Big Shiny Things: Studio/Gang at Expo Chicago at Navy Pier

So here's the sketch . . .

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. . . and here's the reality . . .

Expo Chicago 2012 is now open, through Sunday, September 23rd in the huge Festival Hall at Navy Pier.  Organizer Tony Karman called on architect Jeanne Gang and Studio/Gang to design the 170,000 square-foot exhibition.

The idea was to recreate Chicago's street grid, complete with a zig-zag diagonal aisle cutting through the center, for east of navigation.  Frankly, the long rows of white-walled galleries didn't seem all that different from those I experienced at Merchandise Mart, with the difference of three huge mylar constructions hanging down from the 55-foot-high ceiling, alternating between concave and convex, demarcating what could be said to be the "parks" of this city, two food areas, plus that central lounge with its highly reflective dome that's kind of a cross between a hot air balloon and a giant coffee filter, picking up the colors and forms of the artwork.

The red carpet that was to mark the diagonal aisle like a flowing river apparently didn't make the final cut.  Interrupted by the lounge at the center, it makes the aisle seem less a diagonal, than the existing aisles doubling up in size as they approach the Mylar domes.

The domes do the job, however, of providing inescapable physical markers.  Wherever you are in the huge exhibition hall, at least one of the domes is in sight, helping you to set your bearings.

Each dome has its own character. The Chef's Cafe has a huge sphere inside at its center, illuminated with purple light.

The Signature Cafe is like a basket of thick mylar straps; the underside a warm overhang for the seating below it.

 

Expo Chicago 2012 has over 100 galleries represented, as well as special supersized installations by such artists as Jaume Plensa and Theaster Gates.  Get all the information  here.

Fore! PARK(ing) Day 2012 turns Milwaukee Avenue into a Golf Course Friday

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Although, since it's miniature golf, maybe it should be:  Fore! . . .

If you're around North Milwaukee Avenue early Friday morning, September 21, you may see Architecture for Humanity/Chicago's Katherine Darnstadt playing parking chairs, getting dibs on nine metered parking spaces that will be transformed for the day into the holes of a miniature golf course.  Nine parking spots from Kimball to Central Park, each in front of a vacant storefront, will be transformed into a 9-hole course, each of the nine holes individually designed by a local artist or creative business.

Speaking of Number 9, there are also Nine "gates" to the male human body.  Nine choruses of angels, and Nine noble virtues.  Nine animals make up the Chinese dragon.  Nine false doors in the building permit office.  Nine small steps in the Parade of Shoes.  Nine check-out lanes to choose from at my local Jewel, and everyone ahead of me has a very large cart filled with  81 very small items.  But I digress. 

The event is part of PARK(ing) Day 2012, "an annual worldwide event where artists, designers and citizens transform metered parking spots into temporary public parks." The ultimate objective of Mini-Golf on Milwaukee is to help "create a vibrate arts corridor over time in an area that is experiencing serial vacancy." You can see some pics of the course being pre-assembled here.

Sculptor Marshall Svendsen's eagle lands along Diversey Harbor

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Here's some of my usual noisy, technically challenged video on sculptor Marshall Svendsen's sculpture, Chicago Industrial, being installed at Diversey Harbor, September 19, 2012.  The aluminum and steel sculpture is one of 53, from Andy Scott's The Kelpies at the Museum Campus to Bob Emser's Windsurfer at Belmont Harbor, in the Chicago Park District/Chicago Sculpture International Outdoor Sculpture Exhibition.  (You can see a map with the name, artist and location of all the sculptures here.

On Wednesday, Svendsen was assisted by fellow sculptors Terrence Karpowicz, Ted Sitting Crow Garner, and Eric Stephenson, as well as two students currently studying at the School of the Art Institute.  The event was photographed by Jyoti Srivastava, and the process was carefully monitored from the truck by Ziggy.

The installation is part of Activate Chicago with Sculpture, four separate shows, from the lakefront (through August of 2013), to the Chicago Arts District in Pilsen, to the Lincoln Park Conservatory (through November 3rd), to the Lill Street Gallery (through October 14), showcasing both indoor and outdoor art in all sizes, small to monumental, leading up to the International Sculpture Center's 2012 conference, being held this year in Chicago, October 4-6. 

