Ellingsen tonight, cans and bricks this weekend, zoning later

Department of Goings-On - update edition:

Eric Ellingsen - tonight, Thursday, June 18th 6:00 p.m., at Archeworks, 625 N. Kingsbury at Ontario. A gallery talk on Ellingsen's exhibition SEA: Seeing Eye Architecture, a species of Architecture Service Animals, at the Extension Gallery at Archeworks through July 10th. SOS is described as "structured on the illogical leaps of open door collaboration, cultivated difference, the responsibility of risk, and the joy of the embodied imagination playing in space and matter."

Brickworld -
this weekend, Thursday through Sunday, a conference for adult Lego-maniacs, ($50.00 registration) with public days Saturday and Sunday, tickets sold at the door only $10.00 adults, $7.00 seniors, kids under 10 - kids under 3 free. Website site here. A great compendium of the amazing Lego structures that were seen at least year's event (it may be the only place you'll ever seen a completed Calatrava Spire) in photo's - including the one shown here - by the tireless Bob Johnson here.

Canstruction -
the annual event benefiting the Great Chicago Food Depository at the Apparel Center, 350 Mart Center Drive (or Franklin, just north of the river) in which sculptures are made out of 86,000 cans of food, to be donated to the Depository at the end of the show. A jury that included Alpana Singh, Jimmy Bannos, Craig Vespa and Zoka Zola this year awarded Juror's Favorite to Nagle Hartray's Can-tastic Voyage. You can check it out through June 28th, suggested donation at least one can of food. Ths photo here is also (inevitably?) from Bob Johnson, and I'm told on reliable authority that it's a dam.

History of Chicago's Zoning Code and its Current Implementation - Mary Jo Graf of DeStefano + Partners will moderate a panel including 42nd ward alderman Brendan Reilly and the man who, literally, (co)wrote the book on Chicago zoning, Prof. Joseph P. Schwieterman. It's being put on at the Chicago Yacht Club June 24th - $50.00 members, $60.00 members - and if you don't make yourself a royal pain, they'll let you stay and watch the Wednesday fireworks show afterwards. Info here.

Grainy video from last Thursday's Lighting Crown Hall

Last Thursday, June 11th, artist Jim Tichy and students from IIT, SAIC, Bauhaus-Universitat Weimar, and Bezalel Academy Tel Aviv presented Lighting Crown Hall, turning it into "a massive light box, sending video projections and elaborate time-base lighting sequences through the glass windows." The project was a collaborative venture with the School of the Art Institute and the Mies van der Rohe Society, and the culmination of Bauhaus Labs' three week summer session "exploring the ideas of visionary artist and educator Laszlo Moholy-Nagy."

Zaha and Ben update - 7:30 a.m., June 16th

Our thanks again to Bob Johnson for the photo.

SAIC Student Show: Making Modern - opening reception and panel with Gordon Gill, Kelly Costello today

Over the weekend I had the opportunity to take in a great show featuring the thesis work of AIADO graduate students of the SAIC (Architecture, Interior Architecture, and Designed Objects of the School of the Art Institute to you). The work is enriched by the varied backgrounds of the students - artists, writers, etc. We'll be writing more about this, hopefully soon, but we wanted to remind you that there's an opening reception today, Tuesday, June 16th, at 6:00 p.m. in SAIC's Sullivan Galleries, on the 7th floor of the former Carson Pirie Scott building. (enter at 33 S. State.)

At 4:00 p.m., there'll be a panel that will include architect Gordon Gill of Adrian Smith+Gordon Gill Architecture, design consultant Kelly Costello of Doblin, SAIC professors Hennie Reynders and Ben Nicholson, graduate students, and - God save us all - me. More information here:

And here's a brief video featuring exhibition designers Odile Campagnon and Hannah Swart. The audio is absolutely abysmal (I'm still learning this whole video on the run thing) but they have some interesting things to say about the show and the work.

Get up to HALF off on all books at the Prairie Avenue Bookshop

This is the good stuff, the stuff you can't get on your Kindle. Through July 18th, one of Chicago's great treasures, the Prairie Avenue Bookshop, is having a remarkable sale that presents an irresistible temptation to bulk up your library.

