VOA's Old Town School of Folk Music Opens Today

I won't be able to make it, so this pathetic photo of the new building for the Old Town School of Folk Music  designed by VOA Associates I snapped last night with my camera pressed against the window is all I've got.  However, the Old Town School is having a  week of grand opening events, including free tours today, Monday January 9th.  So take your pick and check it out for yourself.  Let us know what you think.  Or you can read Blair's review here.  (He actually got inside.)

Last week for AIC Goldberg shows, plus Japanese 1960's projects, Kenneth Frampton, Re-Envisioning Navy Pier, Landscape Design with Lurie Garden staff and Roy Diblik - a dozen new items for the January calendar

See, we'd told you there would be a lot more.  We've just added over a dozen new great items to the January Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events, including two new exhibitions.

On Monday at Crown Hall, IIT opens a new show, Struggling Cities: From Japanese Urban Projects in the 1960's, which runs through the 31st.  The Metabolists are back with a vengeance, and Struggling Cities includes work by Kiyonori Kikutake, Kisho Kurokawa, Masato Ohtaka, Fumihiko Maki,  Noboru Kawazoe and Arata Isozaki, whose  “Cities in the Air” is pictured here.  In conjunction with the exhibition, there will be a lecture at Crown Hall this Thursday, the 12th,  at 6:00 by critic and historian Kenneth Frampton, Ware Professor of Architecture at Columbia.  (There will also be a February 25th appearance by Peter Frampton at the Chicago Theatre, but we're hearing this may be an unrelated event, more about music than an actual lecture.)

Over at the ArchiTech Gallery, there's a new show, Architectural Drawing: From Europe to America, that runs through April 28, 2012 and features work by Louis Villeminot, George Mann Niedecken and Alfonso Iannelli, among others.  Hours are Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday from noon to five, "or by chance or appointment on Monday or Tuesday."

Elsewhere, we've added this month's events from the Chicago Center for Green Technology, which is branching out with a morning session on Landscape Design Series: Part 1 featuring the staff of the Lurie Garden and Roy Diblik at the Chicago Cultural Center on Saturday the 14th, and a Wednesday January 25th session on Green Roofing for the Homeowner and DIY-er at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum, as well as its usual programs at the Center, itself.

Crain's Chicago Real Estate Daily has a morning panel, Residential Forecast, on Wednesday the 18th moderated by Alby Gallun and featured Stephen Baird, Andy Konovodoff, Buzz Ruttenberg and Steven Fifield.  If there's a Q&A, maybe someone can ask Steve Fifield if his projects, like the ironically named Left Bank, really have to suck so much.

On Friday, the 20th, DePaul's Chaddick Institute has a panel on Re-Envisioning Navy Pier with Larry Booth, Gerry Butler, Michael Emerson, Reuben Hedlund, Cherri Heramb and Larry Lund.

And lastly, this is the last week to see two essential shows on Bertrand Goldberg at the Art Institute, Bertrand Goldberg: Architecture of Invention, and the uniquely expressive Inside Marina City: A Project by Iker Gil and E.G. Larsson.  Both are must-see exhibitions, and you have only through next Sunday to catch up with them.

Check it out:  There are still over three dozen events on the January Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.

The Architects behind the Architects: Anne Tyng dies at 91

photograph courtesy Domus magazine.  You can read Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss's excellent, beautifully illustrated interview with Anne Tyng here.

According to Inga Saffron's fine obituary in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Anne Tyng "struggled her entire career to be taken seriously." Much like Marion Mahony with Frank Lloyd Wright and Walter Burley Griffin, she was a pioneer, one of the earliest female architects.  Without a doubt they had a major influence on the now iconic architects they worked with and for,  but their identities were subsumed in history.

At a recent lecture by Tyng at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard, dean Mohsen Mostafavi revealed some of Tyng's history by reading from her book, Louis Kahn to Anne Tyng: The Rome Letters, 1953-1954, a collection of letters written during her year in Italy  . . .

