Chicago Streetscene - Michigan Avenue, September 15, 2006 (and a bonus quiz)

Bonus question: Where am I? Answer will be posted on Friday.

The Unexplored Power of Architecture in Film

Here's a tardy follow-up to a heads-up from AIA Chicago's Joan Pomaranc to Turner Classic Movie's festival Architecture in Film, which is running 20 different movies tieing into an architectural theme, each Wednesday evening in October.

If this is the first you've heard about this, you've already missed The Fountainhead, The Towering Inferno, and Naked City, one of the first Hollywood films to be shot entirely on location, providing in the process an incredibly rich portrait of 1948 New York City. This Wednesday's offerings, under the title of Home, Sweet Home, range from The Magnificent Ambersons to Roger Corman's House of Usher. Next Wednesday's theme is Reconstructing History, and the pictures include The Alamo, and Fall of the Roman Empire.

This is a topic I think deserves a lot of attention, which will have to come back to later when I have more time, but here's a couple of initial thoughts.

1. Film as a preservation medium. Films can provide extraordinary documentation of lost urban landscapes. To me, the heart-stopping moment in The Seven Year Itch is not the iconic shot of Marilyn Monroe's skirt billowing up from the gust from a subway grating, but the glimpse in an early scene - in full color - of the concourse of the lamentably vanished Penn Station.
2. Film can explore the three dimensional aspects of architecture much more vividly than static - and often deceptively idealized - commercial still photography.
3. The combination of moving images and sound can give a real sense of a physical space. Think of the convention scene in Citizen Kane, a highly artificial set where the actual hall is never portrayed but the sense of it is made palpable through the imaginative use of sound.
4. Film is an incredibly powerful medium for expressing the psychology of space. No one knew this better than Alfred Hitchcock and the brilliant art directors and set designers who were his collaborators. In Vertigo, the film inhabits San Francisco and its architecture in a way that gives the city a highly specific character that both reflects and informs the psychology of the film. The individual rooms - Scottie's bachelor apartment, Elster's men's club, the passion-red walls of Ernies, the small hotel room, bathed in green light that becomes the orgone box for the refabrication of Scottie's primal desires, and, most especially, that extraordinary, almost surreal, dark room at the top of the bell tower, reverberating with passion and fear, guilt and retribution, death and cold triumph all in little more than a minute of film. Piranesi couldn't have done it any better.

Time Change on tonight's Grant Park Advisory session on proposed Chicago Children's Museum

We've just gotten word that there's been a time change on tonight's Grant Park Advisory Council meeting on the proposed move of the Chicago Children's Museum to just east of Millennium Park. The new time is 6:00 P.M., at Daley Bicentennial Plaza - 337 E. Randolph just east of Columbus Drive and directly south of the Blue Cross/Blue Shield building. The Council's Bob O'Neill notes that October 16th marks the 106th anniversary of A. Montgomery Ward's first filing to keep Chicago's lakefront "Forever, Open, Clear and Free." Details for tonight's event here.

Chicago Tribune - World's Most Boring Newspaper?

If you ever wonder why newspapers are dying, consider this. Chicago is a city which votes overwhelmingly Democratic, but where both dailies hew hard right editorially. (The Tribune has the risible distinction of NEVER endorsing anyone but a Republican for President in its century-plus history.)

I always knew that conservatism was a primary Trib tenant, but until today, I never realized that also being deathly boring was not a failing, but a matter of editorial principal.

In an endless bit of naval-gazing that gets funnier every time I read it, Public Editor (i.e., newspaper ombudsman - and isn't that a concept that's had all value wrung out of it) Timothy J. McNulty practically falls on his knees apologizing to what the paper apparently considers its primary readership - the super-rich.

What caused this orgy of self-flagellation? An October 8th Sunday Magazine issue on mega-mansions rising on Orchard Street in Chicago's Lincoln Park. Although I had my own disagreements with the piece, it was extremely well researched and written by writer Susan Chandler, with a thoughtful commentary from architecture critic Blair Kamin. My own take was that is was, in anything, too serious. What makes the subject interesting to us, after all, is our fascination with foibles of the rich, a factor that the Trib's graphic staffs captured a lot more honestly than the actual stories, with a tabloid-styled cover that screamed, "Attack of the Giant Houses!"

But fear not, delicate, trembling readers of exceptional wealth. Your frail sensibilities have found their protector. McNulty has come to save you - and us. There will be no more "holding the subjects . . . up to ridicule", no "innuendo", no "reverse snobbery", "class superiority." No more Kamin's fueling the fire, or using a psychiatrist to analyze the obsession for bigness, no more covers that look like "horror movie posters." Tsk. Tsk. Tsk. We'll have no more of that.

Lighten up, McNulty. The stories were in the Sunday Magazine, not the front page. Or was the real sin that the articles clashed with all those catnip-for-the-wealthy-ads for the likes of Patek Philippe watches and pricey designer furniture? The Trib has a talent for deadening everything it touches. How did they manage, for example to transform Phil Rosenthal's column, a lively read when he wrote for the Sun-Times, into a dull slog at the Trib?

The Tribune Company is under siege these days, and in its endemic confusion of ponderous self-regard for seriousness, continues to march under the flag of "tastefulness" right towards the grave.

Sure - It may look like fun to drive a car off Marina City

Film director Phil Joanou was in town over the weekend to shoot a million dollar commercial for Allstate Insurance, created by Leo Burnett, that had cars racing at speeds up to 75 MPH along the streets of downtown Chicago, underneath the city's historic "L", and, for the big finish, off the 17th floor of Marina City.

And yes, the sight of a car plunging into the Chicago river sure looked like fun, and yes, it sent the crowd of teen-age girls screaming not once, but twice, as the stunt was repeated, but remember this, all of you who may be tempting to try this at home: in the commercial it may look, as intended, just like the famous scene in Steve McQueen's last film The Hunter, but after the cameras stop rolling, the aftermath looks more like the last shot in Psycho.