Buy $10-49.00, take 20% off; $50-99, 35%, and once you hit $100.00 - which is, what, half a Phaidon? - you start paying half price. The books can be new or out of print. The fine print? Books have to be in stock, payment due at time of invoicing, discount calculated pre-tax, and can't be combined with other offers, all sales final.

Hours: 10 to 6 MtoF, 10 to 4 Saturday, closed Sunday. 418 S. Wabash. 312/922.8311. Website here

Bon appetit.

van Berkel pavilion unveiled!

why does it put me in mind of an egg salad sandwich? (I think I need to go to lunch.) again, thanks to Bob Johnson for the pic.

Zaha has landed

Blair Kamin was reporting last week that the Zaha Hadid designed Burnham Centennial pavilion in Millennium Park was weeks behind schedule, with only the skelton likely to be place for this Friday's official opening. That skeleton is now being mounted on site, as you can see in this photo from our indefatigible correspondent, Bob Johnson. The wraps are coming off the Ben van Berkel pavilion to its north, which is scheduled to open on Friday.

Update: just got an invitation from the Burnham Centennial Committee that seems to indicate both pavilions will be available for viewing by late this week. Could Zaha Hadid's actually be assembled by then??

Cecil Balmond and the Bonfire of the Vanities

This is an article I should have completed eight months ago. It concerns the most brilliant man I’ve yet to meet, the engineer, architect and polymath Cecil Balmond. A striking exhibition of his work, Cecil Balmond: Solid Void, is entering its final week at the Graham Foundation, 4 West Burton Place. Sorry for the short notice, but you will regret it if you miss it.

Is the new austerity the death of "star-chitecture"? And what caused eight months of writer's block? An article on architecture after the fall, the work, thought and relevance of Cecil Balmond, and a brief history of the Indian Rope Trick -all copiously illustrated with images and videos - here.

Waiting for Zaha

Remember when I wrote back in April about the Burnham Pavilions slated to open in Millennium Park on June 19th:

Will the stararchitects be able to match Burnham's 1893 creation of a perfect city, on-time, by opening day? Place your bets, ladies and gentlemen, place your bets.

Well, if you put your money on built-from-scratch Ben van Berkel, collect your winnings. Bet the ranch on Zaha? Pre-fab or no, better luck next time. Blair Kamin reports that Hadid's pavilion won't be ready, possibly for weeks after this Friday's official opening.

Reminder: Preservation Chicago Pilsen benefit, 2nd Fridays Gallery walk tonight

A quick reminder that the grassroots group Preservation Chicago is holding its spring benefit tonight, Friday, June 12th, 5:30 to 8:30 p.m., at 1835 S. Halsted, the heart of the Pilsen Chicago Arts District. The $30.00 at-the-door price includes beer, wine and appetizers, as well as music by the muy caliente Latin band, Son Bel Viento and d.j. LiMbs. There'll also be an exhibition of art by the organization's members and local artists and photographers, which you'll be able to buy directly from the artists. Full information here.

Tonight is also this month's 2nd Friday's Gallery Night, with 35 galleries, representing the work of over 100 artists, open from 6:00 to 10:00 p.m. You can download a printable map here.

A rainless evening, a good cause, and a gallery walk in one of Chicago's most historic neighborhoods - what's not to like?

Mr. Kamin Protests: Mr. Becker Apologizes - to a degree

Pulitzer Prize-winning Blair Kamin of the Chicago Tribune is among the nation's most respected architecture critics and, truth be hold, a very nice man. So when, he bitches and moans about being misrepresented you eventually have to listen.

The point of contention was a paragraph I wrote in my post about the travails of the old Chicago Post Office:

Of course, all of the city's dutifully sober critics at the time, most prominently Blair Kamin , dismissed the concept as a morbid caprice not even worth discussing. The big idea on their platter? Condo's. Carving condo's out of floorplates as big as two square blocks and actually suckering people into buying them. Yeah, right. Remind me again, which of those ideas was the big fantasy?

