Gill, Gang, and Kamin today at Ideas Week, Erika Allen at Access Living on the 25th - more for the October calendar

Still more additions to the October Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.

As of this writing, there were still tickets ($15.00) for a panel on Architecture, 4:00 to 5:30 p.m., at the Chicago History Museum featuring Gordon Gill, Jeanne Gang, the Trib's Blair Kamin, plus Andrew Kotchen, Matt Berman and photographer Scott Frances.  It's a part of Chicago Ideas Week, which includes such other attractions as Bill Clinton on Tuesday, and a tour of Millennium Park with former Mayor Richard M. Daley (sold out).

On Wednesday, there's a all-day conference, GreenTown - the Future of Community, at Unity Temple in Oak Park, and on Tuesday, the 25th, Archeworks has added a lecture by Erika Allen of Growing Power Chicago, Closing the Loop: Planning and Implementation of Community Food Systems, at Access Living.

Also this week, Chicago Women in Architecture have a reception with Jeanne Gang on Tuesday, and a Wednesday logjam includes The City as Campus author Sharon Haar at CAF,  architect Stanley Allen at IIT, and Kevin Harrington discussing H.H. Richardson at the Glessner House Museum.  On Thursday, Carolyn Armenta Davis talks about Designing for the 21st Century: Germany's Black Architects, at the Goethe Institut.  Friday brings MAS Context: Analog, and Saturday and Sunday, the spectacular openhousechicago, with behind-the-scenes of over a hundred Chicago building.

Check out all the over fifty events still to come on the October Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.

Marathon!

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architects doing other things, opening reception tonight

OK, so I guess, dear readers, a picture of a squirrel eating a banana doesn't thrill you as much it does me.  Go figure.  So here's a second post for today:

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Tonight, from 5:30 to 9:00 p.m., at Ross Barney Architects, 10 West Hubbard, there's an opening reception  for a.DOT, architects doing other things, featuring the work of 50 female architects, sponsored by Chicago Women in Architecture.  It's a part of Chicago Artists Month.  There's a jury with Carol Ross Barney, Veronika Bocanova, Pam Hutter, Dorothy McCarty and Cindy Muller, so there must be a prize.  There will also be a series of six lunchtime talks by the artists throughout October.

We are showcasing Chicago based women from the architecture and design community who see themselves as artists.  The exhibit will feature a wide variety of art, including but not limited to paintings, sketches, sculpture, photography, mixed media, textile design, furniture, and jewelry design.

Just don't expect to find a photograph of a squirrel eating a banana.

Thursday Miscellany: Great Moments on State Street - and a Squirrel Eating a Banana!

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Pullman a "Great Neighborhood"- APA Says So (and they're right) - Here's the rest of the story

It was always a pleasure to interview Mr. Pullman, for he had a way of making you feel at ease, and I entered heartily into the humor of his jocularity.  But, as in a bantering way, I let out link after link of my chain of evidence, he . . . finally made frank confession that I was on the right track, by acknowledging that they had already bought many hundreds of acres, were negotiating for many hundreds more which would be advanced to prohibitive prices by publication, and the whole scheme would be wrecked.  On the other hand, if I withheld publication, he promised that I should have the matter exclusively . . .  Pullman strenuously insisted . . . that the enterprise should in no matter be presented as a philanthropic one, but,  in all aspects, as a strictly business proposition.
- Frederick Francis Cook, Bygone Days in Chicago

The American Planning Association on Tuesday named The Pullman Neighborhood as one its Great Neighborhoods in its  2011 Great Places in America.  Galena was cited as one the year's Great Streets.   The APA's history of Pullman, save to a single reference to "a worker strike",  is pretty much cleansed of any accounting of the company town's contentious origin and troubled life.  George Pullman - he's the "Mr. Pullman" in the quote above, conceived his idealized idea of a town in the late 1870's on a tabula rasa that would be miles away from the corruptions, regulation and taxes of Chicago proper.

Designed by 27-year-old architect Solon Spencer Beman, the Town of Pullman was a marvel, replacing dirty, crowded tenements with model housing  with state-of-the-art sanitation and indoor plumbing, a beautiful park, lush landscaping, an indoor shopping center, a library and even a theater.  In exchange Pullman kept a rigid control: only one non-denomination church; no room for Catholic churches or Jewish synagogues.  Workers had to leave town to get a drink The only place you could buy liquor was at the upscale Hotel Florence, which Pullman had named after his daughter. 

