Endgame for One of Chicago's Great Public Places?

The Chicago Daily News Building, Holabird and Root's elegant Art Deco skyscraper from 1929, was the first building constructed over railroad air rights. With its broad graceful plaza, it was the first project not to turn its back on the Chicago River, but to embrace it. Now the Daily News Building is threatened with being cast in the shadows, and its great plaza destroyed, by a new office tower reportedly being considered by billionaire developer Sam Zell. Read all about the building's history, endangered present, and future potential, here.

Hedrich Blessing Interiors at ArchiTech

This Friday marks the opening of Hedrich Blessing Interiors: Architectural Photography of the 1930's: Art Deco interiors photographed by Ken Hedrich at the ArchiTech gallery.

According to the announcement:

Hedrich Blessing was the the choice of the best architects and designers to document their creations. And like their famously cinematic exterior shots of the modern buildings that made them known the world over, HB's interior views often resembled movie sets.

The 1930s was the first full decade of business of the greatest architectural photography firm in America. Chicago's Hedrich Blessing was the firm chosen by the best architects and designers to document their creations. And like their famously cinematic exterior shots of the modern buildings that made them known the world over, HBs interior views often resembled movie sets.

Hollywood not only influenced the high design of the best decorators and interior architects, its lighting and staging were mimicked by the architectural photographers who were instrumental in communicating the look of "Art Deco" to the rest of the world.

Included above is Hedrich's 1930's photo of the ocean liner stage set of a lobby of architect William L. Pereira's Esquire on Oak Street, one of the most elegant movie palaces in Chicago. Usually booked with art films, it probably hosted the biggest crowds in its history when it was single exclusive venue for the first run of the surprise blockbuster Star Wars in 1977. It was still largely intact a decade later when its 1300 seat auditorium was carved up into a shoebox multiplex that was obsolete almost from the moment it opened. Closed since 2006, the Esquire today sits forlornly awaiting its impending demolition, the middle letters of its iconic vertical sign still glowing weakly, like a ghost fading into oblivion.

But I digress. ArchiTech's Hedrich show runs through Saturday, March 8th. ArchiTech is at 730 North Franklin, Suite 200, open Thursdays through Saturdays, noon to five, "or by chance or appointment."

And when exactly did the Times hire the Post's headline writers?

Corpse Wheeled to Check-Cashing Store Leads to 2 Arrests

We're Not in Marlboro Country Anymore: Jonny Greenwood's score for There Will be Blood

This past Sunday's New York Times has a story by Dennis Lim on how composer Carter Burwell deploys quiet, natural sounds, and a Partchian assembly of unconventional instruments to create a largely subliminal "anti-score" (sixteen minutes of music total) to heighten the tension in the Coen brothers' latest opus, No Country for Old Men. It almost makes me want to see the film.

It brings up the old question of the intrusive film score, where every kiss gets a Wagnerian swelling, and every joke an insipidly jaunty cadence to let you know it's time to laugh. Puritan that I am, I used to consider the best film scores to be the ones that were almost invisible, that, like Burwell's, did their work almost subliminally.

And yet, it's not always so. Many of the greatest film scores are deeply intrusive. Think Bernard Hermann's score for Vertigo, with its deliberate crib of Tristan for its story of obsessive love. Think The Godfather. Without Nino Rota's score, the film we've come to know wouldn't exist.

Rota's music is both intrusive and recessive. He often keeps the music at bay at the most dramatic moments. The scene where Michael Corleone assassinates a mob rival in a restaurant is accompanied only by a Burwell-like background of natural sounds, climaxing with the deafening screech of an unseen passing "L" train. It's only after the deed is done and the bodies hit the floor that Rota's score kicks in, at full blast, and not with a cadence of triumph but with a dark sense of doom being set into motion. The score serves as an often ironic commentator. Where traditional gangster movies used aggressive, driving music to hype the violence, Rota's score stands apart, the voice of an outside narrator: sad, mournful, even wistful. In counterpoint to the seductive catharsis of the brutality on screen, Rota's music intimates the consequences - loss, emptiness and longing.

Still another way is that of the remarkable new score by Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood for Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will be Blood. The extended opening sequence of this extraordinary claustrophobic epic of raw ambition in pioneer California is completely without dialogue, wide shots over spare, spiky music that permeates into the audience's psyche the character of the sparse, endless terrain: mysterious and unsettling, with a presence ripe with intimations both divine and demonic.

Among the several striking things about Greenwood's music is that it's accomplished, not with electronics, but almost entirely with strings. There's no brass or woodwinds, and no percussion save for a piano and the thwacking of bows. Greenwood draws on the work of avant garde classical composers of the 20th Century. According to Greenwood's Wikipedia profile, Oliver Messiaen's gigantic ''Turangalila'' Symphony is his "all time favourite piece of music." (Like Messiaen, Hermann in Vertigo, and Maurice Jarre in Lawrence, Greenwood has been drawn to the Ondes Martenot for his score for Blood.) Contemporary composer Arvo Pärt is another influence; his Fratres also shows up in Blood. You can't listen to the "Henry Plainview" track on the soundtrack without thinking of Gyorgy Ligeti's Atmospheres. The only conventional melody comes in a brief spurt of the Brahm's Violin Concerto, in the Anne-Sophie Mutter performance under Karajan, which in the context of the film becomes exultant and unsettling at the same time.