Almost immediately after the post hit the web, there was a comment posted by Mr. Kamin disputing the construction that inferred that he was among those proposing condo's for the site. So I added my own comment reprinting his actual words, and a sentence to the original post: "[Mr. Kamin takes exception: see comments]". This was apparently not enough, as Blair soon thereafter left a message on my home answering machine (unfortunately I was at work all day - sorry) again expressing his displeasure, which he indicated was shared by others posting comments on my site. (Actually, there was one.)

So I've included a revised paragraph on that post that I hope will remove any ambiguity about Mr. Kamin's position. He never proposed condo's for the Post Office, and I apologize if the paragraph in question inferred that he did.

The condo reference, however, was a secondary issue, a sideshow to the larger point that only a radical rethinking of the city may be enough to save it. Befitting his position as the critic of what remains, even in today's troubled state, one of the most powerful publications in America, Blair is kind of the pope of architectural criticsm, codifying the conventional wisdom of the moment. He is, in short, a supremely cautious man. He has many interesting things to say, but has he ever written anything that startled or surprised you?

Blair has a hard-won reputation to maintain. It is reasonable that he be cautious, even if not always useful.

I, on the other hand, have no reputation to speak of - other than, perhaps, that of the guy sitting alone at the far end of the bar spouting his opinions to the air - and am free to speak incautiously. And I say this: quibbling over the condo's reference is a pettifoggery diversion from the real issue: is the future of Chicago to be found catering to what "every business leader wants" when many of the most powerful of their number, traveling in a herd, have left us with a revised cityscape of staggering, generic mediocrity, or is that future to be found in a vision like John Ronan's for the old post office, and similar, muscular rethinkings of urban life that could actually lead to the city's salvation?

Got 12 cents a square foot? Take our Post Office - Please!

That's right, friends. Just 12 cents, a measly 12 cents per square foot, could make you the proud new owner of Chicago's largest antique: the 1932 former post office! Straddler of expressways, repeller of investors, threatening bankruptcy to any demolition company who dares to destroy it - it can all be yours!

That 12 cents comes from dividing the building's 2.5 million square feet (the Merchandise Mart has 4), into the suggested opening bid of $300,000 for an August 27th auction of the property. As reported by, among others, the Sun-Times David Roeder, Walton Street Capital has walked away from a $300 development plan that would have seen the razing of a large part of the building that crosses over the Eisenhower Expressway. The deal collapsed even though Walton was in line for a $51 million subsidy from the local TIF slush fund, and would have gotten back $9 million of the $10 million it was going to pay the postal service for the acquisition.

Now the postal service, spending $2 million a year just to keep the building shuttered, is reduced to playing the role of desperately motivated seller. "Whatever we can get from a sale," a spokesman told Roeder, "every penny counts." So that $300,000 could be the opening of a Dutch auction; not a floor, but a ceiling from which bids descend on a steep incline towards zero. If you're enough of a gambler, you might be able to win the behemoth on Harrison for not even the change in your pocket, just the lint.
The old Main Post Office was once a proud symbol of civic achievement, of American power and affluence. It's block long lobby was one of the most spectacular - if chilly - interiors in Chicago. Now it's garbage.
So we're back to square one. We could do a lot worse than to return to architect John Ronan's brilliant vision of turning the Post Office into a Municipal Mausoleum, a Pantheon for both Chicago's greatest and its common men and women, an incredible spectacle of urban drama that boldly re-imagined the expression of urban life - and death - through architecture.
Of course, all of the city's dutifully sober critics at the time, most prominently dismissed the concept as a morbid caprice not even worth discussing. The big idea on their platter? (Except for Blair Kamin. Blair Kamin never proposed condo's) Condo's. Carving condo's out of floorplates as big as two square blocks and actually suckering people into buying them. Yeah, right. Remind me again, which of those ideas was the big fantasy?
Read what I wrote about Ronan's proposal here - with illustrations - and judge for yourself.

Recover from your Workday in just one graceful half hour: Rush Hour Concerts at the Cathedral of St. James

So here's the deal . . . Leave the office at 5:00 after a hard day, 5:15, have some Argo tea, snack's from Trader Joe's, perhaps even a little wine. 5:45, hear a chamber concert in one of Chicago's finest spaces, in one of its most historic churches. 6:15, applaud generously. Horrors of workday past now only a distant memory, head out, relaxed, refreshed, and primed to enjoy the rest of your evening.

