describes it, but somehow, to me,  it seems more like  a prop from some mutant version of Shakespeare's Macbeth.   The stuff that nightmares are made of.

Ambani about to move on up to his $1 billion Mumbai mansion. Perkins+Will would really rather talk about something else.

Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani is taking his wife and three kids and moving on up to his comfy new house. One that's 27 stories high. Really BIG stories - the thing soars more than 550 feet into the Mumbai skyline. Great views of the city and Arabian sea.  400,000 square feet in all. Did I mention it's the world's first billion dollar residence?

Three helipads, a health club and gym, a 50-foot movie theater, nine elevators, parking for 160 imported cars. A four-story cantilevered garden; a ballroom where crystal chandeliers take up 80% of the ceiling.  A nursery for unicorns. And a staff of 600 to keep it all going. The opening is getting a lot of press, worldwide, but what you don't see much of is the happy architects - in this case Perkins+Will - beaming in the reflection of their bold new baby. The spectacular project seems to be missing in action on Perkins+Will website, although there is a page on the New Mumbai headquarters the firm has designed for Ambani's Reliance Group.

78% of readers responding to a New York Daily News poll claim to "outraged" at this "obscene, offensive display of wealth." 18% say, "Good for him." Larry Ellison wrote in,  "Why didn't I think of this? (Call me, Ralph Johnson.)"

photo courtesy Wikipedia - click on it for larger view

Chicago Streetscene: The Old Mag Mile Curiosity Shop

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Great Moments in Marketing: Is this the worst commercial ever?

Crispin, Porter + Bogusky  has just released the initial commercial for Microsoft's new Windows Phone 7, and it may be the worst ad in the company's history, which is a pretty impressive feat when you consider it had to top such campaigns as "Windows 7 was my idea", the print campaign that portrayed anyone who didn't leap to buy the latest version of Office as - literally - dinosaurs,  and the epically disastrous spots that attempted to make Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld a comedic tag team.

Windows Phone 7 is by all accounts an absolutely adequate product, which kind of falls short of what you need when your smart phone market share is plummeting and your competitors - primarily Apple and Google's Android - are eating your lunch.  Clearly, something major is required to reverse this trend.

Which brings us to the Crispin spot.  Big, undoubtedly.  Textbook awful, oh yeah.  What makes this ad so bad?  Let me count the ways:

1.  It's trying to sell smart phones by ridiculing people who are devoted to smart phones.
2.  It's trying to sell smart phones to an imagined class of consumers who aren't the people being ridiculed, in other words, people who have an aversion to the entire category of smart phones.  Really? How big of a market is this?
3.  Apparently ad agencies know of only four pieces of classical music:
a.  the Dies Irae from the Verdi Requiem.
b.  O Fortuna from Orff's Carmina Burana
c.  The Aquarium from Saint-Saens' Carnival of the Animals
d.  and the big winner - slathered onto the Crispin spot - In the Hall of Mountain King, from Grieg's Peer Gynt.  Could we please retire all of these, please?  From movie trailers, too, if possible.
4.  Is that really the grand staircase of the Paris Opera, enlisted for a slapstick middle-aged-lady-falling-down-the-stairs sequence?  The surest sign of an impoverished concept is a blank-check expensive,  overproduced spot, overpopulated with vignettes that, even when individually funny and engaging, don't match in tone and don't progress in any kind of dramatic arc - just a laundry list of ideas dumped together.
5.  The final tagline, "It's time for a phone to save us from our phones - designed to get you in and out and back to life," is never explained. 

How exactly is Windows Phone 7, even in future spots, supposed to substantiate the campaign's premise?  No report I've seen claims the OS is faster than its competitors.  I'm sure the cellular companies Microsoft are depending on to push phones running their new Windows 7 OS are overjoyed that it's being promoted as a way of cutting back the minutes users buy.

The final shot is of a young man in a restaurant finally able to focus on his lovely date, because he's left his cell phone sitting on the table.  Problem is, you can just as easily set an iPhone or a Droid on the table, as well.  All it takes is willpower, not a new OS.  (Now, if an OS let you text an electric shock to your significant other's ear when they were on their phone ignoring you, that could send product flying off the shelf.)