The new Carson's: Floor 12 - woodshop, laser cutting and 3-D digital printing, courtesy of the SAIC

We still don't know what will happen to all that space when the Carson Pirie Scott department store vacates its landmark Louis Sullivan Building early next year, but the top floor, just behind the newly restored cornice and ornately columned arcade has already been claimed by the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. On October 10th, the school dedicated it's new Architecture, Interior Architecture & Designed Object department in 31,000 square feet of newly renovated space. Motorola CEO Ed Zander was on hand for the dedication. The Motorola Foundation contributed $100,000 to SAIC to the GFRY Design Studio, honoring the memory it's late Chief Marketing Officer Geoffrey Frost.

The opening took place just as SAIC announced three new graduate design programs: Master of Architecture, Master of Architecture–Emphasis in Interior Architecture, and Master of Design in Designed Objects. The new facility may be aggressively high-tech, but the view out over the city through the prism of Sullivan's organically-inspired ornament provides a valuable counterpoint both of Chicago's rich design history, and of the persistence of an art informed by nature in our own, often relentlessly synthetic world.

Ken Shuttleworth's Crescent, the CSO's St. Bernard, and Lifestyle Malls go Willoughby

Some compelling reading for this weekend:


Crescents and Bleached Galleries. The Financial Times has two interesting pieces in its current weekend edition, In the first, architect Ken Shuttleworth, who split from Foster and Partners to open his own firm, Make, talks about his incredibly handsome Crescent House. In the other, architecture critic Edwin Heathcote talks about some antidotes, including the Great Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern, and London's Whitechapel Gallery, to the generic white cubes that are the anti-climatic reveal to the often spectacular exteriors of the current rash of new museums.

St. Bernard? In this Sunday's edition of the Chicago Sun-Times, critic-at-large Andrew Patner offers up an engaging profile of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's new principal conductor Bernard Haitink, who will be in town this week to conduct highly anticipated performances of the Mahler 3rd symphony. As modest and self-effacing as he is preternaturally talented, Haitink, 77, is at the stage of his long, distinguished career where he's in danger of being canonized. CSO patrons are already indebted to him for agreeing to step in to help fill a leadership vacuum left by the sudden departure of former music director Daniel Barenboim at the end of last season. Haitink shares responsiblities with principal guest conductor emeritus Pierre Boulez. Amazingly, until last year, the two had never met - "not even in an airport queue!" Haitink tells Patner. When they finally got together at Boulez's Lucerne home in September, the Dutch conductor was overwhelmed by the depth of Boulez's knowledge of the CSO. "He knows nearly every member by name! There was also real electricity as we started talking about ideas and programs. My only concern with this partnership is that we have together almost 160 years of age!"

Willoughby Redux? And finally, catching up on my reading, here's a great article from the September 25th Advertising Age (registration required) on Yaromir Steiner, who's working overtime creating those new open-air "lifestyle" type malls like the 90-acre Easton Town Center, outside of Columbus, Ohio, that are positioning themselves as the inevitable successors to traditional enclosed shopping centers with their department store anchors, and the big box retailers floating in a sea of parking. Steiner is planning for these lifestyle malls to eventually incorporate the original, but unrealized vision of the inventor of the modern mall, architect Victor Gruen, which included a substantial residential component. Steiner's is planning space for up to 10,000 residents in his proposed "Glorypark" development in Arlington, Texas, sandwiched between the Texas Rangers Ameriquest Field and the new, under construction stadium for the Dallas Cowboys. The trend ties into the goals of the New Urbanism, but with what, at least in its infancy, with the most empty kind of patische architecture imaginable.

Olympimania!

The City of Chicago, in the midst of a full-court press to become home to the 2016 Summer Olympics, last week revealed the logo for its campaign. It features an abstraction of the city's skyline as the flame atop a green (for Chicago as America's greenest city) and blue torch.

It's pretty lame. The torch looks more like a golf tee, and the skyline making up the flame is so generic it could be anywhere. But then most Olympic logos look like they were designed by committee. The best of those pictured here is probably the one for Beijing, which got to cheat because they have a pictograph writing system that's a lot more inherently visual than the West's drastically more limited set of staid characters.

On this week's Hello, Beautiful, the Sunday arts program on WBEZ-FM (91.5 - 10:00 A.M.), host Edward Lifson will be talking to Ross Wimer, the rising new star at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, the powerhouse architectural firm responsible for the Chicago Olympics master plan. Perhaps there'll also be time to talk about the internal changes at SOM which have seen long-time design partner Adrian Smith leave to set up his own firm with a still undetermined number of co-exiles.

Then on Monday, October 23rd, the Chicago Architectural Foundation is sponsoring a special free lunchtime lecture at 12:15 P.M. where SOM partner Thomas Kerwin will join Patrick Ryan, Executive Chairman of Aon Corporation and Chairman of the Chicago 2016 committee, to discuss how the city's plan for the games "integrate with the city’s downtown area and surrounding neighborhoods"

Also last week, Mayor Richard M. Daley, Frank Kreusi at his side, announced that he is suspending all mayoral elections through a newly scheduled special election in May of 2017. "It is essential," Daley said, "to keep partisan politics from getting in the way of this vital program that will so greatly benefit this city, its citizens and its contractors, as well as provide the rationale for everything I could possibly want during the next 10 ten years, from a new CTA Circle Line, to a privatized $1.5 billion express train system to O'Hare, and a summer 2016 program to kidnap and transport 300,000 downtown residents to undisclosed resorts in Michigan's upper peninsula to minimize congestion during the games." (Just kidding - I hope.)

A Correction and an Apology on Massive Change symposium listing

Our abject apologies to all of you suffered sticker shock when you went to sign up for SEGD Chicago's all-day symposium, Massive Change Global Design, at the Museum of Industry on October 30th. No matter what our monthly Calendar of Architectural Events may have misled you to believe, this is not a free event. You have to pony up anywhere from $200 to $275.00 ($125.00 for students) to hear Bruce Mau, Elva Rubio, and Fred Dust of IDEO. But with a roster like that, what's money? SEG Chicago is recommending you register by October 19th, and you can find instructions, as well as a lot more detail on the day's programs, here. (By the way, am I the only one who finds a page dense with tiny white type against a blood red background not so much edgy design as a painful invitation to eyestrain?)