And if that's not enough, there's also the Chicago Sculpture Exhibit 2012, with 30 large-scale sculptures on exhibit in locales from Bucktown to Lakeview.  And Expo Chicago 2012, this weekend at Navy Pier.

As you might have imagined, October is Chicago Artists Month.

Chicago Street Scene: Snow Globe

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Studio/Gang's Aqua from Start to Finish

A photo set on the construction of Aqua at Lakeshore East, Chicago, by architect Jeanne Gang of Studio/Gang, for Lowenberg + Associates. Structural engineers, Magnusson Klemencic Associates, Seattle. 81 stories, 820 feet.  Project completed October, 2009.

Click the image above to see the photographs in larger format(highly recommended).

Read: Studio/Gang's Aqua refreshes the Chicago skyscraper.

Studio/Gang's Aqua Refreshes the Chicago skyscraper

 On September 24th, the Art Institute of Chicago will be opening its new exhibition Building: Inside Studio Gang Architects. As a run-up to the opening, we're posting a series of new and newly revised versions of pieces on Jeanne Gang and Studio/Gang Architects.

An introduction to Aqua refreshes the Chicago skyscraper.

Although Jeanne Gang and her firm Studio/Gang Architects have completed a number of important projects since, Aqua remains her largest and most ambitious project do date.  The 81-story tower was largest building ever designed by a female architect, and the distinctive imprint it has made on the Chicago skyline marks it as an instant - and award-winning -  landmark.

Aqua has not been immune to criticism.  It's been noted that inside its sculpted exterior, Aqua is a completely conventional condo tower, and not especially energy-efficient. Valid complaints, that can also be made against a rather massive number of far lesser buildings constructed in the last decade.  In the last analysis, Aqua, like every other commercial project in the city, was built to make money for its developer.  What surprising is not its common shortcomings, but that something with Aqua's bold visual qualities came to exist at all.

And so we go back to the beginning, to the article we wrote in the Chicago Reader all the way back in 2006, before a spade of earth was turned.  I'm publishing it now because it recounts the story of how Aqua came to be, and the process by which Jeanne Gang and her associates at Studio/Gang arrived at the decisions that informed Aqua's distinctive design.

In terms of updates, Aqua was not the crowning endpoint of developer James Lowenberg's career.  Since then, his Magellan Development Group has entered into a partnership with bKl Architecture, the firm bringing together Brad Lynch and former SOM Chicago's Tom Kerwin, to continue to expand Lakeshore East with projects like the 49-story Coast, now under construction.

We also wrote about the Gang and others forming a "third school" of Chicago architecture.  We still have to see how that will play out.  John Ronan continues to create works of  distinction, such as his new home for the Poetry Foundation, but Douglas Garofalo's tragic, early death last year means we'll never get to see all the wonderful things we would have added to the argument.

For now, read about how it all started:  Aqua refreshes the Chicago skyscraper.  You can also see photographs of the construction process, from start to finish, here.

Amazing Open House Chicago 2012 Looking for a Thousand Good Women (And Men)

Corpus Christi Church (click images for larger view)

The full schedule of 150 locations has been published for the 2012 edition of Open House Chicago, the Chicago Architecture Foundation's remarkable two day point of entry to . . .

. . . over 150 of the city’s great places and spaces.  Explore repurposed mansions, hidden rooms, sacred spaces, private clubs, iconic theatres, hotels, community murals and more—all for free.

As you can imagine, such an event takes a lot of planning, and a lot of help.  Specifically, the CAF has put out the call for volunteers.  Shifts are four hours, either/and Saturday and Sunday, October 13th and 14th.  You must be at least 18, and you must wear clothes.

In addition to the satisfaction of a job well-done for a great event, being a volunteer has its benefits:

• Priority access at all OHC sites for you and a companion
• 50% off a CAF membership
• Member discount at CAF shop for the week following OHC
• OHC T-shirt and lanyard souvenirs
• Two free CAF walking tour passes

Get all the details and sign up on-line here.

The site list is remarkable, from downtown to all across the city, with a large roster of "hidden gems" not usually open to the general public.  To cite just one example, you can visit the 41st observation deck of the 1962 Shaw, Metz designed United of America/Unitrin/Kemper Building - open for the first time in nearly 40 years - and, unlike the guys in the photograph above, you can actually enjoy it from the inside.