Obviously, neither Apple or Google are above running down the competition, but they've never lost sight of the fact that the ultimate focus needs to be, not the shortcomings of their competitors, or their competitors' customers, but the selling points of their own products.  As they've proven again and again, that's something Microsoft still doesn't get.

Brazilian Design for Real Cities, Modern Ball, Active Layer, Epstein in Racine, engineering for kids in Des Plaines - more great events for October

You'd think that by October 12th, we would have everything there was to find about what's going on in October.   You'd be wrong.  We've just put up over half a dozen great additions to the October Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.

From October 28th to the 30th, at locations including the Instituto Cervantes, the Graham Foundation, and the South Side Community Arts Center, there'll be a three-day symposium, Building Connections: Brazilian Design for Real Cities, which will include the participation of such architects, planners, and authors as Jaime Lerner, Carmen Vidal Hallet, Fernanda Barbara and Jorge Wilhelm.

Not yet maxxed out by benefits? Have $500 in your pocket? Can make your reservations by the 15th? The Architecture and Design Society of the Art Institute will hold its Modern Ball on Saturday, October 23rd,  in the new Renzo Piano designed Modern Wing, with dinner, cocktails, a video, and a live auction offering such morsels as a Chicago River tour with WTTW's Geoffrey Baer,  dinner with architect Dirk Denison at L20, and first-class sojourns to Hamburg and Berlin, New York and New Canaan, and Cap Martin, France.

If that's a little bit beyond your budget, there are plenty of free events to choose from.  This Friday, the 15th, there's a reception and lecture at the Extension Gallery at Archeworks for their new exhibition, Active Layer, an installation by Mason White and Lola Sheppard of the firm Lateral Office.

On Saturday, the 16th, there's a Chicago Architecture + Design Day at Hermann Hall, IIT, offering a college fair, admission and career workshops for students interested in Architecture, Interior Design, Construction Management, and Landscape Architecture programs.  It's part of Discover IIT Day.  On Wednesday, October 20, Michael Damore of Epstein Chicago will talk about their collaboration with Norman Foster on the expansion of the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed S.C. Johnson Campus in Racine, Wisconsin at the Häfele America showroom on Hubbard.

And if you have third-to-eighth graders with a budding interest in architecture and engineering, take them to the Des Plaines Library this Saturday the 16th for their Second Family Science Expo,  where they'll be able to get hands-on experience from structural engineers Chas Hague and Larry Novak, who will talk on High Rise Building Design and show an earthquake shake table testing the stability of towers made out of LEGO's™.   Also participating will be our tireless correspondent, engineer Bob Johnson, who gave a preview to ABC7's Linda Yu and Sylvia Perez.

And that's just the new stuff. There's the Tribute to Bruce Graham this Thursday, plus the Design Evanston Awards, the Traditional Building Exhibition and Conference, the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat symposium at IIT, Julie Snow, Dana Buntrock, Robert Bruegmann talking about his new book on Harry Weese in Weese's Seventeenth Church of Christ, Scientist, and dozens of other great events. Check out the entire October calendar here.

What's next for Cecil Balmond? (Balmond branded shelving at the Container Store? Or?)

The Architectural Record's Tim McKeough reported today that legendary engineer/architect/designer/polymath Cecil Balmond is leaving ARUP, the global powerhouse where, as head of the Advanced Geometry Unit (AGU), he partnered with prominent architects to create some of the most spectacular structures of the last decade, including Rem Koolhaas's Seattle Public Library and CCTV Tower, Daniel Libeskind's Imperial War Museum North, and Toyo Ito's Serpentine Pavilion, to name just a few.  (ARUP is also being sued for $10 million by the Art Institute for flaws in their new Renzo Piano designed Modern Wing, but we'll talk about that another day.)

Balmond has already been striking out as architect as well as engineer, most notably in 2007 with a stunning bridge in Coimbra, Portugal.  Now he's setting up his own practice, which will include both structures and products.  Think Phillipe Stark for eggheads.  I love to imagine having - and being able to afford - a Cecil Balmond watch, which probably wouldn't be a watch at all as we've come to know them, and might just as likely rethink the concept of time as tell it.  Let him loose on the design of a bra and support of the female breast might never be the same.  Seriously, though, Balmond's work has always been about amazing, one-of-a-kind creations, and it should be fascinating to see if he can translate his talent to the demands of a mass-manufactured product, as well.

