How to Quickly Disassemble a Bus Shelter

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One Year: 85 Tours - Chicago Architecture Foundation's Jennifer Lucente nears end of her odyssey; plus a unique oportunity to tour the works of Bertrand Goldberg this Saturday

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It's as if Odysseus was the one who had stayed home, and instead Penelope went on Homer's grand adventure.

Chicago native Jennifer Lucente, the Chicago Architecture Foundation's Social Media Manager, took it upon herself to take every one of CAF's enormous roster of 85 tours over the course of a single year.  It began this past January 13th at the Chicago Board of Trade, and it will end this coming Thursday with the "Razzle Dazzle" walking tour of the city's theatre district, finishing at the Chicago Theater, where there will be a special reception marking the end of the project later that afternoon.

The tours have taken Lucente to every part of the city, from Pilsen to Kenwood, Uptown to Jackson Park and beyond, to Evanston, Kenilworth, and Frank Lloyd Wright's Oak Park - including the cemeteries - high and low, in all kinds of weather.    She's documented her journey on a blog,  Around Chicago in 85 Tours, tour-by-tour, with a wealth of great photographs.

It's been a clever and effective promotion of one of Chicago's greatest resources - the dedicated team of almost shockingly knowledgeable docents (believe me, I would never make the cut) who lead those 85 tours.  If you've ever taken one, you know they're not just for tourists.  Chicago's architectural heritage is so rich that (unless you're Tim Samuelson) you can never learn it all, but the informative and entertaining CAF tours give you not only a deeper knowledge of the buildings you thought you knew about, but introduce you to wonders you may never have imagined existed.

A case in point takes place this Saturday, December 11th, with a repeat of CAF's popular Architecture in the Round: Bertrand Goldberg tour.  If Mies was all about the box, Goldberg was all around breaking it, and Saturday's bus tour

takes you to his most famous Chicago creations: the recently restored Hilliard Homes on the south side, River City, Marina City and the stunning Prentice Hospital, which everyone is fearing that its new owners, Northwestern University, will be working to demolish.  (You can find more information on the battle to save Prentice here.)

It's looking like Saturday will offer a welcome break from the recent frigid cold, so it's a great opportunity to spend a few hours seeing and learning more about some of the Chicago's greatest works of architecture and one of its most creative minds.  Architecture in the Round is only $38.00 ($33.00 for CAF and Docomomo members and students) and you can get more info and reserve your space here.

Post Modern Peel: Chiclets and Stripper Poles at Helmut Jahn's Thompson Center

`Back in 1985, this is how it started . . .

photograph: Mary Ann Sullivan (click images for larger view)

Helmut Jahn's post-modernist State of Illinois Building, now the James R. Thompson Center, took up most of a full city block, with pedestrian arcades along three sides.  Shielding the arcades from the street was an applique of granite panels mounted on perimeter columns, which continued past where the building ended, in a series of free-standing shafts supporting the same granite panels that diminished in height as they moved to the corner of Clark and Randolph, where a column was missing, providing both an abstracted sense of enclosure and inferred entrance to the large plaza fronting the building.

Flash forward a quarter century.  As we reported, in September of 2009,   metallic grids of steel strapping began to bind the pole-mounted granite panels into place.  It was the prelude to stripping away every last granite panel, which officials feared were coming loose from their moorings, threatening to smash passersby into personal injury lawyer dust.

At the time, the talk was about working with the Illinois History Preservation Agency, "investigating replacement materials (foreign granite vs. domestic granite vs. artificial stone) to determine the best match with original, while considering green footprint, budget, historic preservation regulations, etc.", with the plan being to begin installing replacement panels this past June.

That didn't quite work out.  Instead, along the sides of the building, itself, we were left with only the jagged metal support structure for the granite, never intended for public display.   It was like looking into a mouthful of metal spikes waiting in vain for their crowns.