Out of all this, Greenwood creates his own distinctive, expressive and powerful language. There Will Be Blood is the most interesting film score I've heard in some time. It's out on CD, and you can download it on iTunes. Check out the score; check out the picture, one of the year's very best, going into wide release this coming Friday. You can read an extensive interview of Greenwood and Paul Thomas Andersen from Entertainment Week here.

Marina City Curdles; Landmarks Commission Piddles

Nothing says Marina City better than rows of garage doors and bricked up facades.

No?

Well, that's exactly what LaSalle Hotel Properties had in mind for its newest Marina City tenant, Dick's Last Resort. Read about the trashing of architect Bertrand Goldberg's masterpiece, the exchange of letters between the condo association and the developer, and the silence of a Chicago Landmarks Commission that seems more comfortable making lists of nice neighborhood firehouses than protecting the iconic buildings that have made Chicago architecture known and admired throughout the world here.

Goldberger, Future City Regional, additions to January calendar

Two late additions to the January calendar of architectural events:

(Sunday, January 27th) Paul Goldberger on Contemporary Jewish Architecture
4:00 - 5:30 P.M., Spertus Museum, 610 South Michigan, $30.00, $25.00 for Spertus members, $10.00 for students

A lecture by New Yorker architecture critic Paul Goldberger, recently announced as the museum's first Weil fellow, a fellowship endowed by Spertus trustee Dennis Weil in memory of his mother, Jacqueline Weil Bloch. Information: on-line or call 312/322.1773

(Saturday, January 26th) Future City Regional Competition
8:30 A.M., judging begins, 3:00 awards ceremony, University of Illinois Chicago, URIC Student Center West, 828 South Wolcott

It's probably not too late to volunteer for this years competition, held inconjunction with National Engineers Week, Chicago engineering societies will be hosting a student design competition for area schools. The contest will require 7th, 8th grade students with the assistance of an engineer mentor, to design a future city with the aid of the award winning computer game, SimCity 3000 TM from Maxis. Participants will also write an essay on “Keeping Our City Infrastructure Healthy: Using Nanotechnology to Monitor City Structures and Systems.”

The competition will includeteams from 25 Chicago area schools. Dozens of Chicago area engineers (and architects) will review the Future City Models and listen to presentations as students present their Vision of the Future. Besides the models, students will be graded on their posters and essay. Awards will include“Most Livable City” offered by the Chicago Chapter of AIA, “The Most Innovative Structures” given by the Structural Engineers of Illinois, “The Best High-Rise Building” by the Chicago Committee on High-Rise Buildings, and several awards from the American Society of Civil Engineers, including “Best Transportation System”, “Best Future City” and “Best Planned Zoning”. The Society for Marketing Professional Services will present an award the “Best Future City Promotion”.

Team members from the winning school will advance to the final judging in Washington, DC. during National Engineers Week, February 17-23, 2008. The winner of the national competition will receive a week's trip to Space Camp. Top teams from the Regional Competition will be honored at the Annual Chicagoland Engineers Benefit, February 22, 2008.

Information: on-line or call Don Wittmer at 312/930.9119 for info or to volunteer.

The Architecture of Abandonment

The Victorians found ruins romantic, and so fell in love with them, that for their country estates, when they didn't exist, they would simply build some.

Those Victorians would probably risk heart failure if they confronted our own contemporary kind of ruins, the subject of an intriguing website, Abandoned But Not Forgotten, which offers photographs of abandoned buildings and sites that are a long way from classical picturesque. For some reason, there's an abundance of abandoned psychiatric hospitals in the collection, including several pages on the closed Manteno facilities, from which the above photograph, taken at the location in Morgan, Illinois, was taken. Another, snake-pit styled evocation of the mental hospital experience can be seen below.

35 of the 50 United States are represented, along with a host of foreign locales, including this abandoned town in Sanjr Taiwan.
Truth be told most of the photographs are of commonplace decay - empty cabinets, rusted patch panels, broken windows, littered floors - but even these can take on an unsettling power, as in the shot of a room in the plush sounding Elysium apartment complex, completely empty except for a brown carpet, green mattress, and a busted pink umbrella. An encyclopedic array of building types is represented, from humble to grandiose: homes, strip malls, big box stores, hotels, office buildings, amusement parks, forts, a counterculture barn, Xanadu, Florida's "home of the future" a future, apparently, that didn't quite pan out, and old railroad stations -in the case of the photo below, the grand vault of the Buffalo Central Terminal.

Bewarned, the web site runs a little funky and is likely to crap out on you for extended periods as you browse, but hang in there: you'll find an addictively fascinating look at the things we leave behind. Check it out here.

"Stunning" Burnham and Root San Francisco Chronicle Building restoration unveiled

"Stunning"is how San Francisco Chronicle architecture critic John King describes the restoration of the building Burnham and Root designed for that newspaper in 1890. This is what it originally looked like, in a historic postcard that appears on the Curbed SF website.

