Tree Studio rehab honored by Friends of Downtown

Friends of Downtown held their annual Awards Dinner Monday night, recognizing ten specific projects ranging from the new McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum, the McCormick Tribune Bridgehouse and Chicago River Museum, and Joe Valerio's Michigan Avenue store for Garmin. Best new building was Booth/Hansen's 30 West Oak , Best New Public Art Madgalena Abakanowicz's Agora, Best Adapative Reuse: Hartshorne Plunkard's rehab of the Chicago and Northwestern Power Station.

Best Restoration went to Friedman Properties, for their work on the landmark 1894 Lambert Tree studios a $70,000,000 upgrading that saw a century old tradition come to an end. A trust set up by Tree reserved the Studio's for the use of artists, keeping rents low. Over the decades, residents included artists as diverse as author Edgar Rice Burroughs, sculptor John Storrs, whose Ceres gazes down LaSalle Street from the top of the Chicago Board of Trade Building, and actors Burgess Meredith and Peter Falk.

With the rehab, there are no more residents at Lambert Tree. They've been replaced by such upscale retailers as Thomas Moser, Aveda, a couple of antique stores, and Pops for Champagne, transplanted from its long-time home on Sheffield Avenue. What was once artists' studios and apartments in the 1912 annex is now the headquarters for Metropolitan Capital Bank, bankers to the "emerging affluent" with millions of dollars in personal assets. Starving artists no longer need apply.

Tree's own visage can be seen in the building's ornament. A silk-stocking Democrat, he was a friend and supporter of progressive Illinois governor John P. Altgeld, and was among those pleading for clemency for the men convicted, in a highly suspect trial, of inciting the 1886 Haymarket bombing. As a Circuit Court Judge, he did his part in keeping one of Chicago's most enduring traditions alive by presiding over trials that found a number of the city's aldermen guilty of corruption. An unsuccessful candidate for both the U.S. House and Senate, he served as ambassador to Belgium, and, for a period of only one month, Russia.

Tree and his wife Anna were among Chicago's most prominent patrons of the arts. He made his fortune as a connected attorney. In a period of 18 months ending in 1867, when consumer prices, by one indicator, were less than a tenth of what they are today, his law firm had an income of $28,000. The Tree Studios were built opposite Tree's broad-lawned mansion at 620 North Wabash, replaced in 1912 by the twin onion-domed Medinah Temple, today a Bloomingdale's furniture store.

Art Institute Bertrand Goldberg Catalog completed

The Art Institute of Chicago's Department of Architecture and Design announced last week that the guide to their extensive collection revolving around the work of architect Bertrand Goldberg has now been completed. The archive, acquired through a 2002 gift from the Goldberg family, includes over 30,000 documents - over 270 linear feet of photos, drawings, sketches and the like from across the fifty-five year career of the architect of Marina City, which alone accounts for 279 entries in the catalogue. You can view information about the collection here. There's a bibliography of the speeches given by Goldberg from 1958 on, concluding with a series of four talks, including a lecture titled "Modernism: The Ghost Walks" given at IIT just months before his death in October of 1997 at the age of 84. There's also eight pages of listings of articles on his work.

Perhaps most importantly, for all those who are unlikely to be treking down to the Ryerson Library to ask for the boxes to brought down from the shelf for a quick peek, there's a link to an impressive, still-in-progress website by designer Justin Braem devoted to Goldberg's life and work. Its introduction page includes this quote:

“My message, I think, is much more important either than myself personally, or than the quick identification as the round-building architect. I am talking about the performance of people in a social system, about the performance of people in the city. I have spent a great deal of time not only studying what I have been able to discover, but to demonstrate it. I only wish there were more people who shared with me this interest in the role of architecture in society.”

The website includes a detailed description and copious photographs and illustrations on each of 42 major projects.