Now, just in time for Christmas, we have our solution.  The metal supports, as promised, have been removed, and in their place, we have a support structure covered in what looks like a kind of wallboard . . . .

. . . over which a white, vinyl-like material has been stretched.

The materials may be abject, irregular and not especially durable, but from the distance of the sidewalk, the result is not entirely displeasing.  The new white, chiclet-like hem almost seem to relate  from the original white panes of glass.

It's really as if the layer of Post Modernism has been peeled away from the Thompson Center - along with the protection for the arcades - with the removal of that vaguely classical faux wall of stone.  What's left is a much more straightforward expression of a steel and glass skyscraper.

It works best, I think, at the LaSalle Street entrance.  With the previous accretion of stone gone (there was a small transparent breach at the keystone, which you can see here) and the horizontal top beam exposed, it becomes a much clearer cutout of the curtain wall above,  The flagpoles coming through the now open stubs, however, look a bit like toothpicks jammed into cubes of port wine cheese.

What doesn't work as well are the now free-standing columns in the plaza.  On the plus side, it's more open and porous, leaving unimpeded the visual backdrop of the buildings around it.  The columns themselves, however have become almost a surreal collection of random poles.

Things change.

Holiday Shopping for the Archiphile: Computer Part cities; photography books up to 50% off, 3D Chicago, and something for someone who has everything

Still shopping for the holidays?  (I usually wait to start until the 26th)

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Via Rib Bone Production's Andy Spyrison, we bring you the work of Italian artist Franco Recchia, which scavenges the innards of computers to create abstracted cityscape sculptures, named after New York's Manhattan, Fifth Avenue and Central Park, Tokyo's Pechino District, Boston and Pitsburgh.  No Chicago yet.  It looks like you can actually buy them on-line.  Prices range from  $2400 to $8100.  Maybe there's some Chicago computer geek with a lot of old boxes to tear apart who might want to test the market with their own more popularly priced creations.  If you're out there, let me know.

If your heart is set on Chicago, and you're comfortable with "some assembly required" taken to the max, there's the 4D Cityscape Chicago 831-piece jigsaw puzzle, complete with 127 plastic buildings, now on sale at the shop at the Chicago Architecture Foundation.  To me, the great temptation would be to redesign the city, jamming selected buildings into alternative locations, or just be able to contemplate a Chicago skyline cleansed of its worst structures.  (Maybe you could resell them on eBay as the "Chicago bad buildings collection".)

And if Chicago's not your cup of tea, there are also 4D Cityscape puzzles for London, Toronto, Las Vegas, New York and Washington DC.  No Pittsburgh.  I've already written that for the month of December, the CAF shop is offering free shipping on orders of $50.00 or over, but it gets better.  CAF members get 25% all purchases during Members Month in December.   If you're buying a lot of gifts, getting a membership could pay for itself.  (Which reminds me, I still have to redeem that coupon for membership that I got on Groupon a few weeks back.)

Elsewhere, we've also written on giving the gift of art from the ArchiTech gallery. I'm pretty sure every Chicago area museum has its own array of great gifts, but the book store at the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College is upping the ante with a Holiday Book Sale offering "up to 50% off nearly all books! Some books are just $5! (Exclamation points from the original!) It runs through Friday the 10th, 10 a.m., to 5:00 p.m., at 600 South Michigan. "cash or checks only please."

And one, last Neiman Marcus-sized idea*

You can actually get a little plastic version of Santiago Calatrava's Chicago Spire in CAF's 4D puzzle, but for that special someone for whom only the best will do, how about . . . a hole . . .

photograph:  Bob Johnson

No, we're not talking about sex reassignment surgery for your significant other, but the only surviving trace of Great Gatsby Garrett Kelleher's insanely ambitious dream for an 2,000-foot-high, Santiago Calatrava designed Chicago Spire. As the Trib's Mary Ellen Podmolik reported yesterday, the Irish developer  has now officially lost control of the property, as a Circuit Court judge has allowed the project's lender, Ango Irish Bank, also in deep doo-doo, to appoint CB Richard Ellis to oversee the property as it goes through foreclosure.