AIA Chicago seeks to create new LEED certified HQ at Jewelers Building

The Chicago chapter of the American Institute of Architects has announced that it will leave its present headquarters in the Merchandise Mart to move to the 35 East Wacker, usually known as the Jewelers Building that, with its great domed tower and four lower cuppolas, has been a landmark at Wabash and the river since its opening in 1927. The structure is already home to Murphy/Jahn Architects, which has its great conference/dining room in the high ceiling penthouse space just beneath the dome that was reputed to be a 1920's speakeasy.

AIA Chicago is taking over a 5,000 square foot space overlooking the river, from which they'll be able to watch the rising of Trump Tower on the north bank. Earlier this year, a competition for the design of the build-out received responses from 26 teams. The winners are a team of four design professionals, all under 30, collectively named "interface", which includes Daimian Hines and Natalie Johnson (both of HOK Chicago), Daniel West of KEO International Consultants in Abu Dhabi, and Andrew Senderak of Gensler in Chicago. AIA is working to make the renovation LEED certified, and hopes to move into the headquarters this coming January.

A decade after his passing, CSO conductor Sir Georg Solti still on the move

"They should erect a statue to me,” is how Georg Solti testily responded, in that unmistakable voice with its thick Hungarian accent that could rise from a guttural growl to high falsetto in the space of a single sentence . . .

And Chicago did, in 1987. Now the memorial bust has just found a new home. Read all about it and see pictures here.

Ken Yeang adds Friday noonday lecture at IIT

Architect Kenneth Yeang, whose lecture tonight (Wednesday) at the Graham Foundation is waitlisted, has added a noon lecture this coming Friday, October 13th in the lower core of Crown Hall, at 3360 South State on the Illinois Institute of Technology campus. The title is Current Projects.

To quote from the Graham Foundation description of its lecture:

"Kenneth Yeang is an internationally renowned architect specializing in the design of "green" architecture, or ecologically-responsive large buildings and master plans. He has designed more than a dozen high-rise towers and over two hundred projects worldwide, including the 40-story eco-tower Elephant and Castle in London; the 24-story IBM building in Malaysia; the 15-story Mesiniaga Building, also in Malaysia, which received the prestigious Aga Khan Award; and the National Library in Singapore, honored by the government of Singapore with a Green Platinum Prize, the highest award for a green and sustainable building. His most recent book is Ecodesign: A Manual for Ecological Design."

Also this Friday an exhibition, Ken Yeang: Green Design and Planning in Architecture, will open at I space, running through November 11th. I space is located at 230 West Superior, 2nd Floor, Chicago

Mr. Becker regrets . . .

. . . that I'm currently engaged finishing up an article. So, for today, here's a photo of the Goethe memorial against a backdrop of Mies van der Rohe's Commonwealth Apartments, plus a sign I found at the base of the CNA building.

Leslie Robertson, Charles Landry, Curitiba and Modernism Road Show among late additions to October calendar

As if the October calendar of Chicago architectural events weren't already crowded enough (20 items this week alone), here are some crackerjack late additions. On Thursday, Charles Landry, authority on what makes cities work and author of both The Creative City and the soon-to-be-published The Art of City Making, will lecture at the Chicago Architecture Foundation. Next week, legendary engineer Leslie Robertson, principal structural engineer on the twin World Trade Towers, will talk at IIT in anticipation of the upcoming Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat symposium the following week.

On October 26th, Design Evanston will be sponsoring Carmen Vidal-Hallett and Mark Hallett will lecture on Learning from Curitiba, the environmentally progressive Brazilian city.

Finally, a couple of offbeat additions. On the 18th, the Chicago Architectural Club is sponsoring what it calls Open Mic night at I-Space, where past, present and future club members are being encouraged to present and talk about work that is unbuilt, under construction or conceptional. And on Sunday the 28th, Antiques Roadshow stalwarts David Rago and John Sollo come to IIT's Crown Hall to provide appraisals of your modernist furniture, fine and decorative arts.

There a cornucupic logjam of great events this week, including a weekend long symposium on the ocassion of Louis Sullivan's 150 birthday. Free up your schedule, and see details on all of them here.

Chicago's Orchard Street - Urban Menace?

Today's Chicago Tribune Sunday magazine is largely devoted to how the city's wealthy elite are creating mega-mansion mania on a several block stretch of Orchard Street in the city's Lincoln Park area. "There goes the neighborhood," is the Trib's Blair Kamin's take. Why?

What's really going on? Is the Tribune Sunday Magazine, in the words of its editor, "indulging in real estate pornography?" Or should we all lighten up and just enjoy it? Read all about it - and see all the photos - here.

A Preview (Solti Bust Rededicated) and a Reminder (Uptown doc runs on WTTW's Image Union Tonight)

Two Friday items:

Here's a photo previewing a story that will go up, probably later this weekend, on the rededication of the bust of former Chicago Symphony Orchestra music director Georg Solti at a new location in Grant Park just south of Orchestra Hall. We'll have more details on the history and on the ceremony, which was attended by Solti's widow, Lady Valerie Solti, as well as by Chicago First Lady Maggie Daley.

Also a reminder that the award-winning documentary Uptown: Portrait of a Palace, which tells the story of Chicago's legendary 4,500 seat movie house, will have its television debut tonight (Friday, October 6th) at 10:30 P.M. on WTTW, Channel 11's Image Union, which will repeat at midnight this Sunday.

Newsbits - Uptown update, plus So Far, but so Close

Two interesting newsbits:

Uptown Theater: The Chicago Sun-Times real estate columnist David Roeder reports today on action taken at last week's Community Development Commission meeting to help rescue Chicago's historic Uptown Theater, the 4,500 seat movie palace that has been closed for a quarter century. The Commission passed a resolution authorizing the city to "forcibly acquire" the property. What would happen after that remains anyone's guess.