The Art Institute is planning a major retrospective of Goldberg's work for 2010. Ironically, by that time, one of his important buildings, Prentice Hospital in Chicago, may well no longer exist. This fall, the hospital, itself, moves to a much larger facility. Northwestern University, which controls the Goldberg property, has yet to announce plans for the stunning building, but if history is any indication, the clout-heavy institution will not be shy about using its muscle to shunt aside any obstacles to a decision to demolish, including a move for landmark designation, which Prentice does not currently have. Neither, astonishingly enough, does Marina City, which continues to undergo a series of mutilations at the hands of a new owner who is converting the House of Blues Hotel, carved out of what was originally the complex's office building - long-time home to Goldberg's practice - into a Hotel Sax.

Arquitectonica coming to Chicago

Crain's Chicago Business is reporting that Florida-based Peebles Corporation has hired Miami's Arquitectonica to design a new $215,000,000, 50-story ultra luxury condo/hotel on the current site of a Walgreens, Subway and Radio Shack at 300 North Michigan. Like Trump Tower, the Chicago Spire, and the Ritz-Carlton Residences, the project is targeted at the city's apparently inexhaustible supply of the super-rich, with prices at $800 to $1,200 per square foot and the most extravagant unit at $10,000,000. I guess you shouldn't count on Subway returning.

Also in this week's Crain's, their annual list of Chicago's largest private companies shows Evanston architect/developer David Hovey's firm Optima as having a very good year, with its revenues nearly tripling to $209 million, but not as good volume-wise as Fifield Companies, currently lobbying to demolish the Lakeshore Athletic Club, which saw revenues jump 89% to $578,000,000. They're at position 52, just ahead of Alter Group at 53.

The Psychological Acoustics of Space - Walter Murch on BLDGBLOG

As reported by John Hill's Archidose, which came in at number four, Eikongraphia has come up with what it calls MoPo 2007, the 25 most popular architecture blogs. This is not to be confused with PoMo (Poor Momentum), the list of the 125,000 least popular architecture blogs, on which ArchitectureChicago Plus lingers in dedicated obscurity.

The MoPo of MoPo's is BLDGBLOG. U of C graduate Geoff Manaugh's superdense (in the best sense of the word) blog on "Architectural Conjecture :: Urban Speculation :: Landscape Futures". The blog, which has also just been named to Time Magazine's 2007 Style and Design 100, is a compendium of Manaugh's obsessions, and it's not surprising that he found a kindred spirit in legendary film and sound editor Walter Murch, with whom he's recently posted an extensive interview.

The bulk of the interview is devoted to Murch's speculation on a connection between the Pantheon in Rome and the theories of Copernicus. Murch quotes 7th century historian Dio Cassus that the very name Pantheon comes not from a reference to the wide array of Gods originally worshipped there, but “because of its vaulted roof, it resembles the heavens.”

Murch goes on, "That powerful image of the central source of sunlight surrounded by a series of concentric circles must have been an overwhelming experience for Copernicus . . . " He cites a drawing by Copernicus, who having lived in Rome was undoubtedly familiar with one of its most famous buildings, of a system with the sun in the center, surrounded by concentric rings of the orbits of the planets. closer together towards the center, wider apart at the fringes. When Murch superimposes the drawing over an image of the interior of the Pantheon's dome by Wolfgang Wackernagel, the rings of the orbits match up to the rings of the dome almost perfectly. There's much more to Murch's arguments - from a sun-worshiping emperor Hadrian to Bode's Law - and it's worth checking out the entire interview.

Just as Murch finds mathematical ratios that are common to both building and the orbits of the planets, he has also deployed mathematics to the art of film editing - at least 14 points of view a minute for a successful action sequence, four for a dialogue sequence, but what struck me most in the entire interview is in his interest in, in his words, "how a place sounds". He talks of watching John Frankenheimer's 1966 film, Seconds, a creepy tale about getting a second chance at life in someone else's much younger body. While most of us remember that film, if at all, for the way cinematographer James Wong Howe's use of a fisheye lense gave the story a closed-in, unsettling feeling, what riveted Murch's attention was how well the film rendered the very individual acoustic of a highly unique space, Grand Central Station.

"There was just a single hand-held shot gliding down the main staircase," recalls Murch, "but accompanied by this…. bwoooaaahmmmm… the sound of that great room in all its wonderful complexity. It hit me very hard, emotionally, even though in retrospect it was quite obvious: the realization that you could join a certain tonality with a certain architectural space to create an emotion in the audience. And, if you wanted to, that you could then manipulate or distort that tonality to create a different sense of the visual space and a different emotion."