What says "I Love You" better than a 76-foot-deep hole at the side of a rushing expressway?  You might even considering licensing one of the winning ideas in the Chicago Architectural Club's Mine the Gap competition from earlier this year to gussy it up.

Alexander Lehnerer and team - The Second Sun

But I'm warning you now: it's going to be a royal pain to wrap.

*taken from an ad placed by Warner Brothers to begin selling tickets to the Palace Theater's 1964 run of the film version of My Fair Lady, nearly a year before the opening.  Image-starved and text heavy, it concluded with the "Neiman Marcus-sized" suggestion of simply buying out the theatre for a personal showing for yourself and your closest friends.

Two Cats Ponder the Tax Cut Deal

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. . . there's all kinds of great things to write about, and I'm so lazy and disgusted that, yes, I've fallen to the level of posting a photo of my cats. They're looking at me like that because they know I should be working. Hope to have my ass back in gear and doing more substantive posts tomorrow. (If I do, they've promised me tuna treats.)

Last week for Looking After Louis Sullivan, plus a fish tricycle - exhibitions return to Repeat

We've put back the listing of current exhibitions and moved it to the Repeat Calendar.  Here's a quick overview.

This is the last week to catch the Art Institute's exhibition, Looking after Louis Sullivan: Photographs, Drawings and Fragments, centered on the photographs of Adler & Sullivan's

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architecture that range from striking to stunning.  Included is work from Aaron Siskind and the iconic Richard Nickel, but what blew me away was the work of John Szarkowski, which had a way of moving the architecture past the realm of abstraction to capture the intersection of the buildings and the passage of day-to-day life through and around them. Sunday, December 12th is the last day for this show, and it's definitely worth catching.

The good news is that its companion show, Tim Samuelson and Chris Ware's Louis Sullivan's Idea, at the Chicago Cultural Center, has actually been extended, through May

2nd of next year.  But don't wait.  As I've written before, it's a don't-miss-it show, beautifully designed and mounted, an epic journey of the life and work of one of America's greatest architects.  I've heard one visitor comment they found the layout confusing, but it really is pretty chronological: the earliest years as you enter, and at the far end, the final ones, ending on a very sad and diminished note - the last designs of a facade, a stove mat and a Christmas card, the final days in a tiny room at the Warner Hotel, even a pack of the bargain brand Home Run cigarettes that a friend would buy Sullivan when the architect didn't have the money to get them himself.  It's a downer, for sure, but then to exit you have to retrace your steps, past all the brilliant designs from the peak of his career, and you leave not disheartened by how it ended but exhilarated by Sullivan's stunning achievements and indomitable spirit.

Elsewhere, the MCA has Urban China: Informal Cities, an idea-packed retrospective of China's only publication devoted to the issues of urbanism, and the Chicago Tourism Center Gallery on Randolph across the Cultural Center has History Coming Home, revealing "public policies, oral histories, and artifacts from public housing from Chicago to Boston and New Orleans to Sacramento . . . including a 1950's-style public housing apartment that visitors can walk through."

The above drawing, a "Design for a child's tricycle" by R.G. Martelet, really hasn't anything to do with the ArchiTech Gallery's current show, The House:

Drawings for Residential Architecture, but it's so redolent of a holiday spirit where the gift giving transcends consumerism to the realm of actual delight that I wanted to pass it on.  (It can be yours for $250.00, and there are other drawings of Martelet's vehicle designs from that price up to $1,200).   Running through December 25, The House features drawings, blueprints and sketches from designers Barry Byrne and Alfonso Iannelli, D.H. Burnham & Co.,  Richard Neutra, Frank Gehry and many others. 