So Far, but So Close: Tad Friend in this week's New Yorker confirms what many had long suspected - the Goodman Theater skull long claimed to be that of the insanely great - and greatly insane - Chicago improvisational legend Del Close is not. Apparently, people willing to remove a head from its body are hard to come by in our politically correct age, and so, after his death in 1999, Close - head and all - was cremated instead of honoring his last wish to keep his place in the theater by playing Yorick in Hamlet, among other, similarly corporeally-challenged roles. Tad Friend's tale of longtime collaborator Charna Halpern's quest to find a another cranium to stand in as Close's ceremonial self is less a story about the uncovering of a hoax than of a quirky, loving odyssey that ultimately became a fitting tribute to Close's legacy and spirit.

Chicago Streetscene - Turkish Fest, Daley Plaza, September 16, 2006

Adrian Smith leaving SOM?

WBEZ's Edward Lifson has a new posting on his blog passing on an unconfirmed report that architect Adrian Smith is splitting from Skidmore Owings and Merrill and taking 50 people with him to start up his own firm. Read what Edward has heard here.

UPDATE: This item has been confirmed, with a detailed story in today's Chicago Tribune by its architectural critic Blair Kamin.

Is this the face of Zoë Ryan, newly named curator of design at the Art Institute of Chicago?

It was announced today that Joseph Rosa, curator of architecture and design at the Art Institute of Chicago, has named Zoë Ryan, currently senior curator at New York's Val Alen Institute, as the Neville Bryan Curator of Design at the Art Institute, effective October 31.

"Her exhibitions, writings, and presence in the community - as well as her enthusiasm for good design - have contributed greatly to the further understanding of how aesthetics of design and methods of fabrication have evolved since mid-century," said Rosa in a press release. In addition to curating its exhibitions, Ryan has also been editor of the Val Alen Report, the Institute's quarterly. Ryan organized The Good Life: New Public Spaces For Recreation, a Val Alen exhibition that closed last Sunday exploring "the reinvention of urban public spaces to meet the needs of 21st century recreation." and featuring projects by Ábalos & Herreros, Acconci Studio, Adjaye/Associates, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Weiss/Manfredi, and others, as well as editing the catalogue, distributed by Princeton Architectural Press.

No photograph accompanied the press release, so we rummaged the web for the image you see here, which is of a Zoë Ryan at a recent New York event that may - or may not - be the curator, herself. If you know for sure, let us know.

From Mau to Mendes de Rocha and much more - over 50 events on Chicago's October architectural calendar

October sees an explosion of events on Chicago's architectural calendar, including an all-day symposium with Bruce Mau at the Museum of Science and Industry, a lecture by Pritzker-Prize winning architect Paulos Mendes de Rocha at the Art Institute, where on another date famed photographer Julius Shulman will have a conversation with curator of Architecture and Design Joseph Rosa.

The celebration of Louis Sullivan's 150 birthday culminates with a three-day symposium at the newly reopened and redesigned Chicago History Museum, and later in the month the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat will have its own two-day conference, Thinking Outside the Box – Tapered, Tilted, Twisted Towers that will include an address by Daniel Libeskind. Friends of Downtown will host a session on the future of Wabash Avenue at the Prairie Avenue Bookshop, and there'll be gala benefits, for the Chicago Art Deco Society at the Tavern Club, and AIA Chicago's Design Night at Navy Pier.

Stanley Tigerman speaks with Elizabeth Smith at MCA, and on the 11th there's a scheduling train wreck with Joe Rosa, Jeanne Gang, Ken Yeang, Transsolar's Helmut Meyer and Henry Cisneros at Arquitectos's Annual awards event all competing for your attention at the same hour. Believe it or not, that's just the tip of the iceberg. I could have hyperlinked it all in this posting, but it's midnight and I want to go to bed. Check it all out for yourself here.

Great Weekend reading - Kamin on Classicism and the GSA, Huxtable nails the situation at WTC, and von Rhein blasts CSO on digital cluelessness

Three great pieces you should check out before they disappear into paid archive hell within just a few days:

Blair Kamin on the battle over GSA's new chief architect. On September 6th, the Wall Street Journal ran an article (no longer available online for nonsubscribers) that related how, after the recent retirement of Edward Feiner, classicist architect Thomas Gordon Smith was set to be named as the chief architect for the General Services Administration, which oversees $10 billion of federal construction. Smith is a crawl-back-into-the-womb kind of guy, addicted to buildings that look like Greek Temples and Roman palaces, seemingly right in tune with the Bush administration's mindset of empire. Despite its sure-fire nature to generative controversy, however, I saw that story covered nowhere else until this past Thursday, when the Chicago Tribune's architecture critic Blair Kamin wrote the GSA claims to be "still in the selection process." It's all a bit strange, but Kamin does his best to sort it out.

Ada Louise Huxtable nails the situation at the World Trade Center. The ongoing, tragi-comic sequence of events over reconstructing the World Trade Center has claimed entire forests of newsprint in coverage and comment, but no one gets it as right, and with such concision and conviction, than Huxtable in last Thursday's Wall Street Journal. While most observers have been so relieved to finally have anything of quality announced for the site that they fell over themselves praising three towers just announced to be designed by Norman Foster, Richard Rogers and Fumihiko Maki. Huxtable brings an unclouded eye to looking at these projects. She's heart-breakingly eloquent on the process that brought the initial high idealism over the rebuilding to its knees:

"The balance of commercial and cultural facilities meant to be the basis of the area's rebirth and regeneration is also gone, sabotaged by the supine political response to the escalating demands of those bereaved families whose inconsolable grief required the elimination of the plan's cultural components on the disturbing and specious grounds that the arts and liberties that mark a free society equaled disrespect, or less honor to the dead. They became Ground Zero's censors and de facto designers, eliminating buildings and dictating content to a commission that seemed to have no clue about appropriateness or professional expertise."