According to King, the four-story clock story, ballyhooed by the paper as "the only bronze one in the United States", lasted only to 1905, when it was set ablaze by skyrockets set off by supporters celebrating the re-election of Mayor Eugene Schmitz, who the Chronicle had opposed, as they paraded past its offices. The next year was even worse. The building survived the Great San Francisco earthquake, but a fire broke out in the top floor, sending the heavy typesetting equipment plunging all the way through to the basement.

In the 1960's, long after the Chronicle moved to a new location in 1924, the old building underwent a disfiguring "modernization" that saw Root's original facades covered over in aluminum and glass. Although I made a point of often visiting Burnham and Root's other San Francisco commission, the 1892 Mills Building, when I lived in the city for a few months in 1982, I can't recall ever even noticing their other treasure, buried beneath all that metal. You can see what that atrocity looked like, and the re-unveiling of Root's original Richardsonian entrance arch, in Curbed/SF's sequence of photos.

Ironically enough, the building is now the Ritz Carlton Club and Residences, fronting for a tower King calls "so uninspired it almost undoes the good work below." Sound familiar? It should, because another Ritz-Carlton Residences is pulling the same trick on Chicago's North Michigan Avenue, where the landmark 1920's Farwell Building is being demolished to provide a staging site for the construction of a new skyscraper for the Ritz-Carlton Residences, after which the flayed skin of the Farwell will be slapped onto a completely new building.

New Archeworks leaders, SEED of Segura, Coudal and Lifson, Lee Bey's Unbuilt Chicago plus 30 more events on January Architectural Calendar

This is the month Stanley Tigerman and Eva Maddox pass Archeworks on to a new generation of leaders. at a January 16th event that will also feature Lee Bey, Sarah Herda, Joe Rosa, Zoe Ryan, Hennie Reynders and Robert Somol (you know, that whole crowd, as Severn Darden used to say). Two days later, there'll be a SEED conference at IIT which will include Jason Fried, Carlos Segura, Jim Coudal and Edward Lifson. Lee Bey will talk, at a Friends of Downtown event, about visionary Chicago projects that never managed to see the light of day, Teng's R. Shankar Nair discusses engineering the new Waterview tower at a SEOAI dinner meeting, urban lofts, elevator innovations, I-Go car sharing, hospitals - Prentice and Children's Memorial, networking and the Center on Halsted. They're all among the 30+ events on the January architectural calendar, and I'm sure there'll be even more once people recover from the holiday sojourn. Get the details on all of January's events here.

New York Times tracks Marion Mahony's Magic, plus: Nance's House of Glass

On New Year's day, the New York Times is publishing Fred A. Bernstein's article Rediscovering a Heroine of Chicago Architecture, an overview of the life and career of architect and draftsperson Marion Mahony, including a slideshow of eight images, on the occasion of the Art Institute's publication on the Internet of Mahony's The Magic of America, which we covered here. Also, you can read our take on Mahony's tragic and exultant story here.

Closer to home, the Sun-Times' Kevin Nance had a great piece in the Sunday edition, Rescuing History, on the David R. Phillips Collection, consisting of 110,000 historic photographic images, 80% on glass negatives. According to Nance, the collection, stretching back to the 1850's, documents Chicago both before and after the Great Fire on 1871, the city's two world's fairs, and the architecture of Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright, among a host of other subjects. Despite promising a "Photo Gallery", the web version of Nance's story offers only a single image. A small sampling of images can be found on the David R. Phillips Collection website.

Controversy is Dead (and the Sun-Times Isn't Feeling Too Well, Itself.)
This past Sunday's Sun-Times also marked the first week after the death of the paper's Controversy section, a short-lived but top-notch weekly compendium of book reviews and extended opinion pieces that fell victim to rapidly deteriorating finances. It was a great idea, well executed, that shouldn't have to had died.

It's self-proclaimed "progressive" editorial page may be mostly a sham, but the Sun-Times has become a real and feisty alternative to Sam Zell's stolid rag at the upscale end of the river. The Sun-Times has better investigative reporting, but, just as importantly, it has personality - Roger Ebert, the combative Mary Mitchell, the sourly funny Neil Steinberg, the amiable but dogged Mark Brown, the saavy and cogent Carol Marin, the sarcastic Zay Smith, Bill Zwecker, Michael Sneed, Stella Foster and many more. The Tribune has John Kass, Blair Kamin, Jon Hilkevitch, Steve Chapman (tragically, no longer Terry Armour, who died suddenly last week), a few others, and a lot of very corporate types whose columns as often as not read like something out of an annual report.

It must be in the air. In the Sun-Times, Phil Rosenthal's column was an engaging read; moved to the Tribune, it's usually something of a slog. I read the Tribune every day. With its overall depth of reporting, it's still the city's paper of record. But I read the Sun-Times every day not just to keep informed, but because it's a compelling read that channels the Chicago spirit.

Now the Tribune Company is selling itself off in pieces to try to keep from drowning in the massive servicing costs for it $11 billion of debt, while the Sun-Times cuts and cuts just to keeps it head above water. In a city the size of Chicago, you'd think there would be room for both these publications, but the way things are going, can either survive?