At the Chicago Architecture Foundation, the popular Chicago Model City, featuring a spectacular model of Chicago's center city, continues,  with a second exhibition, Neighborhoods Go Green! Scaling up Sustainability on display in the Lecture Hall.

Opening this week: Hyperlinks: Architecture and Design at the Art Institution, which "presents more than 30 projects that span from architecture and furniture to multimedia and conceptual design from an international group of architects and designers . . . Not always intended as ends in themselves, these multidisciplinary practices are often experiments that motivate reflection on the values, mores, and practices often overlooked in society."

Check out the full December calendar - now with Exhibitions! - here.

Housing after Katrina, Restoring St. John Cantius, Lee Bey judges Gingerbread - 3 Great New Events

ArchitectureChicago PLUS apologies to those of you who have been experiencing problems viewing our calendar in - if you'll excuse the expression - Internet Explorer.  We believe we've fixed the problem.  If not, let us know.

Just added to the December calendar:

On Friday, December 10th, to observe Human Rights Day,  marking the date in 1948 when the United Nations issued the first global Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the National Public Housing Museum will be sponsoring a screening at Roosevelt University of the documentary Coming Home: The Dry Storm, about the housing crisis in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

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On Monday the 13th at the Harold L. Washington Library, Brother Joshua Caswell SJC will present Restoring a Landmark: The Story of St. John Cantius  Church, the north side landmark designed in 1893-98 by architect Adolphus Druiding, covering the major interior and exterior restorations that have been undertaken beginning in the 1980's.

Then for a good time for a good cause - the restoration of Frank Lloyd Wright's iconic Unity Temple, on the evening of December 9th, the Unity Temple  Restoration Foundation will be offering up Edible Edifice: Reinterpreting the Classic Gingerbread House, at Room & Board, 55 E. Ohio.

Attendees will be enjoy hot cider, holiday trees from Bleeding Heart Bakery and live music, and be able to review the designer gingerbread houses entered into a competition to be judged by Bleeding Heart's Michelle and Vinny Garcia, Smith+Gill's Jeff Stafford and Michelle Dumont, and architecture critic and Chicago Central Area Committee Executive Director Lee Bey. 

Projects will be judged on six criteria: originality, use of materials, craftsmanship, site design, use of lighting, and that special "je ne sais quoi . . . The works will then be auctioned off to the highest bidders with proceeds benefiting that other convention-defying edifice, Unity Temple.

There are over two dozen events still to come this month.  Check out the complete December Calendar here.

Winter's Bleakness Lost in Memories of a Japanese Garden

Freezing should be for microwave dinners, not people.  As it wears on, I'm sure I'll rediscover the satisfactions of winter, but as the first chill blasts descend, I find the prospect as depressing as the ever-earlier sunsets.   

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It's the unexpected discovery that makes the unpalatable endurable.  Although there are good buildings, I find much of the Medical Center campus a fairly depressing environment.  And then there's the unexpected. . .

In a district where the architecture often seems to be in a style called 1984 bureaucratic, it's refreshing to discover this building on Polk Street - currently an outpost facility for corporate behemoth United Health Care - steeped in an amiable modernist eccentricity.  (Anyone have any information on the structure's history and architect?)

  What's really unexpected, however,  is coming across a serenely elegant Japanese garden.

To encounter the carefully sculpted foliage and lovingly tended flowers, humanizing the hard-edged architecture, is to be revitalized with delight.  To remember that it was there for the finding little more than a month ago, and will return again if we just hang in for a few months more, makes phrases like "highs in the single digits", "gale force winds", and "blinding icestorms" almost bearable.

 

Richard Sennett's December 2nd lecture cancelled

Urban Habitat Chicago and the Graham Foundation regret . . .

. . .  to announce the cancellation of the lecture this Thursday, December 2nd. Due to unforeseen circumstances, Richard Sennett is unable to come to Chicago at this time. UHC is working to reschedule the lecture, and those who were signed up to attend will be contacted and given the first opportunity to reserve their place at that time.