The Utopian Pullman lasted little more than a decade.  A devastating economic crash in late 1893 resulted in George Pullman slashing the wages of his workers while refusing to lower the rent they paid for their company-owned housing.  The "worker's strike" referred to by APA was one of the  central events of the century, sweeping the nation and paralyzing Pullman's operations, both at his company town and on the rails across the country.  President Grover Cleveland did Pullman's dirty work by calling out 12,000 army troops to break the strike.  In the classic photo below, you can see onlookers in their Sunday past watching militiamen cordoning off the Arcade building, waiting for something interesting to break out.

Now those conflicts are ancient history, but Pullman endures.

 They've yet to find a use for the old Administration Building (Lee Bey has proposed it would be a good place for the Obama Presidential library) . . .

 . . . restored after a disastrous fire.

The beauty of Pullman's thoughtful plan and of Beman's simply yet elegant structures, now far removed from their embattled gestation, shines anew.  While it began to breath as a living, democratic thing only after it was wrested from his authoritarian control, in the Town of Pullman, George Pullman, ahead of his time, created what remains one of the best examples of a planned community.

Architecture for Humanity Charrette on Saturday for Tanzania's Nyegina Resource Center

Architecture for Humanity Chicago is partnering with Tanzania Development Support to prepare designs for . . .

a new three-phase library, teacher enhancement center, and computer lab. The facility will be located on the grounds of the Nyegina Secondary School, a Catholic-run boarding school, and will also serve a nearby government primary school as well as the village of Nyegina.

Education remains a critical issue in Tanzania, especially in the rural Mara district on the shores of Lake Victoria. This will be the second library in this district of over a million inhabitants, and a crucial piece of infrastructure for the schools and the community.

Saturday, October 8th, there will be a kickoff,  9 a.m. to 4 p.m. charrette in room 1227 of the Sullivan Center at The School of the Art Institute, 38 South Wabash. 

"Participants will work in teams to develop schematic schemes that day, and will optionally have until Monday, October 24th to finish documenting their ideas before they're sent to our partners TDS and UMABU for review. Lunch will be provided."

Email Laura Bowe if you plan to attend, she'll put you on the security guest list.

Help Me: I've Been Urbanized - preview of documentary from Director of Helvetica among 80 events on October calendar

We just posted the October Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events yesterday, and already we're adding.  The big addition is an advanced screening of Urbanized, the new documentary from the director of Helvetica, which explores the question, "Who is allowed to shape our cities, and how do they do it?" and offers up a massive, star-studded cast including Amanda Burden, Ricky Burdett, Norman Foster, Rem Koolhaas, Oscar Niemeyer and the five marvelous pretzels.

Urbanized plays at the Music Box on Sunday the 9th at 7:00 p.m., and it's only one of what's now approaching 80 great events in October.  Just today, Tuesday the 4th, we've got the 3,300 meter Strait of Messina Bridge discussed at this month's Structural Engineers Association of Illinois dinner meeting, at the Cliff Dwellers, and a 6:00 p..m. panel discussion at the Chicago Architecture Foundation in conjunction with its new Design on the Edge exhibition, with everyone from Darryl Crosby to Jeanne Gang, John Ronan, Stanley Tigerman and five other leading Chicago architects.

Want more?  We've got Maya Lin, Millennium Park, architects doing other things, Sharon Haar and The City as Campus, Stanley Allen and Juhani Pallasmaa at IIT, Kees Christiaanse and John McMorrough at UIC, Carolyn Armenta Davis discussing Germany's Black Architects, Arup's Ryan Biziorek on Modeling Sound in Space, a tour of the EnV Tower,  John Tshirch on McKim, Mead &; White's Isaac Bell House, Ben Weese receiving AIA Chicago's Lifetime Achievement Award at this year's Designight.