Finally, in CSO fiddling away chance to forge digital future, Chicago Tribune music critic John von Rhein exposes the management of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's complete and willful failure to come to grips with the evolving world of digital classical music. It's been years since the London Symphony created what has become its own, incredibly successful music label, to which the San Francisco Symphony has followed suit. The BBC streams its Prom concerts. The New York Philharmonic has put its concerts on ITunes, where they've become runaway bestsellers. The Metropolitan Opera is offering its productions on Sirius Satellite Radio. The Philadelphia Orchestra has begun selling downloads of concerts on its own website, both as MP3's, and, for a slight increment, in higher-quality lossless formats that we audiophiles prefer. (You can even download a recent performance of the Beethoven 5th conducted by the orchestra's music director Christoph Eschenbach for free.)

And the Chicago Symphony? Its concerts have been off the air since 2001, and it hasn't done a commercial CD since 2003. Digital downloads? It's own label? Radio broadcasts? You must be joking. "I don't want to move funding from sponsorship of our concert season to radio, because then I've got to replace the concert sponsors," is what CSO manager Deborah Card tells von Rhein. There's money for a concert whose program includes the overture to Spielberg's 1941, and "The Love Theme from Splash", but none to keep the CSO from becoming marginalized, its music making confined to an increasingly isolated and geriatric audience, even as it fades into a hidden, largely forgotten treasure for the rest of the world.

Ned Cramer - Avenging Angel? Architecture Magazine put to sleep, Architect Magazine born

In 1995, the venerable magazine Progressive Architecture, which for fifty years was the somewhat scrappier alternative to the mainstream Architectural Record, was sold for $1,000,000 by Penton Publishing to VNU, the Global media conglomerate based in the Netherlands whose holdings include Billboard, Adweek, the Hollywood Reporter and AC Nielsen, which promptly shut down P/A and merged its circulation list with Architecture.

Now, as revealed in a late-Friday evening posting on the Archnewsnow newsletter, Architecture magazine is joining P/A in the graveyard. It's been purchased by trade and housing aftermarket publisher Hanley Wood, a $240,000,000 company owned by J.P Morgan Partners, and is being shut down and merged into Architect, a new title whose first issue is due in October.

It's a reversal of circumstances for Architect's Editor-in-Chief Ned Cramer, who held various editorial positions at Architecture beginning in 1997 that saw him rise to Executive Editor four years later. Not long afterward, in September of 2002, he resigned to become curator at the Chicago Architecture Foundation, a post he held until May of this year, when he moved to Washington, D.C. to help engineer Architect's startup.

Although Cramer promises Architect will provide both "information and inspiration", Hanley Wood stakes its shingle on being a business-to-business publisher, which could mean that once again a publication with thoughtful discussion on architecture is being replaced with a nuts-and-bolts trade magazine with little interest in analysis or controversy. It was rumoured that it was just such a progression that led Cramer to leave Architecture.

Will Cramer wind up being window dressing for a magazine that's little more than a catalogue for purchasing agents, or will he be the strong editorial hand that creates a product worthy of the best of its predecessors' legacy? (It's been announced that the PA Awards will continue, with the winners to be announced in the January issue of Architect.)

Or has the growing junkpile of dead magazines already proven that such balances of commerce and idealism are no longer possible? Assuming Architect meets its announced October debut date, we'll soon to be able to judge for ourselves

Chicago Streetscene - Pioneer Plaza, September 26, 2006

Slumming up Marina City

One of Chicago's great architectural icons is underdoing a bit of renovative vandalism as the base of the House of Blues Hotel in Marina City, architect Bertrand Goldberg's pioneering mixed-use development along the Chicago river just north of the Loop, is being smothered in the kind of battleship gray paint usually reserved for back-alley loading docks. Read all about it - and see the photos - here.

Detroit's Lafayette Park at 50 - Mies's greatest triumph?

October 16th marks the 50th anniversary of the groundbreaking for Detroit's Lafayette Park, an 78-acre mixed use development not far from the city's waterfront that has proven an enduring success even as much of the city around it fell into deep distress.

Lafayette Park is the product of a team of four that gravitated around Mies van der Rohe in Chicago. First, there was developer Herbert Greenwald, who also took the risk to build Mies's 860-880 Lake Shore Drive Apartments, arguably the first modernist residential high rises. There was Mies himself and two of his IIT colleagues, the great landscape architect Alfred Caldwell, and Ludwig Hilberseimer, the planner who taught with him at the Bauhaus, and who followed him from Germany to teach at IIT.

Lafayette Park brought together these four men at the peak of their powers. It could be said to the one place where Mies, who had been steeped in socialist theory while in Germany but built his American practice on well-heeled patrons, actually married his art to social conscience. But perhaps the most extraordinary thing about Lafayette Park is the way it turns today's conventional wisdom about planning on its head. The development shears off the basic street grid, and personifies Le Corbusier's concept of the Radiant City, a series of tall skyscrapers set amidst abundant parks largely isolated from through streets. It's a basic matter of faith these days that these are all terrible ideas, but at Lafayette Park, they worked, and have continued to work for half a century.

Via PLANetizen, here's a great article from the Detroit Free Press by its architectural critic John Gallagher that tells the story. What is now called the Mies van der Rohe Residential District is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. There's also a book, Lafayette Park Detroit, edited by Charles Waldheim, who will be speaking this Wednesday, September 27th on landscape urbanism at a Chicago Architectural Club session, which will also include Sprawl author Robert Brueggman, at 6:30 P.M. at the Ispace Gallery.

Oh, and at Lafayette Park, a three bedroom condo can still be had for $135,000.,

Beyond the Usual Campus Suspects

Chicago's college campuses have always been home to some of the city's best architecture.Here's a few gems that frequently get overlooked. (Originally published September 22, 2006, in a far-better edited form in the Chicago Reader under the title, It's All Around You.) Read all about it - and see the photos - here.