That's the great concept behind the Rush Hour Concert series sponsored by the Cathedral of St. James. "Great music for busy lives," they call it, and with a reception and a 30 minute concert early every Tuesday evening through August 25th, and a superb roster of musicians that draws heavily from the ranks of Chicago Symphony and Lyric Opera players, who's to argue?

St. James, itself, is a civic treasure, one of Chicago's oldest houses of worship. It was founded in 1834, just one year after the city's incorporation, the same year John Kinzie settled here. Along with another Chicago pioneer, Gurdon S. Hubbard and Margaret Helm he was considered the parish's founder, and early services were held in rented quarters in a wood building at State and Kinzie streets which he furnished. Kinzie would later donate the land at Wabash and Illinois where in 1837 a new brick church, costing $14,000, was dedicated. Pews were sold at auction, netting $13,862.

In 1856, at a time when most of Chicago's earliest churches were moving to south Wabash Avenue from present homes centered around the public square that's now the site of City/County building, St. James moved even farther north, to its present location a block south of Holy Name Cathedral, into a $100,000 edifice by architect Edward Burling, who would later bring a young, pre-Sullivan Dankmar Adler into partnership in his firm.

Just after the dedication of a new organ, the Great Fire of 1871 hit. As one eyewitness described it, "I saw the beautiful Episcopal Church of St James in flames. They came on all sides, licking the marble buttresses, one by one, and leaving charred or blackened masses. But the most wonderful sight of all was the white shining church tower, from which, as I looked, burst tongues of fire." That bell tower, along with portions of the facade, were among the few structures left standing in a city reduced to rubble.

As Chicago boomed in the last part of 19th century, St. James' congregation grew wealthy and elite. As quickly as the 1920's, however, the tide turned. The wealthy had moved on; their former mansions cut up into apartments as the neighborhood veered toward skid-row.

Now, of course, the neighborhood, renamed by developers "The Cathedral District" to help move the pricey condo's, is again thriving. A multi-million dollar 1980's restoration brought most of the St. James back to the Arts and Crafts, Victorian Gothic design of the 1890's.

The Rush Hour Concerts series kicked off June 2nd. Next Tuesday's event on the 16th features no fewer than eight cellists from the CSO and Lyric, along with soprano Maire O'Brien and conductor Michael Mulcahy. The programs are extremely varied and creative: Gershwin and Ives on the 23rd, a brass transcription of Shostakovich's String Quarter No. 12 on the 30th, Couperin for Bastille Day on July 14th, Poulenc on the 21st. On the 4th of August, there's CSO principal oboe Eugene Izotov with cellist Katinka Kleijn and organist David Schrader: 11 more concerts in all from now through the end of summer. Check out the full details here. St. James Cathedral is at Wabash at Huron.

Thursday, One Night Only: Eine Kleine Nachtlichtmusik at Crown Hall

In the early days of Mies van der Rohe's Crown Hall, the jewel of the IIT campus, architect John Vinci, then a senior, convinced the school to let him use the new building for the annual dance. He managed to book Duke Ellington to provide the music, and students from IIT's Institute of Design were given responsibility for providing the decor. "They put blue and green spotlights on the grass outside," remembers Vinci, "and aimed them at the branches of the honey locust trees lining the building, so that inside you'd see the shadows of the branches moving behind the lower milk-glass windows like animated drawings on Japanese paper."

This Thursday, June 11th, from nine-ish to midnight, that idea will be turned outside in, as artist Jim Tichy and students from IIT, SAIC, Bauhaus-Universitat Weimar, and Bezalel Academy Tel Aviv will present Lighting Crown Hall, turning it into "a massive light box, sending video projections and elaborate time-base lighting sequences through the glass windows." The project is a collaborative venture with the School of the Art Institute and the Mies van der Rohe Society, and is the culmination of Bauhaus Labs' three week summer session "exploring the ideas of visionary artist and educator Laszlo Moholy-Nagy."