No confirmation yet if Sennett's December 6th appearance for SAIC has also been affected. Stay tuned.

Chicago Streetscene: Trump's Christmas Spiral

 

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Blair Kamin at Friends of Downtown Annual Meeting, Thursday, December 2nd

As if five events for the evening of Thursday, December 2nd - including Richard Sennett, Barry Bergdoll, the story of the Nickerson Mansion, and the unveiling of plans for Northerly Island - weren't enough of a logjam, we've just been reminded of a sixth:  Chicago Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin will be the keynote speaker at Friends of Downtown's annual meeting at the Sullivan Center.   If you haven't already, you can check out all the great events on the December architectural calendar here.

Richard Sennett, Antonio Gaudi, Barry Bergdohl, The Malling of Chicago, Pecha Kucha 16, Northerly Island and more - the December Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events

It was the week before Christmas, and all through the city, the only thing stirring was the Gene Siskel Film Center's holiday tradition - Hiroshi Teshigahara's hypnotic documentary, Antonio Gaudi, whose masterpiece, Barcelona's Sagrada Família, begins to enter the home stretch to completion eight decades after its architect's death.

After the 24th, everything shuts down for the year-end holidays.  Before the 24th, there's still nearly three dozen great events for you to check out on the December Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.

There's still several great events coming up this Tuesday, the 30th, including on Empathy, Storytelling, &   Prototyping: 3 stories + 1 conversation at Archeworks and John Vinci and Ward Miller talking about their new book, The Complete Architecture of Adler and Sullivan at AIA/Chicago.  If you can't make to AIA/Chicago, the authors will also be at the Glessner House Museum on December 8th.

December starts off with a bang on Wednesday, with the first of the Chicago Architecture Foundation's Chicago Debates: The Malling of Chicago,  with a panel of heavyweights including Linda Searl, John Lahey, the Reader's Ben Joravsky, Chris Robling, Jonathan Fine and Edward Lifson.

That same evening, Belinda Tato of Ecosistema Urbano lectures of Urban Social Design in Madrid at the Institute Cervantes.  On Thursday, December 2nd the proposed plans for Northerly Island will be unveiled at CAF by the Chicago Park District and Studio/Gang Architects, while MOMA's Barry Bergdoll will be lecturing on New Research Projects in French Architecture at the Block Museum in Evanston, the kick-off to a day-long conference on the same topic with another blue ribbon panel on Friday, the 3rd.

On Wednesday the 8th, another day-long event, the Global Metro Summit: How Metros are Delivering the Next Economy: Lessons from the U.S. and Abroad, takes place at UIC, with Saskia Sassen, Ricky Burdett, the Brookings' Strobe Talcott, and Mayor Richard M. Daley among the scheduled participants. Renowned sociologist Richard Sennett makes not one, but two December appearances, at the Graham on the 2nd,  and at SAIC's Columbus Auditorium on the 6th.

Katerina Rüedi Ray and Igor Marjanovic will be discussing their book, Marina City: Bertrand Goldberg's Urban Vision, at a CAF lunchtime lecture on the 15th, where Larry Bennett will be talking about his new book, The Third city: Chicago and American Urbanism and Why Chicago Isn't and Is Important on the 1st.

Did I mention Pecha Kucha Volume 16, at Martyrs on the 7th with a roster of at least ten presenters, including. Jacqueline Edelberg, Hal Chaffee and the legendary Ken Nordine?

And there's more.  Experience the joy of discovery for yourself.  Check out all the great events on the December calendar here.

Tiny bubbles in the wreath, complete with wishes, adorn Art Institute Lions for the holidays

Last year, the lions at the Art Institute went slightly mod for the holidays, donning wreaths designed by Yves Behar of multi-colored aluminum leaves.  A week before Christmas, as scheduled, the traditional evergreen wreaths returned.

This year, there was one word for the lions' wreaths: plastic.