Take a breath,  OK.  There's a Bertrand Goldberg-Contemporary Perspectives symposium at the Art Institute with John Ronan, Robert Somol, Elizabeth Smith, Sarah Whiting, Zoë Ryan and Alison Fisher, Adrian Smith interviewed by Bill Kurtis, the Richard Driehaus Preservation Awards, MAS Context: Analog with everyone from Sarah Dunn, to Cheryl Towler Weese to Jason Pickleman, Lee Bey, Strawn and Sierralta and a dozen others, the extraordinary openhouseChicago giving you entry to a hundred-plus great sites, as well a murder mystery at the Driehaus Museum/Nickerson Mansion, and Edgar Allen Poe readings and ghost sightings at Glessner House for Halloween.

What are we up to?  A couple dozen? Well, we've got nearly eighty of 'em.  Check out the full October 2011 Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events and fill out your dance card.

October Calendar posted - over 70 items.

Life goes on.

The October 2011 Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events is now up, with over 70 events.  We'll be writing more on it soon, but you can check it out for yourself here.

Farewell, My Friend

Nuages ​​d'automne

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Herringbone floods and the hidden potential of an overlooked Chicago gem

A couple of year's ago, Hyde Park's Sam Guard had tipped me off about an impending change at the upper-level outdoor plaza at Illinois Center. The basic plan for Illinois Center had been designed by Mies van der Rohe, as well as the first building, One Illinois Center, completed in 1970, the year after Mies' death. The paving design followed the grid of the buildings . . .

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and, as you can see, it had been allowed to deteriorate over time.  Add to the mix that moisture was reported to be seeping into the level below, required a resurfacing of the plaza. At the time I was talking with Sam Guard, the new plan had already become visible in the driveways, resurfaced in a darker, simpler interlocking pattern of squares and rectangles . . .

I didn't get much a response when I asked Illinois Center about their plans in 2009.  Nothing seemed to be happening, so I moved on to other things, but a recent visit revealed that it's now the plaza's turn.  The original geometric paving is being replaced by a continuous carpet of herringbone, with lighter pavers of exposed-aggregate Chicago-style concrete . . .

It's not a tragedy, but it's certainly a disconnect from the design of the buildings.  As I've written before in regards to Buckingham Fountain, I'm not a fan of these massive undifferentiated carpets.  What might be distinctive in smaller implementations, or as a composite in a more detailed general design, becomes numbingly generic when slathered across a huge surface like ketchup on a bad burger.  It may be cheaper to maintain, but it's just plain lazy.  At the Miesian Illinois Center, the endless herringbone is like wearing sneakers with black tie. I know it's done, but that doesn't necessarily make it a good idea.

Which is too bad, because in my mind, the upper plaza at Illinois Center is one of Chicago's unrealized gems.  It's been described as cramped and windswept, but I don't find it cramped at all, nor, whenever I visit, especially windswept.  It may not be the greatest place to be on a freezing winter day, but the same could be said for just about any downtown plaza under those conditions.  On a warmer day,  and especially at night, the way you see the buildings slide past each other as you traverse the plaza is quite beautiful.

I love the way the plaza plays off the modernist towers to the east and south to a shear western wall made up of the raw backsides of the older Michigan avenue structures.  The mature landscaping is also quite attractive, small plantings, flowers.  I love especially the tall trees, delicate green leaves and brown trunks rising in counterpoint to synthetic black of the monolithic towers.

Illinois Center, of course, became the poster child for the revolt against modernism, its towers the epitome of the repetitive black box, it's concourse a low-ceiling second tier shopping mall with the charm stripped away.  It didn't help that the complex was twice removed from the rest of the city, both stuck behind older structures like the Art Deco 333 North Michigan and the neo-classical Republic Insurance Building, and its office lobby's raised up a level above Michigan Avenue.

That raised plaza, however, has now become the bridge to the massive residential development to the east.  Until you get to the sunken park of Lake Shore East, it's all on the same level of the Illinois Center plaza.

Two things are missing to make the plaza a real asset. First off, the kind of amenities that make a plaza a destination.  Changing this needn't be an ordeal  A few kiosks, and maybe a discreet dumbwaiter structure that would allow the broad expanse overlooking the Chicago river . . .

to become a dining plaza during the warmer months.

The second is a way to end Illinois Center's isolation from the Mag Mile, a link to draw up people from Michigan Avenue. In 2008, the Chicago Loop Alliance and the Urban Land Institute Chicago chapter floating a proposal for creating a Chicago equivalent of Rome's Spanish Steps to mediate between Michigan Avenue and the plaza.