Legacy of Fazlur Khan considered at IIT September 27th

The College of Architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology has announced a September 27th evening dedicated to the brilliant structural engineer Fazlur Khan, whose work at Skidmore, Ownings and Merrill with architect Bruce Graham included both the Sears Tower, for decades the world's tallest building, and what is arguably Chicago's most beautiful skyscraper, the John Hancock Center on North Michigan Avenue, a gently tapering, 1,127 foot high shaft whose facade is sculpted by a series of massive x's formed by the structure's cross bracing. Khan, who died in 1982 at the age 52, is generally credited for developed the braced and bundled tube systems of tall building construction.

A 5:30 P.M. reception in the center core of Mies van der Rohe's Crown Hall, at 3360 South State, will include a display of Khan's work, and will be followed at 6:30 at the nearby McCloska auditorium of the schools new campus center by a lecture, Reflections on the Work of Fazlur Kahn, by A.G. Davenport, professor emeritus at the University of Western Ontario. A 7:00 panel discussion will include Mahjoub Elnimeiri, Micheal Hogan, John Zils and Yasmin Khan Byron, Kahn's daughter, author of Engineering Architecture: The Vision of Fazlur R. Khan.

Historic Uptown Theater to be Purchased by City of Chicago?

The eagle eyes of someone at Compass Rose Cultural Crossroads has come across the fact that the just-published agenda for the City of Chicago's monthly Community Development Commission meeting next Tuesday, September 26th includes an item indicating the city may be purchasing the 4,300 seat Uptown Theater, shuttered since 1981, which to date has so far resisted all efforts to save and restore it.

The agenda item reads: "Request authority to acquire the Uptown Theater, a Chicago Landmark, located at 4816 North Broadway Avenue in the Lawrence/Broadway Tax Increment
Financing Redevelopment Project Area."

A TIF (tax increment financing) district diverts all new property tax revenues in a defined geographic area into a special fund used to spur development in that area. In Chicago's Loop, $70,000,000 was kicked in from Central Loop TIF to help fund restoration of the three of Chicago's grandest movie palaces, the Chicago, Palace and Oriental, as well as for building a new home for the Goodman theater behind the preserved facades of the Harris and Selwyn Theaters. The final cost of these projects, however, was several times the TIF contribution.

The cost to restore the massive Uptown, which takes almost all of a full city block, could be $30 to $50 million and up. The building has received minimal maintenance over the past two decades and is in an advanced state of decay. The city could probably pick up the Uptown, which an official city landmark since 1991, for a million or two, simply to secure the building from further harm.

Chicago Streetscene - 11th and Wabash, August 28, 2006

Uptown: Portrait of a Palace to run on WTTW

The documentary Uptown: Portrait of a Palace, which debuted at the Portage Theater earlier this year, is now out on DVD, and will also be aired on Chicago's WTTW, Channel 11 on the season premiere of Image Union on October 6th at 10:30 P.M. The 4,000+ seat Uptown, one of the grandest of Chicago's movie palaces, has been closed since 1981, and continues to deteriorate as advocacy groups such as Friends of the Uptown continue to try to find a way to save it. In the words of the press release, the documentary "explores the history of the Uptown and why the biggest and arguably most elaborate movie theatre in the country has been left vacant for more than twenty-five years. It uses interviews with subjects close to the theatre combined with breathtaking footage from inside the rarely seen venue to ask What is really important in a society fueled by money and private interest?" Is the Uptown a remnant of the long-forgotten past, or is it, as Rapp & Rapp remarked when they built it, a theatre 'not for today, but for all time?'"

The 26-minute DVD of the documentary, pressed in a limited quantity of 500, is available for $10.00, plus $4.00 shipping and handling, from Compass Road Cultural Crossroads.

Emerging Chicago Architecture - Sexton, Ronan, Felsen and Dunn and their buildings - on one time only CAF tour

Here's one you've got to assume will fill up fast. On Saturday, October 7th, beginning at 10:30 A.M., the Chicago Architecture Foundation will be offering a one-time-only bus tour, Emerging Chicago, where three of Chicago's most distinctive new buildings will be discussed - by their architects. Mark Sexton of Krueck & Sexton will discuss the new Spertus Institute on South Michigan, now under construction; John Ronan will provide commentary on his just-opened Comer Youth Center in Grand Crossing, and UrbanLab's Martin Felsen and Sarah Dunn will conduct a tour of their South Side home and studio. And if that's not enough, writer Philip Berger will also be tagging along to provide his own perspective. The tour costs $40.00 for CAF members, $45.00 for non-members, making it not only a great opportunity but an exceptional value. CAF members can reserve tickets by phone; the rest of us can go through Ticketmaster

Massive Change's Bruce Mau to appear with Edward Lifson on WBEZ Sunday

Designer Bruce Mau, in town to launch the Chicago opening of his exhibition, Massive Change, at the Museum of Contemporary Art will be a guest on this Sunday's edition of Edward Lifson's Hello, Beautiful on WBEZ (91.5 FM).

Mau created this almost madly ambitious exhibition, with the students of Institute Without Boundaries, a school he founded at the School of Design at George Brown college in Toronto. In the words of its website, it explores 11 different economies "that address the fundamental role of design in all aspects of human life, from manufacturing and transportation to health and the military. In each area, visitors will encounter the objects, images, ideas and people that are reshaping the role of design in the world." The Chicago run is accompanied by an additional exhibition, Sustainable Architecture in Chicago, that showcases forward looking projects from a diverse group of architects that includes Jeanne Gang, UrbanLabs Martin Felsen and Sarah Dunn, Elva Rubio of Gensler, Adrian Smith and Gordin Gills' of SOM, Doug Farr, Helmut Jahn and Stanley Tigerman. We'll write a lot more on both shows later.

For now, Lifson's interview with Mau promises to offer up an excellent introduction to Massive Change and the ideas behind the exhibition. The broadcast begins at 10:00 A.M. If you miss the original broadcast, a streaming version is put up on the Hello, Beautiful site later in the week.