Drawing their inspiration from traditional cranberry wreaths, U of I professors Bruce and Stephanie Tharp fabricated wreathes out of 2,011 separate cranberry-colored plastic bubbles, each containing a wish from a Chicago area child.  Kara Spak of the Sun-Times has a great story on the wreathes and their creators, including a sampling of wishes, here.

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The Tharp's design firm, Materious have brought to manufacture such designs as their easy-grip Samurai handled Umbrella,  and their Piggy bank, sold out for the holidays in white, still available in pink - what does that say about us as a society?  Also available is the super-sized Morgan Stanley version with the image of a golden parking meter inscribed on its side.

During the day, the wreathes look a bit hard and synthetic, a big concord-grapey.

They really come into their own at night.

The bubbles actually include solar-power lights to provide a subtle glow, although this is somewhat minimized by the high ambient lighting levels around the museum.

And evergreen is apparently not forever green.  This year, the Tharp wreathes will adorn the lions -  Attitude of Defiance and On the Prowl, or Atti and Pro for short - throughout the holiday season.

Black Friday edition: 4D Chicago with 127 individual plastic landmarks, free shipping at CAF, Richard Neutra dollhouse, Kamin, Weese, Adler & Sullivan

Let the gift buying frenzy begin.

Through November and December, the Chicago Architecture Foundation is offering free shipping on orders of $50.00 or more to locations in the continental U.S.

The on-line bookshop still offers only a small fraction of the titles available in CAF's great Michigan Avenue store, but it does include such items as the new Blair Kamin compilation, Terror & Wonder, and two of the season's "must-have" titles for any architecture buff: Robert Bruegmann and Kathleen Murphy Skolnick's The Architecture of Harry Weese, and the landmark The Complete Architecture of Alder and Sullivan. You can also get your copy of the just released DVD of Mark Richard Smith's documentary Louis Sullivan: the Struggle for American Architecture.

Among the many special items is the Emerson House, a "modern dollhouse" which "draws inspiration from Richard Neutra's Desert House and A. Quincy Jones' house for Gary Cooper"

The Emerson House modern dollhouse is the perfect home for the modern family. The modern home has six rooms including a living room, kitchen, library/office, master bedroom, bathroom and child's bedroom. With its large, open floor plan and floor-to-ceiling windows, the Emerson House enjoys year-round sunlight. The modern dollhouse features many extras including mitered-glass corners, two fireplaces, sliding glass doors, solar panels, and recessed LED lights. Finally, the dollhouse is easy on the environment with only non-toxic and lead-free wood stains and paints.

It's $329.00 ($296.10 for CAF members - Coop doll not included), but think how much those solar panels will save you on batteries.

And if that price is a bit too rich for your blood . . . I'm not sure the actual product will be able to live up to the hype, and we won't know until it's released December 3rd, but you could have your own version of CAF's terrific Chicago Model City exhibition with the 831-piece jigsaw puzzle 4D Cityscape Chicago.

The kicker on this one is that once you've figured out the puzzle, you'll find pre-cut holes for 127 plastic models (included) of buildings "that depict the city as it appeared as far back as 1873 through to 2015 Including icons such as the Willis Tower, John Hancock, and Navy Pier." You could borrow your favorite building to use as your personal Monopoly piece. Among the pieces are a couple of key unbuilt projects, and at $44.95 ($40.46 for CAF members) it may turn out to be the only version of the Santiago Calatrava designed Chicago Spire that developer Garrett Kelleher will ever be able to afford.  Did I mention the streets are claimed to glow in the dark? Unless this thing is a complete dud, this could be the Chicago architectural toy to have this year.

No word yet whether The Frank Lloyd Wright Illustrated Guide to Matrimony will be in stock in time for Christmas. Check out all the great stuff at the CAF store here.

A Holiday Tradition: The Short, Brutal Life of a Parade Balloon

Read the story and see all the pictures (parental supervision advised) here.