"The collection of energy must be the ground of form" - not said by Louis Sullivan, but . . .

“ ‘The collection of energy must be the ground of form,’ ” he recited, and laughed. “What it means I do not know.”

That's  composer Arvo Pärt talking in an extensive and quite good profile by Arthur Lubow in the New York Times Magazine this past Sunday.  He was leafing through pages of a 1976 notebook described by Lubow as consisting of  "musical notations, there were comments — in Estonian, Russian, Latin, German and English — that recorded his thoughts as well as quotes from texts."  But later in the piece, as he describes the concept of tintinnabuli that has been central to his work since he moved away from classic 12-tone composition in 1976, the meaning becomes clear:

The two lines. One line is who we are, and the other line is who is holding and takes care of us. Sometimes I say — it is not a joke, but also it is as a joke taken — that the melodic line is our reality, our sins. But the other line is forgiving the sins.” One line is like freedom, and the triad line is like discipline. It must work together.

 It's something that was also quite clear to Louis Sullivan . . . 

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The organic, whether in architecture or ornament,  is a synthesis of a fantasy of variation and development growing out of a determinist spine of form.

I may be the only person in Chicago who really liked Pärt's Symphony No. 4 "Los Angeles" from the moment I heard it in its CSO premiere conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen, and that affection only grows as I continue to listen to it in an L.A. Phil performance on my iPod.  For many,  Pärt's music is a case of "There's no there there."   For me, it passes the Mies test of being simple but not simplistic.  For someone for whom Boulez or Ligeti are still my idea of a contemporary composer,  Pärt still packs a punch.

If you didn't catch it in the paper on Sunday, you can read the Lubow profile of Arvo Pärt here.

Marilyn Monroe and JFK's birthday. This is the way the world ends: not with a bang, but with dessicated sugar

I am riding on a limited express, one of the crack trains of the nation.  
Hurtling across the prairie into blue haze and dark air go fifteen all-steel coaches holding a thousand people.  
(All the coaches shall be scrap and rust and all the men and women laughing in the diners and sleepers shall pass to ashes.)  
I ask a man in the smoker where he is going and he answers: “Omaha.”

Carl Sandburg - Limited

A long time ago, when it was only two hours long, the first hour of NBC's Today show was broadcast live in Chicago, followed by the first hour.  This was made necessary by the time difference between Chicago and New York; it was made possible by the quality of videotape, which made a live broadcast and a rebroadcast visually indistinguishable.  This is why I have a great love for old videotape in pristine condition.  An event as much as half a century in the past has a raw immediacy.  It looks like it's happening know.  The strikingly different decor, fashions, and personalities may give things a slightly weird vibe, but otherwise it looks exactly the same as if it were a live news report today.  Videotape is the visceral idiom of the here and now.

Film, on the other hand, distances the past.  We experience our world in color.  A film in black and white abstracts that experience into a subset presence.  When the film goes soft and blurry through age, the events it depicts become less a historical record than a kind of dream.

This blurry film - apparently the only one to survive- has exactly that dreamlike state.  Little more than a minute long, its montage, from the standpoint of today, takes on an almost Godfather-like narrative.  There's Marilyn Monroe, perhaps best remembered for playing the big band chanteuse Sugar Kane in the classic Billy Wilder comedy, Some Like it Hot, singing Happy Birthday to President John F. Kennedy at a 1962 celebration in a Madison Square Garden in New York packed with 15,000 guests, everyone from Jack Benny and Henry Fonda to Jerome Robbins, Ella Fitzgerald, Jimmy Durante and Maria Callas.

Monroe begins haltingly, as if almost paralyzed with stage fright, a quality that seamlessly morphs into the slow, sultry purr that has made the performance infamous.  The song is brief; we see a huge, towering cake being borne through the crowd by two bakers.  Just behind the podium, Monroe exhorts the audience to join in an orchestral reprise of happy birthday.  She leaps into the air, her arms gesture in emphatic, desperate, almost defiant strokes.