Gensler Jilts Bruce and Walter; Shacks Up With Louis

In a story that I somehow missed, Crain's Chicago Business's Eddie Raeb reported on December 19th that Gensler is moving out of its space in SOM's Inland Steel Building for new digs in renamed Sullivan center, the building Louis Sullivan designed for the Carson Pirie Scott department store. Following that century-old institution's closing over a year ago, Joseph Freed and Associates is in the middle of converting the structure primarily to office space, with retail surviving only on the lower floors.

Since it was opened ten years ago, Gensler's Chicago office has grown to 225 employees, spread out over four floors in their current Inland Steel location. The move to Carson's Sullivan Center will allow Gensler to occupy 50,000 square feet on just one floor, the third, right above the storefronts framed by the largest instance of Sullivan's exuberant foliate ornament, currently behind plywood as it undergoes a multi-million dollar restoration. According to Crain's, Gensler plans to move in July.

Previously, in October of 2006, the School of the Art Institute's Architecture, Interior Architecture and Design Object Department moved into 31,000 square feet of newly renovated space on Carson's Sullivan Center's top floor, behind the columned arcade gloriously restored by Harboe Architects. Will more of Chicago's architecture and design entities be lured into doing the Louis shuffle?

Copyright Reform Egyptian Style: Life of the Author + 4,500 years

Via Slashdot comes this story from the BBC on how Egypt will now claim copyright over the Pyramids and Great Sphinx. Zahi Hawass, the Jack Valenti of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, who last year strong-armed Exelon Corporation CEO John Rowe to fork over a 2,600 year old sarcophagus he had purchased legimately eight years before, now plans to shake down anyone making copies of museum pieces or "ancient monuments such as the pyramids."

While the cause is a good one - raising funds to preserve Egypt's ancient historical treasures - the effort can only backfire. Hawass, who has been presented as dedicated scholar, is increasingly taking on the appearance of a bureaucratic buffon. The fact that, according to the report, he blithely told the BBC that the law, expected to be passed by the Egyptian parliament, "would apply in all countries," indicates that he's become delusional, as if legislation passed in a foreign country would somehow be binding on citizens residing in another sovereign nation. Tell that to the likes of Tom Tancredo and see how far you get.

Copyright, designed to make sure authors get paid for their creative works, is now being subverted not just to provide giant corporations an in perpetua cash flow, but as a juice racket scamming off the works of artists five millennia dead.

Just another step in debasing the once sound principle of intellectual property into a lawyers' strategem for boundless greed. For laws to be obeyed, they require some small semblance of the reasonable. Once they descend into pure farce - think Prohibition - they sink into impotence, engendering only evasion and defiance.

CD-killer Chung's Dimitri 5 to be CSO's first "Download-only" release

While Amazon's Kindel reader doesn't threaten to eliminate the printed book anytime soon, the march of technology may move much quicker in the music sector. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra announced last week that it will be releasing a recording of Myung-Whun Chung's Shostakovich Fifth, which he conducted with the orchestra just this past September. But you won't be able to buy it on CD, LP, or 8-track. It will only be available for online download, exclusive to iTunes beginning January 8th, then breaking into wide release through "additional digital music services" on March 11th. The tariff is $7.99. The recording is through the CSO's in-house Resound Label, whose previous issues include CSO performances, conducted by Bernard Haitink, of the Mahler 3rd and Bruckner 7. Both of those are available not only through the Ted Stevens Pipes, but on hard copy, as well.

Not to be outdone, Polygram's Decca label will sell you a recording of the 2008 Vienna Philharmonic New Year's concert, conductor Georges Prêtre, despite the fact that not a single note has yet been played. For $11.99, you can pre-order on iTunes and download on January 4th. Troglodytes still clinging to their CD players will have to wait until January 14th. All the tickets for the concert are long gone, but if you're thinking ahead, beginning January 2nd, you can go to the Vienna Philharmonic's web site to register for the lottery through which tickets for 2009 will be distributed. Don't dally, however, registration closes January 23rd. Tickets run a mere 680 Euros (almost $1K for you or me) down to 30 Euros for a seat in the sink of the backstage plumbing closet.

On a side note, BBC3 is re-running a number of this past season's Prom concerts, closing on January 4th at 1:00 P.M., Chicago time, with Daniel Barenboim conducting the Vienna Phil in Schubert 5 and Bruckner 4. The complete list of the remaining broadcasts can be found here, and BBC3's internet stream here.

The Great 2008 Opera Bubble?

Daniel J. Wakin reports in Tuesday's New York Times that the San Francisco Opera is planning to join the Met in transmitting six operas from its current season including La Rondine, Don Giovanni (which I just heard this past week, audio-only, on Vox), Samson and Delilah, The Magic Flute, Madama Butterfly, and Phillip Glass's new opera Appomattox, with a book by Christopher Hampton, which had its world premiere at the SFO in October.