You can also visit the offices of such firms as Goettsch Partners, Holabird and Root, Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill, Murphy/Jahn, Perkins+Will, SOM, Thornton Tomasetti, VOA, Wheeler Kearns, and Wright Heerema.  You can see Dankmar Adler's last commission, Isaiah Temple, now  Ebeneezer Missionary Baptist Church, get inside the Germania Club, the Powhatan Apartments, Apollo's 2000 (the former Marshall Square Theater), Jens Jensen's Park Castle, and the historic Agudas Achim North Shore Congregation.  You can visit the Lohan Associates designed Police Headquarters, and go directly to (Cook County) Jail.

Ogden School, Nagle/Hartray Architecture

And lest you think the architecture of today is being slighted, you can see Jeanne Gang's Kam Liu Building in Chinatown and Columbia College Media Production Center , Helmut Jahn's State Street Village at IIT, Farr Associates, Christy Webber Landscapes, Nagle Hartray's Ogden School, Williams and Tsien's Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts at U of C, Krueck and Sexton's Spertus Institute, Rem Koolhaas's Campus Center at IIT, and John Ronan's Poetry Foundation and South Shore International College Prep, to name just a few.

Poetry Foundation, John Ronan Architects

This is an absolutely fantastic event, and you can become a part of it here.

Fragments: Sunday on the Great Stair of the Art Institute with George (Seurat), Stephen (Sondheim), and Louis (Sullivan)

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Pretty isn't beautiful, Mother
Pretty is what changes
What the eye arranges
Is what is beautiful.
     - Stephen Sondheim, Sunday in the Park with George

Lining the Great Stair of the Art Institute, late Sunday morning, a large crowd stood waiting for the appearance of the cast of Chicago Shakespeare Theater's new production of Sunday in the Park with George, the landmark Stephen Sondheim/James Lapine musical that spans a century from George Seurat in Paris in 1884, to another artist, also named George, in New York in 1984, both Orwell's prophetic year and the one following Sunday's 1983 Broadway debut.

A reproduction was placed at the top of the stairs of Seurat's A Sunday on La Grand Jette, just outside the gallery where the massive, much-loved original resides.  On cue, the entire first act cast, comprised of all  the major characters that appear in the painting, as well as Seurat, himself, walked past the gallery door out into the the architectural fragments gallery at the top of the staircase, and, before singing one of the climatic numbers of the musical, stopped to study for a moment some of items on display.

Art isn't easy.
Overnight you're a trend,
You're the right combination-
Then the trend's at an end,
You're suddenly last year's sensation.

 A painting that's fallen out of favor can be stored in a back room; a play is a text that can be recreated in full again.  A building that clings to life, either forgotten or in the way of a greater profit, even when it's some of the greatest art created by a genius like Louis Sullivan or John Wellborn Root, is simply destroyed, smashed into dust.  A painting or a play is a self-contained world; an architectural fragment is an invitation to imagine a world vanished.

Architectural fragments project the past into a building of today.  A work of theater, especially Sunday in the Park, synthesizes past, present and future into a drama of constants, the basic elements of human experience as fractals, iterated by the artist into a complex fabric leading us to feel more deeply the most essential moments of our own lives.

Sunday in the Park with George, directed by Gary Griffin, and starring Jason Danleley and Carmen Cusack,  opens September 23rd at Chicago Shakespeare's Courtyard Theater, where it runs through November 4th.

 

see more images after the break . . . 

Buzzing the Bridgehouse: Hollywood Star goes behind the Camera at Wabash Avenue Bridge for Dhoom 3

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Marina City residents hoping to sleep in Saturday morning got an unexpected wake-up call, courtesy of a Eurocopter N350SC helicopter which made an early morning appearance low on the Chicago river over the Wabash avenue bridge.

N350SC is a motion picture veteran, co-starring with Bruce Willis in Live Free and Die Hard.

photo courtesy Warner Brothers

 . . . Alan Arkin and Anne Hathaway in the Steve Carrell vehicle Get Smart . . .

© 2006: Geffen Records

 . . . and, emblazoned with the singer's name, in a music video for Nelly Furtado's Say It Right.

On Saturday, however, mounted on the N350SC's was a Spacecam steadicam pod . . .

  . . . as the copter took shots including actors standing on the approach to the bridge, as actors portraying Chicago's finest (or moonlighting police officers) stood at their squad cars, guns drawn.

The crew remained safely tucked away on east Wacker behind Harry Weese's Seventeenth Church of Christ Scientist.