I was the only woman to take the exams in 1949.  In addition to the written exam for state registration, an oral exam was required for national certification.  In Harrisburg, one of the three reviewers was so against the idea of a woman architect that he refused to speak to me and actually sat apart and turned himself away so he wouldn't have to look at me . . .  Any misgivings were apparently resolved, because I passed.

They was another complication that may have affected her hostile examiner.  Anne Tyng was a great beauty.  It would have been bad enough if Tyng had been the stereotypical mouse of male fantasy fears - homely, wearing eyeglasses, socially inept, a misfit, a female looking to become a man - but to be razor-sharp, beautiful and ambitious,  that's a toxic cocktail for any male chauvinist to have to swallow.

And there was still one more complication.  She not only worked with Louis Kahn, she was his lover.  (He was married at the time.)  She bore him a daughter.  Awkward.  Not just in matter of personal relationships, but in writing history.  Saffron relates that although Tyng kept all of the letters she wrote to Kahn when in Rome, Kahn destroyed all of her replies.

It was Tyng that turned Kahn on to the possibilities of geometry, resulting in their remarkable 1956-57 proposal for a Philadelphia City Tower.  In an interview in Domus by Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss, Tyng relates "The tower is really just something I did . . .  Lou also worked on the base, so he didn't have much to do with the tower either. He didn't really grasp the geometry that well."  The unrealized tower is a stunning "geodesic skyscraper"   "Each level is identical," Tyng told Mostafavi, "and it just rotates in plan as you go up.  It kind of animates the building to some degree, I think, because it looks as though it might be in motion, possibly, if you have enough imagination for that. If you look at it, it almost looks like a women with her hips thrown out dancing . . ."

Kahn basically expunged Tyng as a generator of the design, which Tyng found out when she never received an invitation to a MOMA opening of an exhibition that featured the project.

He's a rascal.  He actually took my name off.  I had put his name on with mine because I thought it might be a gesture he might appreciate. And then he took my name off. So I went into his office and I say, 'Wouldn't it better if you called them than if I called them?' and he did and straightened it out.

Tyng's influence on Kahn is apparent in such projects as the Yale Art Gallery and the recently restored Trenton Bath House.  At the very end of her very long life, Anne Tyng was finally rediscovered, with an exhibition of her work and thought, Anne Tyng: Inhabiting Geometry, which opened at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia just last January, before coming around to the Graham last April.  I didn't get around to seeing it.  Idiot.

Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got
Till it's gone

It was just last fall that Tyng, age 90,  went to Harvard for that remarkable GSD lecture, which, fortunately, was captured on video, and you can see it below.  (I would recommend you click on the video to view it on YouTube full-size.)

“The feminine is more dominant for the moment. There are many women doing things that they never did before or given positions they were never given before or earned before.  They had earned it before, but never got it.

“Geometry when you have it in school was never animate in any form, but I think that there are ways of making things that are flexible that have a kind of life of their own.  That aren't necessarily gimmicks, but something that is just basic . . . the kind of things I think architects can discover.  Something that adds function, adds dimension or some sort of quality that hasn't been done before. If you look back at the five platonic solids, we don't really use all of those .  I mean - there they are.  We can use them. The tetrahedrons and the octahedrons fit together.  They fill space.  They're really quite simple . . .  Out of that, you might make all kinds of interesting architecture that almost has a life of its own.

John Ronan's Poetry Foundation wins 2012 AIA Honor Award

For someone who's been dead now for over two years, Ruth Lilly is having a really good year.  Two buildings that she made possible with her bequests have just been announced as winners of the American Institute of Architects' Honor Awards for 2012.

The first is Guy Nordenson & Associates' Ruth Lilly Visitors Pavilion at the Indianapolis Museum of Art.  The second is the new home for her beloved Poetry Foundation designed by Chicago architect John Ronan.

We're still working on our piece on the Poetry Foundation (see the Hugo post below for an explanation of my bizarre methods for avoiding work), but you can see and hear John Ronan discussing the project here.  Part one below.

And you can see our photoessay on the construction of the building here and here.

Come and Dream With Me: Scorsese's rapturous Hugo and why you shouldn't miss it.