Murch relates a story about director Michelangelo Antonioni. "To familiarize himself with the acoustic space of Manhattan (where he had never made a film) he sat in a room 34 stories up in a hotel somewhere on Fifth Avenue, writing down exactly what he heard over a period of three hours from dawn through rush hour. He came up with the most wonderful metaphors for sounds that were mysterious and unfamiliar to him, but which would be run-of-the-mill to a New Yorker."

Unless they happen to be designing an auditorium, the acoustics of architecture is something that few architects seem to cultivate a knowledge of or even have an interest in. The psychology of space is something all but ignored, yet it is often decisive in how people experience a given space. There is a unique sound to the waiting room of Chicago's Union Station that, as much as the monumental scale and sunlight pouring in from skylights, defines what it feels like to be in that space. The concourses of Illinois Center are uncomfortable not only because of the physical aspects of the bad architecture, but because there is an unpleasant deadness is how sound cramps in the low-ceilinged space.

Today's emphasis on green design is now taking architecture beyond traditional modern concepts of building comfort - all cubic feet, all 72 degrees, all the time - and replacing it with a focus on the study of personal comfort. The study of the psychological effects of the acoustics of space, however, remains stuck in a pre-Copernican mode.

Early registration discount for SEAOI Bridge Symposium available through April 19th.

This gives you one more week than we originally reported. Information here.

And Now for Something Completely Different - Architecture via Beuys and Klein

Via Archinect, we came across this link to a 1982 music video of artist Joseph Beuys as vocalist for a band, complete with a trio of backup singers, singing a protest song against Ronald Reagan's arms policies. The sound is more soft California rock than angry protest, but it's still fun seeing the sixty-year-old Beuys singing and swinging the mic above his head near the song's end. Because of Beuys, Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim will always be associated in my mind with the smell of lard, since the first time I visited the museum it was exhibiting a major retrospective of Beuys' work that included two massive chunks of lard in the central atrium that were impressions of an abandoned spur of an unfinished highway tunnel.

And speaking of true originals, the Beuys video is posted on the extraordinary UbuWeb site, an overstuffed attic of a museum of videos, interviews and information on avant-garde artists. Currently featured is Jonas Mekas' video on the last three days of poet Allen Ginsburg. Also new is a video of two of Yves Klein's most extraordinary performance pieces, Anthropométries de l’Epoque bleue, in which three nude models smear themselves with blue paint and make prints of their bodies against white paper, and a sequence on the making of his Fire Paintings, in which another pair of nude models are doused with water and pressed against white paper, which Klein then attacks with a flamethrower. The areas left damp by the models resists the effect of the flames, leaving silhouettes of the women's forms.

In 1961, Klein created an installation in the garden of Mies van der Rohe's Lange House called Fire Wall (Mur de feu) consisting of fifty burners in five rows of ten, and Fire Column (Sculpture de feu), a ten foot high plume of flame. Klein had a concept of architectural space that put a radical spin on Mies' classic less is more. "Space is what is immaterial," he remarked, "and especially unlimited and this is precisely what fully and unfailingly explains and justifies the development of architecture towards the immaterial for the past fifty years!" In Klein's architectural projects, air and fire demarcate roofs and walls, imparting a mystic sense of the infinite.

If you haven't checked out UbuWeb, do it now, but be warned, you may not come out again. There's everything from Apollinaire reading his poem Le Pont Mirabeau, to interviews with Marcel Duchamp, John Cage's Norton lectures, music by Mauricio Kagel, John Lennon's diary, John Ashberry reading his A Blessing in Disguise, Gertrude Stein and Ogden Nash, together again . . I must stop now, I must stop. I must stop.

1924 Lake Shore Athletic Club Being Railroaded to Extinction?

Chicago's preservation bureaucracy appears well on the way to greasing the skids for the demolition of the elegant 1924 Lake Shore Athletic Club, designed by architect Jarvis Hunt. Its classically inspired facade fronts a richly ornamented interior, including a handsome marble staircase, two-story foyer, and carved marble fireplace. See more pictures, and read about the building and the 11th-hour efforts to save it, here.

