Saturday & Sunday: Open House Chicago 2013 gives you access to 150 ofChicago's greatest Places and Spaces

Saturday Update: 

photograph: Lynn Becker

11:00 a.m., Saturday, October 19th, Architect John Ronan will join Carl Giegold of Threshold Acoustics at the Poetry Foundation, 61 West Superior, to discuss their design of the foundation's new building.  More special events here.

click images for larger view.  all images courtesy Chicago Architecture Foundation

Put on your running shoes and fill out our dayplan.  Open House Chicago is back for 2013.  This Saturday and Sunday, October 19th and 20th, this annual Chicago Architecture Foundation event gives you rare access to some of the greatest interiors in the city, at 150 locations from Rogers Park to South Shore and Pullman, to Garfield Park and North Lawndale, and all points in between.   The full guide ran in yesterday's Trib.  You can also download it here:

Perkins+Will offices

If you're an architecture buff, you not only get to see all the great places, but many of the places they were created.  Almost a third of the downtown locations are offices of leading Chicago architects, structural engineers and designers, including Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill architecture, ARUP, Gensler, Clayco and Forum Studio, Goettsch Partners, HOK,  Holabird and Root,IA Interior Architects,  Jahn,  JGMA, Nelson, Nagle Hartray Architecture, Perkins+Will, RTKL, SOM, Thorton Tomasetti, VOA Associates, and Wright Heerema Architects. 

St. James Chapel at Archbishop Quigley Center

You also have the chance to get inside many of the city's great places of worship, from Holy Name Cathedral, to Holy Cross Immaculate Heart of Mary, Our Lady of Sorrows, Loop Synagogue, St. James Chapel at the former Quigley Preparatory Seminary, the Mosque Maryam, Fourth Presbyterian, St. Thompas the Apostle, St. John Cantius, Midwest Buddhist Temple St. Paul's in Pilsen, and more, including Burnham and Root's former Immanuel Presbyterian Church, now the Lin Shen Ching Tze Temple.

Ling Shen Ching Tze Temple (photograph:  Lynn Becker)

More?  How about the ornate lobby of the Civic Opera House, the Spertus Institute, the John Vinci/Mies van der Rohe Arts Club, John Ronan's Poetry Foundation, Henry Ives Cobb's Newberry Library, Frank Lloyd Wright's Robie and Emil Bach Houses.  Get inside Helmut Jahn's Campus Chiller Plant, the Brewster Apartments, the Elks National Memorial, Thalia Hall, and the Chelsea Hotel.

University of Chicago, South Campus Chiller Plant

You like a good beverage?  There's City Winery and the Goose Island Beer Company.  Ever wonder what goes on at those big concrete silos at Halsted and the River?  Check out the Prairie Material Concrete Production Facility.

Prairie Material Concrete Production Facility

We could go on, but there's only so much my laundry lists can convey.  To get the full picture - complete with great photographs of all of the 150+ sites - check out the official Open House Chicago website.  While the overall festival runs 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, be sure to check out the sites you really what to see.  Some has special hours.  Others are open only one of the two days.

original Sears Tower

The Life Aquatic of Studio/Gang: WMS Boathouse at Clark Park grand opening Saturday; Beloit College powerhouse in 2016

Ford Calumet Environmental Center, Studio/Gang (click images for larger view)

It's common knowledge that Jeanne Gang is for the birds.  She was a pioneer in thinking about bird strikes and the often lethal effect glass-walled architecture has on migrating species.  Her still-unbuilt design for the Ford Calumet Environmental Center not only deploys a delicate metal mesh to keep birds from crashing into the glass, but draws its inspiration from the kinds of nests turkeys built from materials both “natural and man made.”

Studio/Gang's relationship with fish may be less clear, but there's an unmistakable aquatic twist to much of the firm's recent work.  Their contribution to the Venice Biennale and recent exhibition, City Works: Provocations for Chicago's Urban Future, consisted of a model that put four different watery projects in a continuous terrain.  First Reverse Effect, the firm's proposal with the NRDC to re-reverse the flow of the Chicago River, then the new Lincoln Park Nature Boardwalk, the redesign of Northerly Island, and finally, a new boathouse on the river's north branch.