Grab a lawn chair (and a jacket, and maybe an umbrella) and stake out your place. Crown Hall is at 3360 South State Street. There's public parking in lots D1 and D2 at the southeast corner of 33rd and State, entrance on 33rd.

Rabble Overtakes Trib Tower Aerie - with the right kind of cash, you're invited, too.

In case you've ever wondered about the accommodations the Chicago Tribune aristocrats carved out for themselves below the soaring buttresses and behind the Gothic tracery atop Hood and Howells' Tribune Tower, wonder no more.
Chicago caterers Food for Thought have announced they are the "exclusive representative" for the top of the tower and its "State-of-the-art conference facilities, old-world charm, and stunning views." Standing reception: 300; seated dinner: 100. The apoplectic spirit of Col. McCormick restlessly haunting the room: priceless.

Dubai's Giant Swiss Cheese Grater becomes Reality

Usually when you see some architectural firm's really pushing-the-envelope design, your first - and correct - reactions are: a. it's very nice and b. it will always remain in the unrealized perfection of the drawings.

Occasionally, however, such a design does get built. Case in point is New York-based reiser + umemoto's stunning office project O-14, which has actually just been topped out in the architectural fairyland of Dubai, and is projected to be completed next year. Like SOM's 1961 Hartford Building on Wacker Drive . . .
. . . O-14 wears its structure as an exoskeleton. Unlike the more conventional Hartford, however, 0-14's exoskeleton creates a column-free interior. It also provides solar shading, and pairs up with the glazing set a meter within to create what is the equivalent to a double-skin facade, whose chimney effect channels hot air - of which I hear there's a lot in Dubai - up through the cavity, cooling the surface of the window wall.

The exoskeleton is of self-consolidating concrete cast around a "basket weave" of reinforcing steel, with the large circular openings created by inserting cut polystyrene voids in the "basket-weave" rebar matrix. You can see an illustration of the process in photographs accompanying this fine article on Arcspace, from which we've stolen borrowed the image below.
reiser +umemoto's website also includes their interesting entry in a competition to design a new home for the Pittsburgh Children's Museum. Like everyone else in the world excepting the bunker-loving Gigi Pritzker Pucker, Mayor Daley and their minions, the architects recognize the importance of making a "building that is at once light and inviting." (Since it's designed with Flash, we can't provide a link to the project's page on their website - you just have to burrow to find it.)
In an amazing coincidence, Lucien Lagrange, working independently, completely unaware of reiser + umemoto's design for O-14 , came up with a strikingly parallel concept to counter Mies van der Rohe 860-880 Lake Shore Drive apartments when the Chicago architect assumed he would get his hands on the Athletic Club site right across the street.*
*important note to attorneys here.

No Room for the Inn: Mondrian Stateless; Waterview "Worthless"

Two stories this week in Crain's Chicago Business underscored how the current slump in hotel fortunes is affecting the city's architecture.

On Wednesday, Crain's reported that it's now official: there will be no Mondrian Hotel on State Street. The plan of the buyers of the former Cedar Hotel at 1112-18 North State, shuttered since 2007, was to strip off its terra cotta facade, demolish the hotel behind it, construct a new 200 room building in its place, and then slap the old facade onto it, in still another instance of a practice that's becoming so common in this city that it should probably be renamed a "Chicagectomy". (It will interesting to see what happens to another property, the historic Esquire Theater on Oak Street, which the same developer acquired with the idea of knocking it down for a new development.)

No one knows what to do with the hotel, but the ground level space that was formally the long-time home of Melvin B's Truck Stop and the adjacent bar my co-workers used to affectionately refer to as "Man vs. Margarita" will soon be the home to a new pub to be named, ironically enough, Cedar Hotel. Let's hope it will bring back the outdoor terraces teeming with imbibers that were a more democratic counterpoint to its more pretentious Viagra Triangle neighbors.
The news in Shangri-La - the hotel version - is even worse. Crain's also reported this week that the Bank of America has foreclosed on the hotel's intended home, Waterview, the projected 90-story tower that has remained an empty, 26-story stump since the money ran out last year, constructed halted, and the innkeepers fled. It seems no one has a good word to say about Waterview now. One lawyer for one of the other lien holders calls it "worthless"; a second attorney is quoted by Crain's as saying “The property is worth less than it would be if it was vacant."
Forget the Burnham Memorial. Let's do something useful and have a architectural competition to come up with ideas of what to do with the massive, abandoned concrete abortion on West Wacker.