Unlike the Met broadcasts, which are live, the SFO's will be recorded, in 2K digital projection with 5.1 surround sound. The SFO's press release disses the Met for using projectors designed for those annoying ads that run before the movie, versus it's own high-def DLP projectors from Texas Instruments. To get the series going, SFO negotiated a deal wherein net income after expenses and a 20% distribution fee cut to SFO is to split 50/50 between the company and organized musicians and stagehands, scenic designers, and the conductor. The SFO is partnering with The Bigger Picture, Inc., a digital distributor of content to theaters, whose link to the opera series on its website falls into a "Directory Listing Denied" error page. The Times reports that the series will show on 200 screens, versus 600 now showing the Met broadcasts. The SFO will be repeating each opera four times, however.

On still another front, La Scala Milan is working through Emerging Pictures to present a number of its recent productions in American Theaters. It began in December with the Zeffirelli Aida, conducted by Riccardo Chailly, followed by the Barenboim Tristan und Isolde in January, an Angela Gheorghiu/Ramón Vargas Traviata conducted by Lorin Maazel In February, with Maria Stuarda, Forza, and Il Trittico to follow in subsequent months. You can find a description of the broadcasts here, and a list of participating theaters here. Pickings in the Chicago area are sparse, with no announced venues in the city proper. Crystal Lake's Raue Center was the only one listed for the December 8th Aida showing. The other outlets, the Lake Theater in Oak Park, Rosemont 18 in, you know, Rosemont, and Classic Cinemas Charleston 18 in St. Charles still, strangely enough, list the Aida as TBA and offer no further information on future productions. (You can, however, purchase advance tickets for Hannah Montana in 3D.)

Christmas in Chicago 2007

It's time for this year's photo essay on Chicago gussying itself up for the holidays. See all the pictures of old friends and new here. Warning: includes some arboreal nudity.

Downside of Sidewalk TV News Studio Revealed

And, no, it's not Vincent Falk's day-glow wardrobe or a spectator giving the finger just as the cameras turns on the onlookers waving from the other side of the glass.

Minutes into Sunday's 10 P.M. newscast, viewers heard a loud crash. A startled look crossed anchor Ravi Baichwal's face as a silver mini-van crashed into the ABC7 Chicago studio on State Street, smashing a large plate glass window and leaving it in a precipitous incline into the space. In what bystanders described as a deliberate act by the van's driver after the driver was asked to move the vehicle, the crash occurred less than thirty feet from the desk from which Baichwal was broadcasting, in an area of the set used for studio-based sit-down interviews, thankfully unoccupied. The newscast continued, as a headline describing the incident soon began scrolling across the studio's animated ticker, just above the van and smashed window it was describing.

Dark City

The long night approaches.

The sun, six hours stolen from peak summer flush, crouches low in the sky, buried alive beneath the skyscrapers. Birds chirp their anxiety from bare, snowdripped branches. An urban brew of filth-informed slush mires streets and sidewalks. We go to our jobs in darkness, return home in darkness, while in workday hours, the eviscerated rays scarcely penetrate the panes of glass sweating cold into dry, overheated rooms.

Winter solstice, Natalis Invicti, day of the new sun's birth, become, under a later Julius, the next the first, birth date of the son of God, harbinger of personal salvation.

Lights array to refute the darkness. Forced festivals hunger for the satisfactions of ancient rituals.

Winter's discontent will linger, but from this day, the darkest rotation is past for another year. Each day a little longer, light begins to insinuate its coming triumph. Unease like ice slides beneath our footing, but we celebrate. We plan. We hope.

Tristan Nuggets and Isolettes

If you didn't happen to be in Italy for the evening-after broadcast of the Daniel Barenboim Tristan and Isolde at La Scala in Milan, here's Waltraud Meier's stellar Liebestod, to give you an idea of what was up.

You have to think that this production is a prime candidate for a future Great Performances installment, but for now, here's a direct link to it on You Tube, where, if you're patient, you should be able to listen to the entire opera by piecing together all of the eight to ten minute fragments. Meier is excellent, Tristan Ian Storey struggles a bit, Lyric alumni Matti Salminen is still hanging in there with a fraying around the edges but powerful King Marke, and Gerd Grochowski's warmly sung Kurwenal markes him as someone to watch . Barenboim gets beautiful playing from his pit band, and sustains the through line supporting the Wagnerian spell so strongly that the conductor can be seen instinctively flinching after applause intrudes on the silence after the opera's final measures.

Pedro E. Guerrero's American Century

Looking for a great last-minute Christmas gift? Check out Pedro E. Guerrero's A Photographer's Journey, which combines his strikingly beautiful and often iconic pictures of the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, Alexander Calder and Louis Nevelson, among others, with a memoir that provides both the stories behind the shots and the poignant saga of the trials and triumphs of his Mexican-American immigrant family. It's a book that's continued to linger in my mind since I first read it this past spring. You can read about Guerrero's quietly epic story, and see a few of the photographs, here.

Tigerman awarded AIA Topaz Medallion

The Board of The American Institute of Architects (AIA) and the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) today announced the awarding of its 2008 Topaz Medallion for Excellence in Architectural Education to Stanley Tigerman, who has influenced and worked with generations of Chicago architects, as well as the moving spirit, along with co-founder Eva Maddox, behind Archeworks, the city's alternative design school.