Saturday, October 19th, marks the official grand opening of what is now called the WMS Boathouse at Clark Park, named for the company, located just across the river, that gave $1 million towards the facilities $9.45 million cost.  ROWtoberfest will open the facility to the public from 8:45 to 2:00 p.m, featuring a 12:30 p.m., ribbon cutting and opportunity to lunch on a piece of the 65-foot-long “Chicago's largest bratwurst.” (It matches the width of a rowing shell)  The boathouse is the new home to the Chicago Rowing Foundation, which promises “the premier rowing center in the city, with year-round training and facilities unmatched in the region . . .  one of the jewels along the Chicago River.”  The boathouse is at 3400 North Rockwell.

WMS Boathouse at Clark Park (under construction)

Studio/Gang has back at the waterfront still again with last week's announcement Wisconsin's Beloit College has chosen the firm to lead the effort to turn Alliant Energy's century-old Blackhawk Generating Station, on the Rock River next to Beloit's campus, into an activity and recreation center for the school.

photo: Trevor Johnson, courtesy Beloit College

 No details on the design have been released, and funding is still to be procured, but the thinking seems to be that the Studio/Gang brand will help in raising the $30 million cost of the project.  The college has defined a three-year-long ‘window’ to negotiate sale of the property from Alliant.  In the press release, Beloit President Scott Bierman stated the project “should be a model—for connecting college to community, campus to river, and our city’s past to its future while honoring the role Alliant Energy and its employees played in powering our state’s growth over a century.  This is a vision Studio Gang is already helping shape and make possible. We are thrilled to see what they can teach us, discover, and do for the college and our region.”  [full press release after the break]

Read More:

Studio/Gang's Clark Park Boathouse: A Century of Urban Transformation flowing down Chicago's River. 

A Closer Look at Studio Gang's Clark Park Boathouse (Curbed Chicago, photographs by Kevin Dickert)

How I Built a Better City by Going Off the Grid

Smash the Birdie - The fatal allure of architectural glass

Reimagining Urban Eden: Studio/Gang and the Nature Boardwalk at Lincoln Park

As Prentice is beaten into the Ground, Three New Towers Sink Their Roots

click images for larger view

The concrete is so clean, you could mistake it for new construction, if it weren't for violent chewing at its edges and the mangled rebar shooting out like raw exposed nerves after a butchered extraction.

The office podium beneath Bertrand Goldberg's Prentice Hospital, which the feckless Commission on Chicago Landmarks declared a landmark only to revoke the designation only minutes later, is being demolished in anticipation of bringing down the iconic cloverleaf concrete towers above it.  Northwestern University is still claiming it will begin construction for a new research lab on the site by 2015.  However, as Blair Kamin mentioned in the Trib, Northwestern also promised a world-class architectural competition for the new design, but out of a world of great architects, managed to wind up with three finalists that are all Chicago firms who just happened to be among the missing from a Who's-Who roster of local and international architects who demanded Northwestern save the Goldberg masterwork.  

As Prentice is beaten into the earth, two new projects have started to burrow their roots.

Just a block to the south, on the site of the former stable that was, for decades,  the CBS studios . . .

. . . Prentice's neighbor, the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, has begun work on The Ability Institute of RIC, a half-billion-dollar, million square-foot+, 27-story tower by HDR and Gensler,  Moving day scheduled for 2017. 

 

 

At State and Pearson, a half-block formerly occupied by a surface parking lot where the Tempo restaurant used to be, along with a series of low-rise buildings that once included an Ace hardware. . .

 . . .  and a five story apartment on the corner . . .

 . . .  is in the early throes of sinking foundations for two structures.

 

 

 

 

At Pearson Street, there'll be a ten-story new home for Loyola's Quinlan School of Business, whose brick-and-glass facades will match that of the current Quinlan School building across the street. 

At Chestnut, a 35-story apartment tower, 845 North State, will rise, with a glass facade.  Both buildings are designed by Solomon Cordwell Buenz.  The apartment tower is scheduled for completion in 2015.

Marathon! (2013)

marathon 2010 - click images for larger view

 Chicago Streets -

. . .  meet 45,000 runners in the 2013 edition of the Bank of America Chicago Marathon . . .

Pics from Marathon 2007 . . .

. . . Marathon 2009 . . .

. . . Marathon 2010 . . .

. . . last year's event . . .

The Run before The Run: Chicago marathoners and joggers share the city on spectacular Saturday morning

click images for larger view

Tomorrow is the annual Bank of America Chicago Marathon, when tens of thousands of avid runners will course through the city streets.

Today, marathoners joined everyday Chicago joggers along and near the lakefront to take advantage of a spectacular, sunny Saturday morning.

 This guy was doing lateral maneuvers across the IBM/AMA/Langham Building plaza