Meanwhile, the Joseph P. Kennedy award for smart investing in an economic meltdown has to go to Kimpton Hotels. I named this award after the booze peddler who in 1945 paid $11,500,000 to buy the Merchandise Mart from a desperate Marshall Field & Company that had built it at a cost between $32 and $38 million, only to see the Great Depression transform it into an "Chicago's #1 real estate white elephant." The Mart became the cornerstone of the Kennedy family fortune (in 1998 it would be sold for over half a billion dollars), eventually supporting Joseph P. Kennedy's prodigious bankrolling of the successful 1960 presidential campaign of his eldest son Jack.

Strategic Hotels, sent to the ropes by the deepening recession, pulled out of a deal to build an annex to their Fairmont Hotel in Jeanne Gang's new Aqua Tower. While other chains are overleveraged and reeling, Crain's reports that Kimpton Group Holding, which last year end created a quarter billion fund specifically to pick up the bargains that a crashing market presents, is close to sealing a deal to take over the 15 hotel floors at Aqua for $56 million, a third less than Strategic was going to pay, with that $28 million difference matching the $28 million in earnest money that Strategic left in the developers pockets as they walked away from their deal.
Analysts are calling the deal a major risk for Kimpton, but to me it looks like a masterstroke. Aqua has a great location, equidistant between Millennium Park and the Mag Mile, and its completely unique profile of sculpted balcony slabs offers both a distinctive branding vehicle and, at 80 stories, a kind of architectural GPS device, with the tower visible in the skyline all across central Chicago, allowing travelers to easily get their bearings and find their way safely back to their rooms. POSTSCRIPT: The new edition of Crain's is reporting that the Kimpton deal may not have been the lock they originally indicated, and that negotiations are continuing with the final results as yet far from certain.

A Great Show and a Great Storyteller: Tim Samuelson on the art of John T. McCutcheon today at 12:15

Here's a show you shouldn't miss: The Cartoons of John T. McCutcheon: Chronicles of A Changing World, at the Chicago Cultural Center through September 27th. The Pulitzer-Prize-winning artist, whose career ran from 1889 through 1946, mostly at the Chicago Tribune, was most of the celebrated artists of his time, and a walk through the exhibition makes it easy to see why.

And today, June 4th, at 12:15 p.m., you can hear exhibition curator - and one of our city's best storytellers - Chicago Cultural Historian Tim Samuelson give a gallery talk. (They'll be one more, on Thursday, July 9th, also at 12:15) The exhibition - and Tim - are in the Chicago Rooms, 2nd floor, Washington Street side.

You can see a few snippets of his opening night tour from last Friday below, which also also illustrate the striking way curator/designer Nathan Mason uses walls of different bright colors to make the rich, mostly black and white drawings pop. Instead of your eyes growing tired as you move row after row, they're refreshed each time you move to a new panel. SPOILER ALERT: stop watching the video after the background goes orange-yellow to avoid learning the secret of the McCutcheon's "Mysterious Stranger" drawings before you see the show.