Kamin on disappearing landmarks, King on citified suburbs - two great reads

Two great reads worth checking out before they vanish into paid archive hell:

The danger of becoming skin deep - Because I've been sitting on my behind since last March's Chicago Landmark Commission vote approving the demolition of the landmark Farwell Building and pasting its saved/recreated facade onto a completely new building on its former site, Chicago Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin has beaten me to the punch in taking on the decimation of the idea of landmark preservation under pressure from wealthy and connected developers. Increasingly, landmark buildings are being sliced and diced, stripped of context and laid out in a sort of architectural taxidermy.

Kamin covers both the Farwell, the facadectomy razing a series of historic, landmarked buildings along Chicago's Jewelers Row in order to create the new 59-story Legacy at Millennium Park, and the sad case of Maxwell Street, whose legendary and unruly open air market was destroyed to advance the gentrification of the area around the University of Illinois Chicago campus. A single block was retained, its historic buildings restored and polished to a level that never existed during their long, useful life, leaving behind a leering corpse, as beautiful, perfect and phony as the Main Street at Disneyland. And - wonders of wonders - the Trib actually includes a web gallery of 14 photos, with several comparing the dead and empty avenue that Maxwell Street has become with the anarchic, explosively alive market that it ostensibly commemorates. Kamin also talks about a case of preservation done right, in Burnham, Root and Atwood's 1890's iconic Reliance Building. Read all about it and see the pictures here.

Instant Urbanism - San Francisco Chronicle architecture critic John King offers up a sterling report on the rise of new suburbs that are less about sprawl and more about emulating traditional center city neighborhoods. "What's emerging," says King, "is a new form of the American Dream -- a new type of landscape where the lines between city and suburb blur in ever more complex ways." He looks at new suburban developments in Denver such as Belmar and Stapleton, the latter built on the site on what was formerly the city's major airport. Alleys replace driveways. Buildings hug the sidewalk. Towers rise. Instant town centers - beautiful downtown Belmar - pop up as if they were pulled out of a box of cracker jack box. Is it a sideshow or the future? Read all about it, hear King talk and see the pictures.

One Correction, one addition for SEAOI events

A correction to the calendar information for the SEAOI event this evening, Tuesday, April 10th. It will be held, NOT at the Cliff Dwellers, but at the Union League Club, with a reception at 5:30 P.M. and program, a lecture by Dr. James M. Fisher, Ph.D., PE, at 6:30 P.M. More info here.

In addition, on April 26th, the SEAOI will be conducting its fourth annual, day-long Bridge Symposium at Magianno's Little Italy, including 15 different presentations, with a keynote by Tensor Engineering's Walter Gatti. More information here.

Myron Goldsmith, Quiet Poet of American Architecture

Some followers of Mies chose to strove to be different, others competed to be the most orthodox. Myron Goldsmith chose simply to be good. Of all the architects who studied with and worked under Mies, Goldsmith may have been the most successful in faithfully absorbing Mies' basic principles and unyielding standards into a body of work that also remains completely individual.

You have only five more days to see an exhibition of Goldsmith's work at the Arts Club of Chicago, 201 East Chestnut Street. It's on display from 11:00 A.M. to 6:00 P.M. daily, through this Friday, April 13th. Read about the exhibition and an appreciation of Goldsmith's career, and see the pictures, here.

WP+D Career Advancement Dinner Monday, Center on Halsted Furniture Shower Party on Tuesday

A late listing to the April calendar:

Chicago Women in Planning an Development will be sponsoring a Career Advancement Event with Steve Frederick, of Frederick Career Services, and Donna Pugh, a partner at Foley & Lardner Monday evening, April 9th, from 6:00 to 9:00 P.M. You have to register by Sunday, April 8th. More info here.

Also a final reminder that on Tuesday, from 6:00 to 9:00 P.M. the Center on Halsted will be holding a Furniture Shower for its new building designed by Gensler. More details here. The on-line Furniture Registry will be open into the summer. Donors will be able to choose the type of furniture meets their fancy, which they can buy for the Center at a wholesale price, provided as the contribution of manufacturers such as Karastan, Knoll, and Vitra, including classics like George Nelson's Ball and Sunburst clocks.