Nothing came of it, and now the gracious stairway entrance off of South Water . . .

 . . . has been sealed off, as has, last time I checked,  the stair from East Wacker.  Hopefully, this is temporary, and they'll return in good condition.

To me the most intriguing possibility lies in a small gap between the buildings on Michigan Avenue . . .

It's not wide enough to create a Spanish Steps style grandeur, but, replacing the existing fire escapes, it's just wide enough to create something so visually arresting that it would pique the interests of the passersby to see just where that funky staircase led.  The Chicago Loop Alliance has been instrumental in bringing art back downtown.  Sponsorship of an architectural competition for the design of that stairway could both eliminate an unsightly scar on the Mag Mile and provide the needed bridge between Illinois Center and the rest of the city.

Memo to Tom Friedman: No one wants your damn memos

TO: Tom Friedman (oh, sorry, Thomas L Friedman)

Go away.  You seem to be the last person to realize that you are a pompous, self-satisfied idiot who doesn't have a clue.  The Iraq war - you are the guy who thought it was a great idea, right?  Letting GM die and destroying the jobs of hundreds of thousands of employees so they can all go work for Tesla - that was your idea, am I not correct? And you're still at, writing a memo to Barack Obama about how simple it would be to fix all our problems if only he would listen to your simple advice.  As Mencken famously said, "neat, plausible, and wrong." Except maybe not the plausible part. See Hendrik Hertzberg if you need it explained to you.  You're not helping.  Go away.

Dead Lumber Magnate restores Bourgeois Hands for Jane Addams Memorial

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In 1996, for a new park just west of Navy Pier and north of the Ohio Street Beach dedicated to the legendary Jane Addams, the great sculptor Louise Bourgeois created a memorial, Helping Hands, comprised of six rough-hewn granite stones topped by carved marble hands . . .

Bourgeois's leap of faith was not rewarded.  According to Chicago Park District historian Julia Bachrach, Bourgeois's sculpture "did not fare well in that location. It was exposed to the intense winds of Lake Michigan. It was in a heavily used area. It was in a low setting with poor sight lines. It not only deteriorated, but the art work was also the victim of severe vandalism." As reported by The Reader's Martha Bayne and Jeff Huebner, the sculpture was attacked at least twice - with the fingers on one of the hands chopped off as if they belonged to someone who had failed to pay back a juice loan.  The Art Institute, which bankrolled the sculpture, and the Park District, which placed it, threw in the towel and removed the piece to a Park District warehouse.

"Fortunately," continued Bachrach at rededication of the artwork this past Saturday, "this sculpture was the gift of the Ferguson fund of the Art Institute. As Chicagoans we are so lucky that lumber merchant Benjamin Franklin Ferguson decided to establish a $1 million endowment for the installation and perpetual care of public art in our city more than a century ago." Ferguson's largess, valued in the tens of millions in today's dollars, funded 20 individual works, from Lorado Taft's Fountain of Time, to the Henry Hering monumental reliefs on the Michigan Avenue bridge, Henry Moore's Nuclear Energy at the U of C, and Isamu Noguchi fountain along Columbus Drive, which has fallen into a state of neglect where even its owner, the Art Institute, appears to have forgotten it's there.  (You can find photographs and full descriptions of all the Ferguson Fund commissions on Jyoti Srivastava excellent Public Art in Chicago website, here.)

"In 2006," says Bachrach," the Ferguson fund covered the cost of moving the artwork, sending the damaged pieces back to Louise Bourgeois so that they could be recreated by the artist, who was then in her 90's. The other pieces went into storage. For several years, "the project was tied up in good old political bureaucracy"

Bachrach credits Park District President Bryan Traubert for suggesting, "why don't we find an alternative location with Chicago parks so that we can return the artwork to its rightful place in the public sphere?" "The timing was excellent, " remarked Bachrach, "because the City of Chicago had recently transferred ownership of the Chicago Women's Park and Gardens to the Park District. Mimi McKay is the landscape architect who originally designed Chicago Women's Park for the city and she very graciously helped us identify the location for the installation and advised us on some of the landscape issues." 