The State Street bridge raised and lowered several times in the course of the filming, which appears to be for the Bollywood action sequel Dhoom 3: Back in Action,  starring Katrina Kaif, Abhishek Bachchan and Aamir Khan, the later two who turned down luxury hotel suites in favor of renting apartments so they could come home to their families during the three-month shoot in Chicago.

"Don't get me wrong," commented N350SC when asked on the transition from supporting actor to part of the crew, "I love being in front of the camera.  But in movies you're never, ultimately, in control of your own performance.  You're at the mercy of the cinematographer, the editor, the director.  So, no, I don't buy into all those people saying I'm washed up.  Now, I'm the one taking the pictures.  I'm the one pointing the camera, the one in control of the artistic vision.  Except for the pilot.  And the cameraman sitting next to him.  I have to go now."

A Remarkable Story Comes to a Close - Wright photographer Pedro E. Guerrero dies at 95

From Pedro E. Guerrero: A Photographer's Journey, Princeton Architectural Press

Pedro E. Guerrero, who created much of the most iconic photography of Frank L. Wright and his architecture, died Thursday at age 95.  You can read William Yardley's obituary, including a gallery of photos,  in the New York Times here.

Guerrero not only created incredibly expressive photographs of the work of architects like Wright, Phillip Johnson and Marcel Brauer, but also of the life, craft and work of sculptors Alexander Calder and Louise Nevelson.

More to the point, Guerrero's own story, documented in his splendid book Pedro E. Guerrero: A Photographer's Journey, is a deeply moving document, an eloquently-told story of a distinctively American life that began as the son of a sign painter in a Mesa, Arizona deeply prejudged against Mexicans, and proceeded with Guerrero  becoming own of the most accomplished photographers in the United States, and, in the 1950's,  a "Connecticut Yankee" with a fine house in New Canaan, serving as a liberal member on the local draft board.  I've been recommending this book for five years, and I do so again.  The photos of  course, many in color, are gorgeous; the story incredibly compelling. You can buy it at Stout Books here, as well another splendid compilation of Guerrero's photographs, Picturing Wright.

Read our own appreciation: Pedro E. Guerrero's American Century.

Earlier this year, the Julius Shulman Institute of Woodbury University mounted an exhibition, Pedro E. Guererro" Photographs of Modern Life.  Guerrero, then 94 and ill, but still completely engaged and engaging, attended the opening, from which the following interview was taken.  "Did we do all right?" he asks at the end.  You better believe it.
 

dasHaus lectures, Lai, Millet, Dick Higgins collaborates (posthumously) with Chicago Police for The Thousand Symphonies - more for September

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Next Friday, September 21st, Das Haus, a traveling pavilion from Germany that demonstrates state-of-the-art technologies in building construction and solar energy use, makes its way to Daley Plaza for a ten day run.  In conjunction, with the installation, there's a series of lectures which we've just added to the September Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.  On Friday, the 21st, the Passive House Alliance Chicago offers an Introduction to Passive House, at the Hafele America Chicago showroom, and at Lunchtime on the 24th, Katrin Klilngenberg talks about 10 Years of Passive House in the U.S. at the Goethe Institute, among other events.

On Thursday, September 18th, 7:00 at the Graham, a chamber ensemble will play a new version of Fluxus artist Dick Higgins' The Thousand Symphonies.  Four Chicago Police officers were enlisted to create the composition by blasting notes onto music paper with machine guns.  The work was originally created by Higgins in 1968 as a non-destructive use of guns for purposes "other than killing Viet Cong and scattering protesters."  The performance will be preceded by a short film documenting the creation of the Chicago composition.

photo: Jyoti Srivastava

Next week, we also have Jimenez Lai offering a "quasi-reading" from his new book Citizens of No Place at the Graham on Monday,  and architect Patricia Patkau at the Art Institute on Tuesday.  Wednesday finds Thomas Leslie at CAF lunchtime, and Vincent James and Jennifer Yoos of VJAA at IIT in evening.  On Thursday, the 20th, David Van Zanten talks about The Work of Louis Julien Millet at Second Presbyterian Church.

And those are just the highlights.  We still have over three dozen great items still to come, so check them all out on the September Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.