It's official - AIA owns American architecture

Did you know that April 9th through the 14th marks the first Architecture Week in the United States? And did you know Architecture Week is apparently a wholly owned subsidiary of the American Institute of Architects?

It's another cog in the AIA's PR juggernaut marking its 150th anniversary that includes the specious and inane America's Favorite Architecture survey, which has been converted into a barnstorming exhibition that opens at its first location, the AIA's Washington headquarters, on April 11th. On April 13th, there will a rededication ceremony at 111 Broadway in New York, site of the first AIA meeting. The AIA and its PR firm, Imre Communications, also wangled a congratulatory epistle out of the White House. ""Laura and I send our best wishes," its bland four paragraphs concludes.

As a Si monumentum requiris circumspice kind of guy, I'm still pondering whether a National Architecture Week is really a good idea, but I'm pretty sure AIA's proprietary appropriation of the concept, reeking of self-serving press releases and misguided focus groups, isn't. (If you want to see how a local effort can transcend the ham-fisted efforts of the parent, check out 150 Great Places in Illinois.)

And what's Al Gore hiding at the AIA Convention? Your conspiracy theory here.

A couple of weeks ago, Matt Tinder in AIA Media Relations confirmed that former Vice-President Al Gore's address at the AIA Convention in San Antonio will be closed to the press. Tinder stated that he knew nothing about the reasons why other than it was spelled out in the contract.

Exactly when did Al Gore turn into Antonin Scalia? Exactly what is he telling the architects that the rest of us can't be trusted to hear? ("You want the truth?", the former Vice-President was heard to comment, "YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH!") Does it have anything to do with the hostility his appearance has generated among the AIA's more dedicated troglodites?

As a public service, we hereby initiate our own "What's Al Gore Hiding?" forum where we're asking our readers to come up with their best conspiracy theories about the secrecy. The more outlandish the better. We'll even start you off:

WHAT'S AL GORE HIDING?
1. Will admit the whole global warming thing is a scam to maximize his speaking fees.
2. Will warn architects to prepare for global warming causing cities in the American desert to self-combust by 2009.
3. Will unveil a new AIA initiative, based on carbon emissions trading, to create a system for the trading of permits for really bad architecture.
4. Will reveal that Frank Gehry's fondness for titanium and stainless steel is the third largest cause behind the rise in the earth's temperature
5. Will divulge his actual current weight.

OK, now it's up to you. Submit your own theories here.

Dumpster Diving with John Hill

Just in case you missed it, here's a link to great post on John Hill's Archidose site on Herzog & de Meuron's 40 Bond Street for developer Ian Schrager. In his best CSI-NY style, Hill digs into the trash to analyze one of the building's discarded glass sections, and discovers a sophisticating sandblasting that goes from solid at the edges to non-existent in the center, concentrating and minimizing reflected sunlight.

Chicago Streetscenes - Winter stark's chill sun incubates murmer bleed of Spring

The Architecture of Dreams and Waking

Uptown built as if it were going to conquer Chicago, but spent most of the following century battling a hangover. Today, it remains the place where florid ambition and cold reality collide. Read all about it, and see the pictures here.

Mazria, Lautman & Tigerman, Herreros, harbors, greystones, Chicago Modernism, furniture shower and color of light among 50 events on April calendar

April kicks the calendar of Chicago architectural events into high gear. Architect Edward Mazria discusses his Architecture 2030 initiatve to make all buildings carbon neutral. Dirk Lohan talks about his new tower at 353 N. Clark. Jong Suong Kimm and Juan Herreros lecture on their work. There's Annie Pedret discussing her new Archeworks Paper, and Victoria Lautman in conversation with Stanley Tigerman. Carl Smith discusses his book on the 1909 Burnham Plan, and Thomas Payne talks about new architecture in Toronto. The AIA and IES explore the Color of Light, while Bridgette Buckley takes on the effects of winter light on Alvar Aalto's projects in northern Finland. There's a conversation with Mesirow's Richard Stein, and SOM's Roger Frenchette talks about the zero-energy Pearl River Tower in China. And did I mention the Chicago Modernisn Show and Sale, or the furniture shower for the Center on Halsted?