I have a problem.  Whenever I encounter something that matters deeply to me, I experience a failure of nerve.  I fall into full Prufrock mode.  I want make my readers feel for themselves the wonders of my discovery . . . "I am Lazarus, come back from the dead, Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all."  But in a flash I'm measuring it all off in coffee spoons.  "Do I dare?" and, "Do I dare?"

That is why I didn't publish my piece on Cecil Balmond until a week before his great exhibition at the Graham closed, why I waited for months to try to express my thoughts on Bertrand Goldberg: Reflections, at the Arts Club.  And it's why I'm still working on a piece on Martin Scorsese's new film, Hugo, which has engaged and moved me more than any movie I've seen in a long time.

Hugo has been described as Scorsese's first film for kids, but it is as far from pablum as you can get.  Critics have congratulated themselves with the "discovery" that "Martin Scorsese has made a picture about film preservation!,"  but to say Hugo is a movie about film preservation is like saying À la recherche du temps perdu is a novel about cookies.  


The themes of Hugo are as deep and probing as the film is entertaining and beautiful.  While the plot is resolved with absolute grace, challenging questions are often posed rather than answered.  The score by Howard Shore is both incredibly gentle and subtly insinuating.  The performances, especially of Ben Kingsley as the bitter old man who is much more than he appears, are glorious.  The physical production is astonishing.  The evocation of Paris and its architecture, above all the remarkable reproduction of the Gare Montparnasse rail station, and the surreal world behind its walls where Hugo makes his home, will take your breath away.

Obviously, my reaction to Hugo is deeply personal.  I can't guarantee yours will be similar.  But with such possibility of delight, why not take the chance?  Hugo has been around since Thanksgiving, and its theater count continues to shrink.  Go see it - now.  On the big screen, where you can appreciate its ambition and visual splendor.  In 3-D if at all possible, such as the AMC River East, or, if you prefer, in the restored beauty of the Patio Theater, where it begins this Friday.  If you don't like it, I apologize.  If you wind up loving it as much I do, come back next week and we'll talk - I promise.

One Tower for the Meatpackers; One for the Fashionistas - Ross Barney's new Morgan Street Station bridges old and new Fulton Market

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While major Chicago institutions like the South Water market have relocated several times over Chicago's history, and others, like the Union Stockyards, have completely vanished, the Fulton Market district, the clearinghouse for meat, fish and dairy characterized nearly a century ago as "a sight to gladden to anyone interested in the trade . . . thoroughly modern in every sense of the word", has endured in its original location, even as it becomes marbled with gentrification.

Loft rehabs are common.  Smart boutiques . . .

 mingle with meatpackers . . .

Art Galleries . . .

amidst butter-and-egg firms . . .

There's the new home of the Showmen's League of America . . .

and this Archer-Daniels-Midland complex, reported to be Chicago's last active grain elevator . . .

The area is still defined by the soaring, massive hulk of the Fulton Cold Storage building  . . .

. . . designed by Gardner & Lindberg and built in the 1920's at a cost of $4,000,000 - 5,000,000 cubic feet "for the proper keeping of butter, eggs and other perishable produce."  It survives today as "The only 100% owner operated warehouse in Chicago," and, as pictured on website photographs, a magnet for beautiful women hanging off its highest ramparts.

Now, however, the Fulton Market is getting a new visual marker, one that will end the district's long isolation from public transit.  Morgan Street was one of the original stations on the 1893 Lake Street Elevated line, but it survived only until 1948, when it was among 10 stations closed in an efficiency drive by the recently formed CTA.  Since the rebuilding of what is now called the Green Line in the early 1990's, there has been no L stop between Clinton and Ashland, part of a short-sighted rapid transit redlining of the inner city that also saw the demolition of all Green Line stations from Roosevelt to 35th, a nearly three mile stretch.  (Efforts are now underway to also reconstruct the station at Cermak, serving McCormick Place.)

The design of the new Morgan Street station comes from Ross Barney Architects, which recently completed an award-winning, $100 million rehab of the CTA's Red, Brown and Purple transfer stops at Belmont and Fullerton.  $30 million in TIF funding is going towards Morgan Street's estimated price tag of $38,000,000, about what it cost to complete the entire Dan Ryan extension back in the 1960's.