I was able to interview Balmond at the time of his mind-blowing exhibition, Solid Void, at the Graham Foundation a couple years back.  Check out my consideration (copiously illustrated) of the war between the heroic and the reasonable, and the work, writings and ideas of one of most influential thinkers of our time here.

New ways of seeing architecture: Alex Roman's The Third&The Seventh

Spanish-born artist Alex Roman describes his striking film, The Third&The Seventh as trying "to illustrate architecture art across a photographic point of view where main subjects are already-built spaces. Sometimes in an abstract way. Sometimes surreal".  The twelve-minute work, best viewed in HD full screen, includes meditations of the interplay of light and nature on such iconic structures as Mie's Barcelona Pavilion, Louis Kahn's Yale Library and Santiago Calatrava's Milwaukee art Museum.

And it's all virtual. "I use 3DS Max and Vray for rendering," says Roman to Motionographer's Justice Cone, "Photoshop for texture work, AfterEffects for compositing and color grading and Adobe Premiere for edit it all."

The piece's consistently slow rhythms makes the work a bit on the lugubrious side, a little slow, a little heavy, a little too much in love with its own artistry, but there's no denying this is a stunning piece of work, one that could help lead the way past the press-agent photography of architecture that too often manages to kill any sense of the magic - and mystery - of the buildings.

(thanks to EuroRSCG Chicago's Baptiste Limb for showcasing this film)

Marathon! (Chicago 2010)

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click Read More to see all 16 photographs

 

 

A Summer Day's Odyssey in Chicago, October, 2010

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click Read More after the fourth picture to see photographs for the entire journey

 

Picasso's Lady looks down her nose at faux Trevi

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As part of this year's Fiera Italiana, a free-standing replica of Rome's Trevi Fountain made entirely of calf's butter has arisen in Daley Plaza. Visitors can stand with their backs to the replica, make a wish, and throw a coin over their shoulder. A security guard will then inform them that the actual fountain is at the opposite end of the plaza and make them pick up the coins from the ground.

How many of you saw it? Awesome Patrick Stewart/Kate Fleetwood Macbeth on PBS Wednesday night - soon on DVD

I'm astounded there wasn't more promotion on this; I just happened to stumble across last night's 9 p.m.  premiere on WTTW of the film version of 2007's acclaimed Patrick Stewart/Kate Fleetwood production of Macbeth that one London critic hailed as the "The Macbeth of a lifetime."

Both the original stage production and film were directed by Rupert Goold, setting the play in an imagined Stalinist society of the mid 20th-century, a conceit that could easily have become a gimmick, but in this production's specificity of detail only heightens the immediacy of the drama.  What was a single-set as a play has been opened up to use a visually stunning array of found locations, including a decaying, glass canopied cloister that co-producer John Wyver noted would probably have cost over $100,000 if it had been created as a set.

The film was shot in wide-screen HD using a pair of the fabled RED digital cameras by cinematographer Sam McCurdy, perhaps best known for bringing creep-out visuals to such horror films as The Descent and Dread.  That style proves an embracing fit for the fear and loathing world of Macbeth, even if some of the visual tricks sometimes seem like a crib from a Mark Romanek music video, especially one scene where the three witches are portrayed as un-Florence Nightingale-like angels from hell.  (Which will no doubt be appropriated in commercials for the next campaign to dismantle nationalized health care.)

Part of what gives the production its power is how it gains an incredible intimacy through setting some of the play's most intense scenes in the family kitchen, including Lady Macbeth steeling her husband's resolve to murder Duncan as she retrieves the dessert cake from the fridge to serve to the party of the soon-to-be martyred king in the adjoining dining room, or, most famously, the scene were Macbeth instructs the two men he's enlisted to murder Banquo as he makes cheese sandwiches.