But why try to cover it all in an introduction? These are just a few of the over 50 events on the April calendar. Browse the complete who, what, when and where, here.

When the Ducks Return to the AMA Fountain

Chicago may be developing its own mini-Capistrano at the unlikely location of a fountain next to the AMA Building, designed by Japanese architect Kenzo Tange. Last spring, they showed up in late April; this year, the end of March. You know, that whole Global Warming thing.

CAC Emerging Visions, Mary Soderstrom tonight, Lifson and Samuelson Saturday afternoon

A trifecta of architectural events close out the month March. Thursday, night, March 29th, at the Knoll Showroom in the Merchandise Mart, beginning with a reception at 5:30 P.M., the Chicago Architectural Club will be announcing the winners of its Emerging Visions competition, whose goal is to "to provide a forum for young designers to share their visions, inventions, and ideas. Meanwhile, over at Quimby's books, 1854 West North Avenue at 7:30 P.M., author Mary Soderstrom will be discussing her book, Green City: People, Nature and Urban Places. Soderstrom will make a second appearance at 57th Street Books at 1301 E. 57th Street at 7 P.M. on Friday, March 30th.

Finally, from 2 to 4 P.M. on Saturday, March 31st, WBEZ's Edward Lifson and Chicago's Cultural Historian Tim Samuelson will join forces at Frank Lloyd Wright's Unity Temple in Oak Park for Rock the House, an exploration of "how great buildings are like one-of-a-kind instruments." The event benefits the Unity Temple Restoration Foundation. Tickets are $20.00, or $15.00 for foundation members.

Santiago Explains it all for you

Chicago is now officially in the throes of Spire-mania. Over 500 people packed two separate meetings on Tuesday to see and hear developer Garrett Kelleher and architect Santiago Calatrava present what may actually be moving towards the final design for the Chicago Spire, their 2,000 foot high tower to be built on a derelict peninsula between the Chicago River, Ogden slip, and Lake Michigan.

There'll be a much more to come after we finish transcribing, including a full account of the proposals, prospects and designs for the long-unrealized DuSable Park, just east of the Spire, but for now, read our account on how Calatrava sat down next to an overhead projector, picked up a brush, and began creating watercolors to explain his concepts. ""Just working as I work in my office," Calatrava said, "bringing you into my office, and sitting you across from me and showing you how I would approach a thing like that, such an important thing, (through) a balance of very simple gestures."

Read all about it, and see a sampling of the images to come, here.

A Foggy Day in Chi Town - Ohio Street Beach, March 24, 2007

Nice Dress

The credits for the cover photograph on this Sunday's New York Times Style Spring Travel Magazine include those for the designer of the dress and jewelry, as well as for the model, hair and makeup, but the architect of the Copan building in Sao Paulo that makes the cover so spectacular apparently merits no billing. You probably know already, but just in case you don't and you're wondering, the architect of the 1951 serpentine, 1160 apartment complex is the great Oscar Niemeyer, still practicing as he approaches his 100th birthday this December. (Take that, FLW)

Calatrava and Kelleher unveil latest Spire design Monday - twice

Getting a jump on a long-scheduled Monday, March 26th session of the neighborhood group SOAR (Streeterville Organization of Active Residents) where architect Santiago Calatrava and developer Garrett Kelleher have promised to unveil the long-awaited latest design for their proposed 2,000-foot-high Chicago Spire, the Grant Park Advisory Council and Grant Park Conservancy have just scheduled the same barnstorming pair to appear earlier in the day at a 12:15 P.M. program in the Grainger Ballroom at Symphony Center, 220 South Michigan Avenue. Scheduled to be presented are both the newest Spire design, as well as Calatrava's ideas for the long gestating DuSable Park, just to the east of the spire site on the other side of Lake Shore Drive.