The design offers a station house on either side of Lake, leading up to staggered platforms that reduce the strain on the trestle structure . . .

 . . . and translucent polycarbonate canopies that provide both shelter and daylight.*

Trees, landscaping and bicycle racks are planned for street level.

Dominating the composition, however, are the pair of tall, wide and thin stair towers, like a pair of giant bookends, that rise first from the street to the platforms, and then above the platforms to a bridge crossing the tracks.

While the entire design stresses a sense of openness, eventually the stair towers will have a perforated metal screen.

Today, without that screen, the wide-open, white-painted metal frame gives an almost vertiginous sense of the high-height wafers poking into the sky.

We'll be waiting to see how it all turns out, but there's no doubt but that Ross Barney's design for the Morgan Street station creates a strikingly distinctive emblem for a classic neighborhood that - so far, at least - hasn't sacrificed its historic character as it gains a new kind of vitality.

*Direct daylight not available during night-time hours.

Classicist/Modernist Smackdown, Luis Urculo, Margaret McCurry: Distillations, Future City 2012, The L, Henry Ives Cobb's Chicago, Tugendhat, Bloomingdale, Hedrich-Blessing - it's the January 2012 Calendar!

It's Classicist vs. Modernist smackdown night January 19th,  as Iveta Cerná, Head of Villa Tugendhat at CAF faces off at 6:00 p.m. against Tom Beeby, of the Harold L Washington Library, at the Richard H. Driehaus Museum, a/k/a Nickerson Mansion.

But that's just two of the highlights of the January 2012 Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.

On Wednesday, January 25th, Madrid architect Luis Urculo lectures at the Graham, while at the Poliform showroom, Margaret McCurry signs copies of Distillations, the new monograph on her work. On Friday, the 27th, architect Will Bruder lectures at Crown Hall, IIT


There seems to be a new tradition of holiday parties after the holidays, which includes Architecture for Humanity Chicago Chapter's Holiday Hangover which couples the Black Cloud Gallery with Friday the 13th, while APT and others host a Chicago Preservation Holiday Party 2012 on the 11th.

Saturday the 21st is the 2012 Future City Chicago Regional Finals at UIC, where 6th, 7th and 8th trades from area schools  compete with their own visions.

More authors: Greg Borzo discusses the The Chicago L for Friends of Downtown at the Cultural Center this Thursday, the 5th,  Barbara Geiger talks about Low-Key Genius: The life and Work of Landscape-Gardener O.C. Simonds, and Edward W. Wolner discusses Henry Ives Cobb's Chicago for Landmarks Illinois at the Cultural Center on the 19th.

More?  This Thursday marks still another month when the Commission on Chicago Landmarks completely ignores the battle to save Bertrand Goldberg's Prentice Hospital, SEAOI has a dinner program on Geotechnical Lessons Learned on Tuesday the 10th, while Tuesday, the 17th, AIA  Chicago offers a tour of the ACE Technical Charter High School serving students with an interest in architecture, construction and engineering, and the Chicago Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians have a tour of the legendary photographers Hedrich Blessing.

Other CAF lunchtime lectures feature The Bloomingdale Trail on the 18th, and Zurich Esposito, Julie Liska, Pat Saldana Natke and others on the Small Firm/Small Project Awards on the 25th.

I'm sure we'll be adding more events, especially since the Chicago Plan and Community Development Commissions and the Center for Green Technology haven't released their 2012 schedules yet, but we've already got over 30 great items.  Check out the entire January 2012 Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.

Chicago Streetscene: Towards a Better 2012 - Happy New Year!

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Ricardo Legorreta, who brought back the sun to the U of C's Gothic gray, dies at 80

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A brief obituary here.  A sampling of his work here.  My photoessay on the Max Palevsky Residential Commons at the University of Chicago here.

INOMA Holiday Party/Benefit on Thursday

Never too late to add to the December Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.  The Illinois Chapter of the National Organization of Minority Architects is having its annual holiday party, tomorrow, December 29th, from 6:00 to 10:00 p.m. at the Roosevelt Square Sales Center, 1200 West Roosevelt.  $10.00 of every ticket goes towards their scholarship fund.  More information here.