The award "honors an individual who has made outstanding contributions to architecture education for at least 10 years, whose teaching has influenced a broad range of students and who has helped shape the minds of those who will shape our environment."

From the AIA release:

In a culture that struggles to grasp a deep or broad understanding of the power and delight of architecture, Tigerman has been a remarkably influential and effective advocate of the profession we love and the work we do,” wrote Jane Weinzapfel, FAIA, principal of Leers Weinzapfel Associates in her nominating letter. “Tigerman is a nonpareil instructor whose impact on the students he has taught formally and informally for so long is magnified many times over by the informed and passionate love of architecture those students, now teachers and practitioners themselves bring to the world.

Previous recipients of the award include Lance Jay Brown (2007), William G. McMinn (2006), Denise Scott Brown in 1996, Henry Cobb in 1995, and Charles Moore in 1989.

The award comes as Tigerman, 77, is preparing to pass on the reins to Archeworks, which he has been running with Eva Maddox since they co-founded the institution in 1993.

Archeworks is sponsoring a January 16th symposium, Passing the Baton: The New Generation of Design Leadership in Chicago, at which the schools new co-directors are scheduled to appear, along with a panel of Chicago architectural illuminati including:

• former Sun-Times architecture critic and Chicago deputy mayor and current Central Area Committee Executive Director Lee Bey
• Sarah Herda, Director of the Graham Foundation
• Hennie Reynders, Chair, Architecture, Interior Architecture and Designed Objects at the School at the Art Institute of Chicago
• Joseph Rosa, John H. Bryan Curator of Architecture and Zoe Ryan, Neville Bryan Curator of Design, both at the Art Institute of Chicago
• Robert Somol, recently named Director, UIC College of Architecture and the Arts.

The panel will be moderated Ned Cramer, formerly curator at the Chicago Architecture Foundation and now Editor-in-Chief of the new Architect Magazine, who in a recent editorial expressed a desire to crawl back into the womb of classicism, which he equates with the teaching of "traditional design."

"Tradition", of course, is what the great orchestra conductor Arturo Toscanini once defined as "the last bad performance." All great architecture draws on the past; most bad architecture, including much of what passes as "traditional design," merely parrots it. The Tigerman-McCurry website talks of tradition, not as a generic slather, but as having its roots in "the Chicago architectural tradition of innovative design, as well as construction."

It should be an interesting evening.

Erector Set on Clark Street

On a site once dominated by the massive, Central Cold Storage warehouse, now long forgotten, 353 North Clark, a 600+foot-high, 46-story skyscraper, rises between Marina City and the terra cotta Thompson Building. Lohan Anderson are the architects, and the building will be the new headquarters both for Mesirow Financial, moving from the Thompson, and the powerhouse law firm of Jenner and Block, abandoning an IBM building falling under Trump's shadow.

Not long ago, the project's crane sections were corralled like pieces from an erector set.

Now they've been stacked and assembled into what itself is a tower, looking deceptively fragile as it rises high into the sky, an ephemeral backbone destined to be demolished and removed once the tower it supports reaches completion in 2009.
At a million.2 square feet, the project is so big that even the construction trailers are double-stacked.

At night, with its earthen ramp, the site looks like a stage set from an Indiana Jones movie.
What a collage of ungainly equipment, raw steel, dense mud, makeshift barriers. weirdly angled supports, tortured rebar - a riot of mismatched, rough pieces - which will all somehow metamorphose into the final slick engine of perfection rendered below.

Figuration in Contemporary Design opens Thursday at Art Institute

Figuration in Contemporary Design, the latest production from the Art Institute of Chicago's Curator of Architecture and Design Joseph Rosa, opens this Thursday, December 13th.

According to the museum, the exhibition, mounted in the usual Gallery 227, seeks to posit a trend away from modernist minimalism:

"Ever since the Austrian architect Adolf Loos declared that ornament was “crime” in 1909, modern architects and designers have heeded his argument. From the clean, industrial lines of the Bauhaus and International style to the wares for sale today in Design Within Reach, figuration—the use of representational elements—in modern design has been pushed to the margins. [Figuration in Contemporary Design] makes the argument, however, that figuration is returning to contemporary design, leading to an inventive and unique aesthetic."

Rosa promises "a dazzling display of the contemporary design arts, focused on the return of representation that engages with long dormant ideas such as romanticism, subjectivity, nature, and anti-intellectualism."

Among the 28 designers represented are Herzog & de Meuron, Zaha Hadid, Greg Lynn, Petra Blaisse, UNStudio, and Joep Verhoeven of the Dutch design firm Demakersvan, whose computer-designed "Lace" industrial fencing. is pictured here. A catalogue accompanying the exhibition will be either 96 or 112 pages long, depending on whether you're reading the AIC's website or email.

The Art Institute is open on Thursdays until 8:00 P.M., and after 5:00 admission is free. Figuration in Contemporary Architecture will have an extremely long run, through June 8, 2008.

Doctor Atomic to debut at Lyric - will Robert Spano keep his shoes on?