So the sculpture is back, relocated to just the north of the Clarke House Museum, at 1827 South Indiana, fronting on the Prairie Avenue historic district.  Chicago's oldest house, it's celebrating its 175th anniversary this week with an all-day symposium this Wednesday, September 28th, and a Family Day, Saturday October 1st offering free mini-tours, folk music, period fashion and other events.  (More information here.).

Naomi Beckwith, Julia Bachrach

Saturday's event also offered remarks from Glessner House's William Tyre, 2nd ward alderman Robert Fioretti, and Museum of Contemporary Art curator Naomi Beckwith, who compared Bourgeois's more human take on surrealism than that of the flamboyant Salvador Dali.  "She didn't choose," said Beckwith, "to make a monument that was a large scale sculpture. It wasn't a sort of a real figuration of Jane Addams, a picture of her, as you would normally see. But it was about these hands that Jane so beautifully spoke about, as a symbol.  And all these hands as you can see are reaching out and touching, and they're so delicate, and so warm, and so for Bourgeois this idea of surrealism was about the inner life of what you could love and what you feel inside."

As someone whose early childhood was marked by nightmares of disembodied hands emerging from the baseboard to grab and hold me, I'm probably not the best person to critique Bourgeois's sculpture.  Far more interesting to hear from Jane Addams . . .

. . . whose person and spirit were ably recreated on Saturday by artist and activist Jan Lisa Huttner, portraying Addams, and reading an excerpt from her memoir, Twenty Years at Hull House, in which she recalled a visit to a London slum where she witnessed the desperately hungry poor thrust out their hands to grab their winnings in a regular Sunday auction of rotting fruit and vegetables.

Perhaps nothing is so fraught with significance as the human hand, this oldest tool with which man has dug his way from savagery and with which he is constantly groping forward.

I have never since been able to see a number of hands help upward, even when they are moving rhythmical in a calisthenic exercise, or when they belong to a class of chubby children who wave them in eager response to a teacher's query, without a certain revival of this memory, a clutching at the heart reminiscent of the despair and resentment which seized me then.

If you want to see more, here's an execrably shot video of excerpts from Saturday's ceremonies, complete with  vertigo-inducing camera movement and thumbs and fingers over the lens.  It might be better if you just listen. (I really have to take the time to teach myself how to shoot extended videos on my Canon T2i.)  Suitably, for a monument whose history and substance carries ambiguities between hope and despair, the day oscillated between a persistent drear drizzle and short bursts of blue sky and  bright sunlight.

Jeanne Gang before Aqua (and being name a MacArthur genius) - an early portrait.

"I was always fascinated with how pieces came together . . . When we make form, we’re thinking about how can we make the identity fluctuate."

When Studio/Gang architect Jeanne Gang was announced as the winner of one of this year'$500,000 MacArthur Foundation "Genius Grant" fellowships, I was reminded that just a week or two ago, I had come across a profile I had written, based on several interviews with Gang, back in 2004, as her career as an architect was just getting started. Among many things, she talks about growing up in Boone County, giant Pink Sea Snails, Rem Koolhaas, Marilyn Monroe and several of her early projects, including the Starlight Theater in Rockford, the Marble Curtain, the Chinese American Service League, and the Ford Calumet Environmental Center, among others.

 I don't think it's been published before, but you can read the complete profile - with photos - here.

Jeanne Gang awarded 2011 MacArthur Genius Grant

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Officially, they're called MacArthur Fellowships, but unofficially, they've come to be known as the "Genius Grants", $500,000 over five years, no strings attached.  This year, among the 22 recipients who've just received "one call out of the blue", as the MacArthur Foundation describes it (do I see a licensing deal for a TV series in its future?) was Chicago architect Jeanne Gang, whose work ranging from the new Columbia College Media Center, to the Lincoln Park Nature Boardwalk, and the already iconic Aqua tower has been remaking the profile of the city.

It was a good day for Gang.  Earlier, as reported by the Trib's Blair Kamin, she was named one of two architects, along with Chris Lee, who will work with IIT students to design four new $4 million boathouses, assisted by a $1 million EPA grant, announced by Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel as keystones in his efforts to increase recreational usage of the city's river.  Now if he can only jump start getting the funding to build Studio Gang's Ford Calumet Environmental Center, which has the same potential to make that neighborhood a recreational and tourist magnet.

Studio Gang also has a new website, designed by Bruce Mau Design.