Sullivaniana

The 150th birthday celebration of all things Louis Sullivan continues today with the opening of an exhibition of letters, drawings, photographs and architectural objects at William Hasbrouck's legendary Prairie Avenue Bookshop at 418 South Wabash, often cited as the world's largest bookshop devoted to architecture. The exhibit is open to the public during the store's regular hours of business: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m, weekdays, and 10 a.m to 4 p.m. on Saturday, and we're told the staff will be happy to discuss the items on display, some of which will be offered for sale when the exhibition closes early next year. (You can also buy pieces of Sullivan's Stock Exchange Building at the newly renamed Macy's on State, but that's a story for later next week.)

On another front, the Charnley-Perksy House Museum is offering two celebrity tours of the landmark Sullivan/Wright designed home. Both are $10.00, and are limited to 30 people, so this Saturday's 1:00 tour with restoration architect John Eifler, who led the 1986 restoration of the building, could already be full (call 312/573.1365 to make reservations), but if you can't get in this coming Saturday, there's another tour on Saturday October 14th, also at 1:00 P.M., with architect John Vinci, whose many restoration projects include overseeing the reinstallation of the trading room from the Chicago Stock Exchange building into its current location at the Art Institute. The museum offers regular, non-celebrity tours of the house as well. Check out all the info here.

Chicago nightscene - September 13, 2006

Thursday's River North Rendezvous to benefit Archeworks.

Tickets are still available for tomorrow's (Thursday, September 13th) 7th Annual River North Rendezvous, a gallery walk with cocktails and food along 12 galleries and home furnishings showrooms that will benefit Archeworks and 11 other institutions including the Anti-Cruelty Society and Gilda's Club Chicago. The event begins at 5:30 P.M. Tickets will be 75.00 at the door, at the Ambiente Collection, 223 West Huron. Get the info here.

The Incredible Rising Blue Cross Blue Shield

Matt Larson of Goettsch Partners, sends me these before and after renderings of the firm's Blue Cross-Blue Shield Building at 300 East Randolph, just north of Millennium Park. As you know, this structure opened as a 32-story tower in 1997, but was designed with the capacity to add height later to meet the expanding space needs. Now, an additional 25 floors and 800,000 square feet are to be added in a $270,000,000 project scheduled to be completed in 2010, increasing the building's population from 4,200 to 8,000 workers. The present, soaring atrium, which rises the full height of the current building, will reportedly be filled in by two new elevator banks that will serve the added floors.

If this were a spec office building, the expansion would probably never have taken place. Occupany levels in the East remain weak - new office expansion is now largely concentrated in the West Loop. Blue Cross-Blue Shield's parent company, Health Care Service Corporation, has been on a roll, however. The corporation, which provides policies in Illinois, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas, has seen its base of policyholders grow from 3 to 11 million over the last decade. Still, according to Crain's Chicago Business, while Blue Cross is the exclusive tenant of the existing building, about half of the new space is set to be leased out to other tenants.

At a final 741 feet above its Randolph Street entrance, the completed building will match up more evenly with both the neighboring 1,136 foot-high Aon Center and the new residential towers rising in the nearby Lakeshore East development. It will become an increasingly prominent part of the backdrop to Millennium Park and the Pritzker Pavilion bandshell. Most importantly, it will provide an even larger billboard for the next time one of Chicago's sports teams are in the midst of a championship battle.

12 years of Archeworks, Learning from North Lawndale among late entries to September architectural calendar

Several intriguing events have been added to Repeat's September architectural calendar. Going head to head on the evening of Wednesday the 20th is Convention Challenged: 12 Years of Archeworks, a reception marking the publication of a new book capturing the history and works of the alternative design school founded in 1993 by Stanley Tigerman and Eva Maddox. At the Chicago Architectural Foundation, there's the opening reception for the exhibition Learning from North Lawndale, which shares its name and content from the Chicago Architectural Club's 2006 Burnham Club Competition, whose winner will be announced at CAF on that evening.

Elsewhere, SEPAC, the political action committee of the Structural Engineers Association of Illinois, will be hosting a cocktail party at the Columbia Yacht club on Thursday, the 21st, Charles Waldheim (Landscape Urbanism) and Robert Bruegmann will be speaking on, respectively, landscape urbanism and waterfront infrastructure at a Chicago Architectural Club event at the iSpace gallery on Wednesday the 27th.

Check out the details on these events and the full September calendar here.

Greening Rooftops seeks papers for April 2007 Conference

We've gotten an email from the folks at Green Roofs for Health Cities, letting us know they're solicitating papers for their Fifth Annual Greening Rooftops for Sustainable Communities Conference, Awards, & Trade Show, to be held in Minneapolis next April 29th to May 1st. The conference's three major themes will be Programs and Policies to Support Green Roof Infrastructure, Green Roof Design and Implementation and Research/Technical Papers on Green Roof Performance. Submissions, which should include a 300 word abstract and 50 word biography, can be made via email to Jennifer LeBlanc or via fax or snail mail. Details can be had here.

The Trib's Blair Kamin takes on architecture after 9-11

The Arts and Entertainment Section of yesterday's Sunday Chicago Tribune is largely devoted to What Price Security? Architecture in an anxious age, a series of features by architecture critic Blair Kamin with photos by E. Jason Wambsgans on the effect of 9-11 on nation's skyscrapers and airports, and on Washington, D.C. (today's edition of the invaluable ArchNewsNow newsletter also contains a great cross section of articles on architecture after 9-11.)

If you can, pick up a print copy of the section. The internet version that you can access here at first gives the impression the Tribune is finally getting the web. It opens up to a slide show of compelling images, leading to a main menu screen that includes a video of Blair Kaminn introducing the series. But Kamin's talking head is the only video in the series, all the photos are in black and white, many of the key graphics are presented as Acrobat files rather than html, and all of the illustrations that amplify the stories are stripped from the web versions of the articles, although there's plenty of room for such incongruous sidebar photo teasers as "best bartender 06' and "They're sizzling: New Chicago clubs and bars." The autopilot design, in this context, is more than a little tasteless.