While Chicago media has been filled with reports on the upcoming premiere this Friday of John Adams' latest opera, Doctor Atomic, in a Peter Sellars production at Lyric Opera, you still have to hand it Old Europe for its deep engagement with the art form. As reported by the irreverent and indispensable Opera Chic, for "the opening of La Scala's new season, Milan reacts kinda like the USA does for the Superbowl," including Tristan und Isolde inspired confections in bakery windows, and a 23-page supplement in Milan's Corriere Della Sera, Italy's largest daily, with a full calendar for La Scala's season, and the complete(!) libretto for Tristan. You can download the section here. (Beware, its over 30MB).

Opera Chic's offers up her own blow-by-blow account of the six-and-a-half hour premiere. The images here are OC's screen grabs from a complete video rebroadcast of the performance the following evening, to which I must add her obligatory legal disclaimer: "The following shots are pictures taken from a television broadcast, and are not promotional materials of Teatro alla Scala."

OC's report includes everything from the show outside, to teh performance, itself, its intermissions, an ongoing, slightly obsessed speculation over the relentlessly unfurrowed brow of the evening's Isolde, soprano Waltraud Meier, and a soxian (or is it Sachsian?) coverage of the footwear transformations of the evening's conductor, the increasingly cherubic former music director of the CSO, Daniel Barenboim, whom OC praises for his "thorough understanding and embrace of Wagner, washing the audience in the most gorgeous strains of orchestral brilliance." (Act I: shoes discovered to be badly worn. Act II, Scene 1: replacement with borrowed shoes. Act II, Scene 2 shoes too tight, conductor leads Wagner's lovers to their doom in his stocking feet. As with life, itself, apparently the first rule of conducting Wagner is wear comfortable shoes.)

Such pragmatism would no doubt find a warm reception here, the town of Shoeless Joe Jackson, but I'm still betting Doctor Atomic's conductor, Robert Spano, will most likely remain shod throughout the evening. The opera, first produced in San Francisco, "takes place in New Mexico’s desolate mesas in the hours before the test detonation of the world’s first atomic bomb near Alamogordo at 5:29 a.m., July 16, 1945", and centers on the brilliant, troubled head of the project, legendary scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer.

“Doctor Atomic," says composer John Adams, "has at its core the hottest of all mythic images that Americans have – the atomic bomb. The bomb contains a host of signals: scientific understanding and achievement, political and military power, global responsibility, and the potential to forever destroy the planet."

In his earlier enfant terrible days, Atomic director Peter Sellars mounted a notorious 1988 Lyric Opera production of Wagner's Tannhauser, which placed the action within the recent fall of televangelist Jimmy Swaggert. The omnipotently wise New York Times decreed it a production that "quickly palls." Not for me. While I may have gone to the opera (don't we all?) for the nude dancers, in the Venusburg scene, I found Sellar's conception, despite it's often jokey flipness, increasingly powerful, and his setting of the final scene of Tannhauser's redemption in an airport waiting lounge, those hermetic contemporary spaces mingling alienation, rootlessness and hope, not only brilliantly apt, but profoundly moving.

Doctor Atomic's local tie-in is that while the first bomb was tested in New Mexico, it was at the University of Chicago, three years earlier, under the stands of abandoned Stagg Field, that a team led by the great physicist Enrico Fermi created the first controlled nuclear reaction, on December 2nd, 1942. Today, the site, behind the new Riccardo Legoretta dorms, is marked by Nuclear Energy, a sculpture by Henry Moore.

Doctor Atomic runs at Lyric Opera for eight performances, through January 19th.

Building Smashes Wrecking Ball: Jarvis Hunt's 1927 Lake Shore Athletic Club Survives

In a signature victory for preservationists and independent 42nd ward alderman Brendan Reilly, both Crain's Chicago Business and the Sun-Times David Roeder are reporting that Northwestern University has struck a deal for Integrated Development Group LLC to acquire the former Lake Shore Athletic Club, a 1927 work of architect Jarvis Hunt.

Back in April, the University had filed for a permit to demolish the building, in order to sell the cleared site, for a reported $40 million, to Fifield Companies, for the construction of a Lucien Lagrange highrise. The proposal drew the opposition of local community groups SOAR (Streeterville Organization of Active Residents) and the Lake Shore Preservation Group. The Athletic Club had been named by Preservation Illinois to its 2007 Ten Most Endangered Historic Places list. Grass-roots group Preservation Chicago made saving the building the focal point of several initiatives, including a June 3rd rally, attended by the newly elected Reilly, where many participants dressed in athletic gear.

That same month, Fifield SVP Alan Schachtman, seeing a threat to developers' accustomed unchallenged status in the city, sent a letter to his compatriots urging them to pressure Reilly not to get in Fifield's way, because it would guarantee the property "will not be redeveloped due to the economic unfeasibility to do so . . . the building would remain empty and unused." Reilly was unmoved, and in July announced his opposition to the demolition.

Preservation Chicago's Michael Moran relates how the group helped turn back another pro-demolition lobbying effort. "After Northwestern sent out an ill-conceived postage-paid postcard directed to Alderman Reilly, we encouraged residents to send this postcard to Alderman Reilly but with a twist. We encouraged residents to scratch out that they supported Northwestern's plan and to write in that they OPPOSED Northwestern's plan. Northwestern unwittingly paid the postage for these anti-demolition postcards!"