The Mysterious Stranger is just one of a wide universe of characters populating McCutcheons's series A Chronicle of Social Happenings at Bird Center, from 1903 and 1904, a melodrama in pictures of the goings on in a mythical small town that drew on McCutcheon's own upbringing in Lafayette, Indiana. It was, in the words of a current writer, The Simpsons of its time, immensely popular. So popular, in fact, that it inspired a play written by Chicago novelist George Ade, Captain Fry's Birthday Party, that was performed by members of the fine arts club The Little Room. As documented below, the members happily assuming the identities of various Bird Center characters included Poetry editor and John Wellborn Root biographer Harriet Monroe, and such prominent architects as the Pond brothers, Hugh Garden, and Howard van Doren Shaw, McCutcheon's father-in-law. (click to see larger version.)
Much of McCutcheon's style falls within a fairly conventional center, but there's no shortage of engaging, eccentric accents. One drawing of the cartoonist, shown from behind, sweat shooting out of his head like a nimbus as he struggles against deadline to come up with ideas, could have been drawn by Robert Crumb. Extras filling up a street in another cityscape, by Saul Bass.
And then there's the architecture, depicted, mostly in witty caricature, but sometimes also in sharp detail, not just in the operatically scaled scenes of the rising of the city's skyscrapers, but in the smaller snapshots of its brutal, unsentimental dynamism - an abandoned church turned into a storage warehouse, a closed synagogue a cigar store. Politics and corruption (or should it be politicscorruption?) are also explicated with a satiric acuteness not even Mike Royko could better. Walking through this exhibition, you really feel you've stepped back in time, immersed in the huckster exuberance of Chicago at its boom town peak, all vividly captured byMcCutcheon.

Balconies and Eaves, Laurel and Hardy in Chicago and Madrid

Our roving correspondent, architect Iker Gil of MAS Studio, brings to our attention this striking building in Madrid . . .
which, of course, puts us in mind of a slightly taller Chicago variant, Studio/Gang Architect's Aqua tower.
The Madrid building, Edificio en la M-30, is actually a retrofit, by the firm of Jerónimo Junquera-Liliana Obal, of an existing 1.2 million square foot, curtain-walled office tower for the headquarters of Gamesa, a company specializing in sustainable energy technologies and one of the world's largest wind turbine manufacturers.

The Spanish architects share a common vision with Aqua's Jeanne Gang in using the built environment as a reflection of the structures of nature. Gang drew inspiration from stone outcroppings in Michigan; Junquera and Obal see the mountains reflected in urban buildings and the rivers in the city's highways.

The balconies at Aqua and the eaves at M-30 were both designed to provide shading and reduce solar height gain, as well as to set their respective buildings, in Junquera's words, "vibrating with light" in variation day to day and season to season. At M-30, there's also atmospheric lighting at night.
In Madrid, the continuous eaves, made of pre-cast fiber-reinforced concrete, also buffer the offices from street noise - the site is along two major thoroughfares (the M-30 is one of them) which together bring 100,000 cars rushing past the building each day.
In Chicago, the poured-in-place concrete slab balconies, scraped away in places to create sculptural voids of curtain wall, provide views into the city's dense urban forest that would not be available from a rigidly rectangular perimeter.
Isn't it an enormous relief to have Aqua finally wash the sour taste of the once-dominant bunker of the Park Millennium out of the skyline?

Children's Rises, Time Falls

Birth and death portrayed in two photographs from CAF docent Kathleen Carpenter.

First, this spectacular shot of the new, billion dollar Children's Memorial Hospital, now fast rising on Chicago Avenue just west of the recently completed Prentice Women's Hospital.
Second is this final portrait of the clock perch that stood above the entrance to the recently evicted Talbott's in Chicago Place, the pall mall now in the process of largely being converted into office space. For a brief optimistic moment at the time of the mall's 1990 opening, it was the roost of the proud, shimmering metallic bird that personified the space's first tenant, legendary Chicago jeweler, C.D. Peacock. In brutally short order, the store went bust, the bird disappeared, and it's pretty much been downhill from there.
And if you have any doubts about the whole tempus fugit thing, consider the buildings depicted in one of the murals (I wonder what will happen to them) at Chicago Place's entrance. Wrigley Building: owned by Mars. Tribune Tower: bankruptcy central. Sears Towers? Oh, you must be referring to the mighty Willis.
For those of you suffering withdrawal from being able to immerse yourself in the unsettling emptiness and disquieting silence of Chicago Place, may I offer up for your next Dead Mall fix, the Century? With its Landmark Cinemas at the top, it's like a tree house built upon the branches of a dead oak. Ramps descend past a succession of nowheres, all the way down to the basement, where abandoned metal bones are all that's left of the subterranean Eatzie's, done in by a witches' brew of overambition, bad location, mediocre food and fatal cuteness.