If SOAR's experience is any indication, spectators may pack the Grainger to the point of leaving a perch on one of its Austrian crystal chandeliers as the last refuge for late-comers. SOAR, which, unlike the Grant Park Advisory Council, required pre-registration for what is essentially a community group meeting, had such an enormous response that their event wound up being moved from the Courtyards of Marriott to a large ballroom in the Chicago Marriott Downtown on north Michigan Avenue.

At least for the moment, Chicago seems less crazy about the Olympics than mad for the Spire. Kelleher's past presentations have been amalgams of substance and smoke. How will the ratio play out Monday? All in good time, gentle reader, all in good time.

Finally - AIA Illinois 150 gets the whole "best of" list thing right

After a silly season of "best of" lists that's ranged from the American Institute of Architect's lazy and inane America's Favorite Architecture to the Illinois Bureau of Tourism's beauty contest quest for the Seven Wonders of Illinois, AIA Illinois has finally gotten it right.

With 150 Great Places in Illinois, they've finally come up with a compilation that comes off neither as a joke nor as something a PR intern tossed off between assignments. It's a great combination of usual suspects and unexpected discoveries, and it's all available on an addictive, informative and superbly designed website. Read all about it and see some of the photos here.

Koolhaas in Singapore - Slid, not Stacked

Rem Koolhaas is one busy guy. Hot on the heels of the unveiling on his stacked volumes in a project for Jersey City, here's a rendering of his just revealed design for a 153 meter high skyscraper that will be his first project in Singapore, a city that has been a key target of study in his various writings. According to Building magazine, the towers are raised up off the ground to provide more open space at the base, and are expected to hold 68 apartments. Do you think this is what Murcutt means when he talks of "touching the ground lightly?"

Goose Egg Hunt aims to Cut the Crap at Grant Park

How wonderful it is to have nature close at hand in the often hard city. To see the large flocks of Canadian Geese in Chicago's parks. Except that these geese don't migrate - they've settled in for the long haul, and their populations are exploding. Unfortunately, the two things geese are exceptionally good at are breeding and taking a dump. When General Patton talked of his army racing through Germany "like crap through a goose," he wasn't kidding. According to an article in Chicago Wildlife Magazine, a goose can transform food into waste in just seven minutes. A single bird can produce over a pound of droppings per day.

The geese have resisted various techniques to control them. Growing the grass taller works for a while, but then the geese just eat the grass. Seattle has tried something called "scare eyes"; the geese soon lose their fear. Letting dogs chase them away just moves the geese around, and often exhausts the dog to the point where it feels the need to relieve itself, as well.

The Grant Park Advisory Council and Grant Park Conservancy is trying a different tact. They are looking for volunteers this Saturday, March 24th, to learn how to locate "goose eggs so that the eggs can be depredated, preventing them from hatching." Again according to Chicago Wildlife Magazine, it's all about fool a goose. Under strict state and federal permits, egg shaking or egg addling is allowed for a short time after the eggs are laid. The eggs are then placed back in the nest. The now cruelly deceived goose will "will continue to incubate the eggs until it is too late in the season to lay a new clutch."

The Grant Park Advisory Council says the technique "is endorsed by the Humane Society of the United States ." Do NOT, however, attempt this on your own. "Trained volunteers will help find Canada Geese nests and flag them on supervised workdays and then a wildlife management company will perform the egg depredation. " Training will be offered for volunteers this Saturday, March 24th, from 10:00 A.M. to 12:00 P.M. at the Daley Bicentennial Plaza Field House, 337 E. Randolph St. Call 312-829-8015 for more information.

Adrian Smith, a resident sizes up his new Jazzy SRO, books by the chapter, and the Hunchback of Fenchurch

Good things to listen to and read:

Adrian Smith - we've mentioned this one once before, but here's a great interview of Adrian Smith, the former SOM architect behind the Trump Tower and Zero Energy Tower in China, by Edward Lifson on Hello, Beautiful. Listen to it here.