Integrated Development Group was formed only last year, and the Lake Shore Athletic Club would appear to be its first major project. With a projected $80 million cost for renovating the property into 150 residences for seniors, plus a purchase price that may not be much less than the $40 mil Fifield was offering, a lot of money would appear to be at stake for such a new company. However, company president Matthew Phillips is a former executive at Hyatt Classic Residences, the lodging behemoth's senior housing arm, so it could happen. David Roeder reports Integrated is expected to close on the property by the end of next January.

Reilly told Crain's that "we have found a way to preserve almost all of the exterior and much of the interior, historic components of the building." Exactly how that will play out is still to be determined. The Lake Shore Athletic Club is not a city landmark, and enjoys none of the protections of designation.

"We are hopeful," said Preservation Chicago's Moran, "that the new proposal will include preservation of as much of the interior spaces as is possible. The beautiful staircases and dining rooms, the elegant lobby, and the great original woodwork are all important. The reuse of the building as a senior residences seems like a great option for this property."

Booth Hansen has been named architects for the renovation.

And I Want to Thank My Agent, Who Made This Building Possible

Great moments in architecture - It was announced yesterday that powerhouse talent agency CAA's latest production will be a building. It's partnering with Rem Koolhaas to add a baby brother to Manhattan's 60-story, elite-feeding One Madison Park. OMA's contribution will be a second tower with 22 floors, 21 units and a "CAA Screening Room, which will deliver a state-of-the-art experience for residents of the tower and CAA guests." Press release here.

It's The Great Chicago Christmas Tree (some assembly required)

New York City's Rockefeller Center takes the east way out. Each year, they just raid Connecticut, find some 84 foot Norwegian Spruce that's been growing since 1947, ignominiously chop it down, strap it onto a 115-foot long trailer, and haul it to midtown Manhattan to serve as that seasons' Christmas tree.

In Chicago, on the other hand, we make things. We've got an 85-foot-high tree, but it's made up of 113 Wisconsin Balsam Firs, laid out like tinker toys awaiting assembly under the watchful gaze of Chicago's Picasso in the Richard J. Daley Center Plaza. See how it's done - including all the pictures - here.

It's a Gaudiful Life - December Architectural Events

"But they built the cathedral, Clarence - I've seen pictures!" "No, George they never finished that cathedral. They haven't finished it to this day. Remember, you were never born. So there was no one to save him from getting run over by that tram."

George ran the back of his hand across his mouth, as he was prone to do in times of great stress. "I just don't understand, Clarence, I just don't . . . wait a second, 1926. That's when I was working for Mr. Gower! I stopped him from writing that bum prescription that would have poisoned that kid. Goshdarnit, you showed me that yourself, Clarence - why, I was just a kid, myself. And a kid in Bedford Falls, don't forget. My folks wouldn't even let me go to Cleveland. Now how exactly was I supposed to be in Barcelona, Spain, halfway around the world, Clarence, just at the right moment to grab that guy's arm and say, Mr., Señor -however the heck you say it; I don't even speak Spanish, for the love of Pete - Mr. Gaudi, there's a big old streetcar coming, and you need to get out of the way before it slices you up like a Salami. I'm getting a little tired, Clarence, listening to you just - - by golly, don't you think I've been responsible for enough horrible things happening in this town just by my crime of not being born? Do I have to take on the whole gothic hyperboloid weight of Sagrida Familia on my shoulders, too?"

"Well, when you put it that way, George . . . never mind."

Devout Catholic though he may have been, I've never really equated the great Catalan architect with Father Christmas, but over the last few years he's become a holiday staple on the December calendar as the Gene Siskel Film Center, for the third year, is showing Woman of the Dunes director Hiroshi Teshigahara's 1985 documentary, Antonio Gaudi, the week before Christmas.

The rest of month is shaping up as a mini book festival, with talks and signings at the Prairie Avenue Bookshop, for a new monograph on Carol Ross Barney's work, Doug Farr's new book on Sustainable Urbanism, and the issue of a reprint of Edward R. Garczynski's 1890 book on Adler & Sullivan's Auditorium Building, Over at CAF, there are lunchtime book signings for Greg Borzo's book The Chicago "L", Eric Bronsky and Neal Samors photobook, Chicago in Transition, David Stone's Classical Chicago Architecture, and Peter Exley's Design for Kids.

Elsewhere, new director Sarah Herda is restarting public programs at the Graham Foundation with a lecture by Bjarke Inges at opening of its new exhibition, The Big CPH Experiment, Seven Architectural Species from the Danish Welfare State, while Randall Mattheis of Valeri Dewalt Train will discussing the firm's striking design for Garmin's Michigan Avenue store at a Friends of Downtown lecture, and Jim Peters of Landmarks Illinois will talk about a new survey of architecturally significant buildings on the North Shore covering 1935 to 1975. Glessner House holds its annual Prairie Avenue holiday festival this coming weekend, and there are parties and benefits galore. Check all of the events on the December calendar here.