Getting on to the content, Kamin provides a great analysis of where we find ourselves today. His portrait of a Washington, D.C. locked down from both potential terrorists and its citizens is grim and frightening. He shows how knee-jerk - and wrong - reaction to the tragedy has been by quoting a Crain's Chicago Business article from October, 2001 that pontificated that new skyscrapers would be put on hold for at least a decade. Our cities have been transformed into a landscape of bollards and barriers, conveniently ignoring the fact that Timothy McVeigh didn't have to drive into the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City to bring the structure down - he simply parked his explosives-laden truck across the street. Yet we cling to these things, less because they are effective, than because they look effective.

In talking about the planters around the John Hancock building, and Helmut Jahn's new open designs at O'Hare airport, and Norman Foster's dazzling new Hearst Tower in New York, Kamin shows how security and good design don't have to be mutually exclusive.

"We cannot design a world that makes us 100 percent safe," says Kamin. "Invulnerability is an illusion. We need a vision that is at once tough-minded and humanistic. That means assessing potential threats realistically, not emotionally. And it means designing defenses not just against terrorism, but for cities, which form the human habitat."

Koolhaas's CCTV begins to tower over Beijing

In case you don't subscribe to the indispensible Archinect newsletter, we're passing on one of their current links, to an extraordinary set of photographs from flickr.com, posted by a user who identifies herself as miss min, a student at the Architectual Association School of Architecture in London, of the construction of the Rem Koolhaas designed headquarters for CCTV, the Chinese TV monopoly, in Beijing. Due to be completed for the 2008 Olympics, the 230-meter-high, 400,000 square-meter structured is to be a continuous loop of horizontal and vertical elements. Miss Minn's photoset also includes a number of great shots of Tiananmen Square, as well as of the also-under-construction Herzong and De Meuron Olympic Stadium.

This kid gets around, as every student should. Her flickr pages offers up photo sets of trips to Paris, Athens and other locales, including Mongolia, as well as over a hundred photos beautifully documenting Koolhaas's first major commission, the Maison de Bordeaux.

Chicago Streetscene - 823-25 Blackhawk, September 2, 2006

They don't make them anymore like the tower at 823-825 Blackhawk, shown here undergoing a radical and irreversible alteration. Most recently a paint factory for the True Value hardware co-operative, it was part of an industrial district, hugging the Chicago river just south of North Avenue, that goes back more than a century and includes two abject yet surviving factories designed by Adler and Sullivan. As manufacturing has declined, the neighborhood has been gentrifying. What was once a liquor store patronized by both yuppies and winos is now a jewelry store. North Avenue has become a major commercial strip, with Crate & Barrel, Victoria's Secret, Old Navy, and a new Circuit City, in a transformed four-story loft. Just across the street from the Blackhawk factory, another long-time resident, the brightly-bricked New City YMCA has been sold to cash in on the current real estate boom. It's destined for demolition and redevelopment, just like the TrueServ factory, which is making way for more slick new retail.

Garrison Keillor at John Ronan's Comer Youth Center

Word comes from architect John Ronan that on Friday, September 15th at 7:30 P.M., Garrison Keillor and Friends will be appearing at the recently opened Gary Comer Youth Center, the striking new building he designed for the South Shore Drill Team at 7200 S. Ingleside, at South Chicago Avenue. Keillor's friends will include singer Jearlyn Steele and musician Richard Dworsky, as well as the South Shore Drill Team and Performing Arts Ensemble, itself. Tickets, which are limited, cost only $35.00, and can be reserved by contacting Michelle Priest at mpriest@gcychome.org or 773/358.4100, by this Friday, September 8th. The show, which will support the center, will be taped for broadcast over NPR.

I'm not quite sure how a Drill Team will come off on radio, but for a measly $35.00, you get to not only hear, but actually see the Drill Team in action, plus be entertained by Garrison Keillor, and get to check out Ronan's stunning new building, which combines classic form with rich color to create a instant landmark in the Grand Crossing neighborhood.

September Architectural Calendar goes from 0 to 40 in 25 days

The September calendar of Chicago architectural events comes out of the quiet of summer with a roar, with the city's institutions firing up on all cylinders. The centerpiece is Louis Sullivan at 150, the 6 week celebration of the famed architect's birth, with tours, workshops and lectures. But wait - there's more! Bruce Mau comes to town to talk about Massive Change, his exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Daniel Coffey talks about his latest projects at CAF. At IIT, there's Piet Oudolf on landscape design, Leslie van Duzer on Adolf Loo's Muller Villa, and Carlos Ferrater about his own architecture. Chicago Bauhaus and Beyond leads a tour of Riverwoods. David Woods of the GSA speaks at a Friends of Downtown lunchtime event on what the federal government plans to do with the recently acquired block on the State Street next to the Dirksen Building. All that and, you know, much, much more - check it all out here.

Happy 150th Louis

Sunday, September 3rd, marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of architect Louis Sullivan. The event is being celebrated in Chicago with Louis Sullivan at 150, a six week series of events being co-ordinated by the newly renamed Chicago History Museum. The website includes a full calendar of all the events, which kicks off today with a Sullivan's Autobiography of an Idea Bus Tour, sponsored by the Hyde Park Historical Society. Today's tour is already sold out, but it's scheduled to be repeated three Sundays from now, on September 24th.

A lot of ink stands to be spilled on the Sullivan's architecture, life and legacy. First out of the gate is Chicago Sun-Times architecture critic Kevin Nance, with his take, The Tragic Tale of Louis Sullivan. No doubt I'll weigh in, as well, but for now, here's a photo of one of Sullivan's lesser known surviving Chicago structures, the Ann Halsted row houses of 1884-1885, in the 1800 block of Lincoln Park West.