None of this would be worth much is there weren't two extraordinary performances at the core.  Kate Fleetwood's Lady Macbeth is beautiful, seductive, brittle.  Patrick Stewart's performance as Macbeth is the zenith of a long, varied, and distinguished career.  Stewart's strength has never been in an actor's flamboyance, but rather, in a rock-solid centering of the character in the Spencer Tracy mode.  You can't just sit back and observe impassively.  Stewart draws you in: you know this man; more to the point, you begin to feel that, in different circumstances, you could be that man.  You begin to experience the action of the play as if you were in his skin.  You feel what, in our modern times, has become an increasingly elusive sense of the tragic.  Like Oedipus after questioning the messenger, Stewart's Macbeth has just enough self-awareness to realize how he's allowed himself to be trapped.  He sees how fate has plotted his end, but he must play it out, even if he already knows the dread conclusion.

Love is a battlefield, Pet Benatar has told us, and this Macbeth is a very warped love story, indeed. Fleetwood's Lady Macbeth is the ultimate trophy wife, much younger than her husband, inwardly unnerved by the intimations of his mortality to the point of projecting her lust through him and past him, into a carnal craving for blood and power that Macbeth, when we first meet him, has buried deep within himself beneath a mask of amiable soldierly loyalty.  Like Macduff ripped from his mother's womb, Lady Macbeth reaches into Macbeth's entrails and pulls these dark longings back to consciousness.  Entwined scorpions, the Macbeths reinforce each other's venomous cravings.   They give birth to their crimes in primal embrace, only to be condemned to live out the annihilating consequences apart, and utterly alone.

This is a rare case where a landmark theatrical production has not only not been ruined by its translation into another medium; in many ways, it's been enhanced.  The raw theatricality of a live performance is, of course, missing, but the skill with which Goold opens up the play actually helps to ground it and give a visceral presence.  You're not in row K listening to actors project; you're inches from a character's face, leaning in to hear their whispered confessions. 

I was blown away by this production.  If you missed it - and given the lack of fanfare, that's a good possibility - the DVD goes on sale October 19th, and it's only $19.99.  If this were a theatrical release, Macbeth would be one of the best films of the year, laden with Oscar nominations.  As it is, it's transformed the term "direct to video" from a epithet to a bloody wonderful gift.

Chicago Streetscene: Ellen Degeneres, by Lorado Taft

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David Shah, Bruegmannx2, National Public Housing Museum lectures - more for the October calendar!

 And the hits just keep coming.  Just added to the October calendar of Chicago Architectural Events:

This coming Monday, October 11, trend forecaster/provocateur David Shah will kick off the School of the Art Institute/AIADO's Mitchell lecture series, with a talk on Design in a Time of Change, 6:00 p.m., in Fullerton Hall.

On Wednesday the 6th (make your reservations by noon today), UIC's Robert Bruegmann will talk about The Rise and Fall of Public Housing: An International Perspective, followed by a tour of the site of the National Public Housing Museum, one of a series of five lecture/tours this month that will feature such people as Little Italy's Peter Pero,  great-granddaughter of Ida B. Wells Michelle Duster and City Design Center's Robert Feldman.

On Tuesday, the 26th, Bruegmann is back at a Graham Foundation event held in Harry Weese's dramatic Seventeenth Church of Christ, Scientist, talking about the new book he's co-authored with Kathleen Murphy Skolnick, The Architecture of Harry Weese.   This first monograph devoted to Weese's work has just been published.  I'm making my way through it now, and it's a worthy successor to Bruegmann's 1997 The Architects and the City: Holabird & Roche of Chicago, 1880-1918.  Along with a recent profile of Weese by Robert Sharoff in Chicago Magazine, it's jump-starting what looks to be a renewed appreciation of one of Chicago's most creative architects.

There are over 60 great events still to come on the October calendar.  Check them all out here.

And speaking of great Chicago architects, while we don't usually list tours - there's just too many of them - I did want mention a one-time only tour that's part of Docomomo North American Tour Day for 2010, Architecture in the Round:  the life and work of Bertrand Goldberg, a bus tour co-sponsored with the Chicago Architecture Foundation, from which it departs at 12:30 p.m. this Saturday, October 9th. The tour takes in four of Goldberg's designs: Marina City, the Hillard Homes, River City, and the endangered Prentice Hospital (just don't try to take pictures of it.) $38 per person; $33 seniors/students; $33 CAF members, 3.0 AIA Continuing Education Credits. Registration and information on-line.