Garrett Popcorn: Harmless Addiction or Quest for Global Domination?

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You laugh.  Okay, so answer me this:  Did you know there are as many Garrett Popcorn shops in Singapore as there are in Chicago?  Or that there are two outlets in KL, where the Petronas Towers overtook the Sears Tower as world's tallest building?  And that now there's two outlets in Dubai, where, in turn, the Burj Khalifa supplanted Petronas as world's tallest?  Do you see a pattern emerging?

Did you know there's major trafficking of Garrett popcorn from Dubai into Kuwait?  Can another outlet territory - and a new tall building champion - be far behind?  Did you know the word "Garrett" has been banned from the Internet in the People's Republic of China, with all searches redirected to the web site of Xiào's House of Tasty Kernels, West Nanjing Road?

It's just popcorn, you say.  Yeah, right.  That's why at every Garrett Popcorn Shop, including its newest outlet on West Jackson in Chicago, pictured above, the smell of CaramelCrisp® lures shoppers, lawyers, judges, FBI moles and unindicted co-conspirators into a common thread of humanity that, no matter the weather, queues down the street to infinity, much like the line of appliance installers in the Monty Python new gas cooker sketch.

Dancing with Filamentosa: Tristan d'Estree Sterk AIA Chicago's Dubin Young Architect for 2011

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When, at the turn of the 20th century, Louis Sullivan talked about an "organic" architecture, it was largely a poetic conceit.

 Despite their rich ornament, their greenest feature was probably the  windows that opened and closed, which, like the central atriums of the large "donut" office buildings of the same time, allowed for natural lighting and ventilation.

As modern architecture involved at mid-century, even that feature was thrown in the trash bin, replaced by sealed glass boxes with huge floorplates and glazed facades that leaked heat in the winter and sucked up solar gain in the summer, all compensated for by pumping in btu-guzzling air conditioning and forced air in that lost era of "cheap" energy.

Now, energy is anything but cheap, and architects strive towards "zero energy" structures that produce as much as energy as they use.  Are we on the verge of a truly "organic" architecture, where buildings respond to their dynamic environments the same way trees and plants do?

On December 9th, the Chicago chapter of the American Institute of Architects awarded its 2011 Dubin Family Young Architect Award to Tristan d’Estree Sterk, founder of ORAMBRA, The Office for Robotic Architectural Media and The Bureau for Responsive Architecture.


Sterk's investigations address how such a "Responsive Architecture" could reduce energy consumption in all regions of the U.S. by more than 30%.  At a forum sponsored by The Economist, posted to YouTube, Sterk said such an architecture . . .

. . . requires systems that change color, change the color of skins, change the degree of insulation and also change shape.  . . . Color can provide smaller savings, in the order of 2%, permeability or openings and closings can provide around 8%, and shape change of buildings can provide in the order of 25 to 30% . . . shape change builds upon [Buckminster] Fuller's understanding of tensegrity to produce a new structure called an actuated tensegrity structure . . .soft shells that can change color, that can gently change shape, that have an optimized thermal mass, but they're very lightweight.  And all of this is achievable if we take a different view of what architecture might be . . . We're no longer thinking of buildings as static creations that are built of "dumb" material.  These are systems that rely on control, and sensor input, and actuators

Sterk's projects includes a Prairie House: House for A Fashion Pattern Maker and Fiber Artist that was the winner of a 2011 AIA Chicago Design Excellence Award.   And while sculptor Kenneth Snelson, whose pioneering work on tensegrity structures inspired Buckminster Fuller, denied that such structures could scale up to massive size, Sterk created the concept of Filamentosa - ultralight, tensegrity skyscrapers, which ORAMBRA has imaged rising amidst the classic Chicago skyline.

At the end of the YouTube presentation, Sterk shows a video demonstrating the structure's flexibility.  Assuring his audience that the towers wouldn't actually move as radically as in the video, Sterk still added, "If you wanted to dance with a building, this might be one of those buildings."

Christmas 2011 in a Square Mile of Chicago

with the worst audio track on YouTube!

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