A restored Emanuel Swedenborg returns to contemplate what Daniel Burnham Wrought

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As you walk through Lincoln Park, south of Diversey, it may seem that Emanuel Swedenborg is turning his back to you, but give him a break.  He's had a rough last 70 years.

Don't know Swedenborg?  Well, he lived from 1688 to 1772, and he was brilliant in fields from physics to geology to anatomy, to name just a few.  Swedenborg, according to one scholar  "ejected the Newtonian concept of permanent, irreducible particles of matter and suggested that everything material was essentially motion arranged in geometric forms."  Swedenborg also believed the Lord God came to him while Swedenborg was dining at a favorite inn, and, after telling him not to eat so much, commanded him to reveal the spiritual meaning of the Bible.  Which Swedenborg did,  in his Arcana Coelestia and 50 massive volumes of writing.

Swedenborg's beliefs both caused him to be accused of being a heretic, and created a theological system that has influenced everyone from Emerson, to Helen Keller, to Jorge Luis Borges.  Daniel Burnham's grandfather was a Swedenborgian minister, and Burnham attended Swendenborgian schools as a child.  Burnham's great Plan of Chicago - and especially the more socially conscious sections deleted from the final draft - can't be fully understood without taking into account Swedenborg's religious doctrines.

As might be expected, Swedenborg and his "New Church" movement was especially popular among Chicago's burgeoning Swedish population, and it was only logical that Mr. and Mrs. L. Bracken Bishop donated to the city a new bronze casting of a bust of Swedenborg, costing $1,000, by artist Adolff Jonsson, who had studied Swedenborg's skull to help create his artwork.

The Emanuel Swedenborg monument has its Facebook Page,
from which we took this image of the original installation.

According to an excellent account on the blog The Stepps of Chicago,  the dedication of the monument on June 28, 1924 was attended by several thousand Swedes, local and imported, including a 1,200 person Swedish chorus that happened to be in town for a Swedish song festival, and a viking ship with singing Valkyries.  (I'm not making this up, you know.)  The bust, set atop a tall granite space, found its home on what was then called Simmonds island, the lakemost section of land between Diversey and Fullerton, which was also home to the 1920 Chicago Daily News Fresh Air Fund Sanitarium, a large part of which now survives as the Theatre on the Lake,

Simmons Island in 1921, from Popular Mechanics

The indignities began in the late 30's, early 1940's, when the charming carriage drive that the monument faced became the expressway called North Lake Shore Drive.  Swedenborg was reduced to watching rushing traffic and inhaling its toxic fumes.  Then, in 1976, he disappeared.  Swedenborg, or, more accurately, his bust, was reported stolen, most probably snatched to be sold for scrap.  His likeness was replaced with a generic pyramid. Oh, and then, just for good measure,  in 2009 a runaway car smashed into the granite pedestal.

post theft, with pyramid, from the monument's Facebook Page

In 2006, NewChurchHistory.org began to circulate the story of the sculpture, its origin, life and hard times among Swedenborg supporters,  In 2008, a member of the New Church Society in Stockholm reported that a plaster copy of the bust could be found in the church's attic.  Turns out that this was the model Adolf Jonsson used for the original bronze casting.  (Read Ed Gyllenhall's fascinating report in the July/August 2012 edition of New Church Life, Bronze Bust of  Emannuel Swedenborg Reinstalled in Lincoln Park, Chicago, here (starts on page 391).

The Chicago Park District then began the process of restoring the monument.  Swedish artist Magnus Persson created a new bronze casting of the bust, which was shipped to Chicago in February of this year.  In April, Emanuel Swedenborg, repaired and restored, was again looking out over Lake Shore Drive, a bit too close to guard rail for comfort, no doubt marveling at the evolution in automotive design since his last survey in 1976.

Or maybe he's contemplating his influence on his pupil Daniel Burnham, and on the Plan of Chicago, and the metaphysics of speed, consumerism and sprawl, as he watches the traffic rushing by heedlessly like the "fifteen all-steel coaches" of the limited express of Carl Sandburg's poem, and the joggers running past his back, unseeing, on their distant path.  And he may find himself . . .

. . . behind the wheel of a large automobile
. . . this is not my beautiful house
. . . where does that highway lead to?
. . . how do I work this?
. . . my God, what have I done?
. . . water flowing underground
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was, same as it ever was, same as it ever was . . .

Read our previous post, Borg, Borg, Borg! Swedenborgian Revelation and Dan Burnham