Stigma-Smashing SRO - On the same day, Catrin Einhorn has another great piece where Helmut Jahn's flashy - and sustainable - new Near North SRO is seen through the eyes of one of its tenants, Thomas Gooch (apologies if I've gotten the spelling wrong.) Be forewarned that you will briefly encounter my voice in the piece, but, thankfully, a lot more of it is given over to Mr. Gooch, whose first reaction is not unlike that of most of us the first time we encountered bare-concrete modernism, "It looks like a warehouse. . . I don't know if they're going to do some more construction in it, or if they're going to leave it like that. " Once he sees his apartment, however, with its private bath, new appliances, and large windows looking out over the skyline, he begins to warm up to the place. "I think it's wonderful," he says, "especially the view. . . . I can get up in the morning on a nice day and see outside, see the Sears Tower." Listen to it here.

Reinventing the Bookstore - Bob Thompson of the Washington Post reports on the Caravan Project, funded by Chicago's MacArthur Foundation, which seeks to create a broader distribution for small-press books by bringing the process into the digital age, which couples printing on demand to increase the selection of bricks-and-mortar retailers and better control inventory, to downloadable audio (using text to speech technology) and digital versions of the books, including the option to download only specific chapters. Read about it here.

The Hunchback of Fenchurch Street - London Times architecture critic Hugh Pearman takes on the burst of mostly clumsy new projects that would crowd and overshadow Norman Foster's affectionately received Gherkin. Where the Gherkin offers elegance, the newer buildings too often offer only bigness and an often graceless eccentricity. Pearman hones in a new tower by Rafael Vinoly that has been dubbed "The Walkie-Talkie" for the way its bulk increases towards the top and leans forward as if stooped by the burden of its height. To me, it's a cross between Salvador Dali and Claes Oldenberg - The Limp Electric Shaver. Pearman doesn't mince words. "I reckon it is a stinker." "The world's best skyscraper cities tell us," he Pearman, "that the ensemble is what matters, not the individual building." It's a lesson that Chicago's hapless "cram it in with a shoehorn" Department of Planning and Development appears uninterested in learning. Read it all here.

Studio/Gang's Aqua Begins to Flow

It's actually happening. Aqua, the rippling 82-story tower designed by Studio/Gang's Jeanne Gang and Mark Schendel is beginning to rise on its site at Columbus and Lake in Magellan Development's massive Lakeshore East complex.

You usually don't see all the things that go into a skyscraper laid out before you like a jigsaw puzzle ready to be assembled, but that was the case this weekend, as crews from McHugh Construction, the contractor of record for the project, were preparing for the sinking of the cassions that will support the tower. See the pictures here.

No, It's not Fire & Brimstone - It's St. Patrick's Day!

Just in case you weren't already hung over enough from Saturday's festivities, we've appended our St. Patrick's page with new photos from along the green river and at Da Bean. See them all here.

A Peeps St. Patrick's Day

Happy St. Patrick's Day from your toxic green marshmallow chickens.

Huxtable - the last word on Moses

Leave it to the Wall Street Journal's venerable architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable to cut through the crap on the three major New York exhibitions seeking to rehabilitate the reputation of superbuilder Robert Moses.

Unlike most of those pining for the rise of a new generation of Moses to solve all our urban problems, Huxtable actually lived through much of Moses' reign. She was among those "who manned the ramparts against his most damaging interventions and were submitted to his most creative vilifications . . . " Interventions such as a Lower Manhattan Expressway that would have wiped out SoHo and maimed Chinatown, Little Italy and West Village. For Moses, it was his way and the highway. When Huxtable writes about Moses sending bulldozers to Central Park at midnight to tear up a playground in order to create parking for Tavern on the Green, you can't help but be reminded of Mayor Daley and Frank Kreusi's similar illegal dead-of-the-night blitzkreig at Meigs Field. Yeah, right, that's something we just don't have enough of today.

Huxtable looks askance at the exhibition narratives' "safely worded labels that neutralize outrage. The presentation achieves its purpose of comprehensive objectivity, but its very evenhandedness is disturbing. It is almost too cool; there was nothing evenhanded about Moses."

"With all due credit to Moses' achievements," she concludes, "he is not the man to emulate . . . he was the force majeure responsible for much of the beauty and efficiency of the city we know now. Fortunately, he was stopped before he tore it apart."

I despair that I'll ever write as well, or as cogently, as Huxtable, but I'm consoled by the fact that I'm in good company - pretty much everyone else scribbling about architecture today. Check out this must-read here.