We see the young, handsome President stride down the aisle to riotous applause, skip up the stairs to the stage, and stride confidently to the podium, where Monroe now, in an instant, has completely disappeared.  When Kennedy quips that, "I can now retire from politics after having Happy Birthday sung to me in such a sweet, wholesome way," he turns back as if acknowledging Monroe, but she has vanished into thin air.

image source: Wikipedia.  click for larger view

The photograph above was taken after the party at Madison Square Garden.  Despite numerous encounters between them, it is the only known photograph showing Monroe with either of the Kennedy brothers.  The Secret Service was charged with making sure no such images ever saw the light of day, confiscating the photo's, including invading the dark room of White House photographer Cecil Stoughton after he took the shot you see here, which survived only because it was overlooked in a dryer.

In the picture, John F. Kennedy is looking away from Monroe.  He had had a brief affair with Monroe that past February.  For him, it was just another in his string of conquests, but Monroe became obsessed, repeatedly contacting the White House and trying to re-establish contact.  Like Tom Hagen being flown to California to "request" a favor of producer Jack Woltz, Bobby Kennedy was dispatched to Hollywood to tell Monroe to stop calling the White House.

Little more than two months after the birthday affair at Madison Square Garden, Marilyn Monroe died of a drug overdose.  On November 22nd the following year, John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas.   The murder of the country's most powerful figure was a shock to the system of unprecedented force - the last assassination of a president - McKinley's - went all the back to 1901.  Few had personal memories of such an event, and there had been no radio or television to  transmit each new, dreadful detail as it happened, to every corner of the nation.

Kennedy's death marked the United States' long descent down a rabbit hole of chaos and violence that would become the 1960's, culminating in the murderous fever of Vietnam, the killings of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and a spinning out of control that would see Chicago, during the 1968 Democratic convention, blister between anarchic provocation and brutal repression, and a wave of riots across America that set city after city ablaze.

The Kennedys and Monroe have all turned to dust.  To most Americans alive today, the past they lived is no longer a shared experience.  It survives only in books, photographs, blurry film and memorabilia.  The rhinestone encrusted dress Monroe wore - not white, as it appears in the photographs, but flesh-colored pink - sold in auction in 1999 for over a million dollars.  A print of the photo Stoughton took after the 1962 party - one of only 10 surviving - was expected to bring in $23,000 when it, also, was put up for auction earlier this year.

Which leads us to the photograph at the top of this post.  This one last artifact - whimsical, unsettling, obscene.  The Presidential Seal rendered as a decoration for that giant cake we saw in the film of the 1962 Madison Square Garden event.  It is being auctioned off at Heritage Galleries at their Dallas headquarters, about a mile from the site where John  F. Kennedy died, on November 17th, five days before the 47th anniversary of his assassination.  The pre-auction estimated price is $5,000.

It's part of a lot of items assembled, as described in the press release,  "to mark the 50th anniversary of his 1960 election, including treasures such as a gold presentation watch worn by JFK throughout the campaign, and what may well be the only example of Kennedy's trademark rocking chair to come with an authentication from the Kennedy family."

The Presidential Seal decoration "is being offered by the family of decorated New York Police Department Detective Patrick "Patty" Larkin. Larkin, who was working security detail the night of the event, took a shine to the piece, and was in the right place at the right time to get it out of MSG and back to his home, where it has been for the last 48 years."  Larkin's widow notes:

It was not preserved in a spirit of reverence, however, but merely a curiosity the family shuffled from residence to residence over the years, occasionally taking it out on Thanksgiving or St. Patrick's Day to get a laugh or an astonished shake of the head from friends.

". . . this delicate creation, nothing but so much sugar, really," is how Heritage Galleries' Tom Slater describes it, but somehow, to me,  it seems more like  a prop from some mutant version of Shakespeare's Macbeth.   The stuff that nightmares are made of.

Ambani about to move on up to his $1 billion Mumbai mansion. Perkins+Will would really rather talk about something else.

Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani is taking his wife and three kids and moving on up to his comfy new house. One that's 27 stories high. Really BIG stories - the thing soars more than 550 feet into the Mumbai skyline. Great views of the city and Arabian sea.  400,000 square feet in all. Did I mention it's the world's first billion dollar residence?

Three helipads, a health club and gym, a 50-foot movie theater, nine elevators, parking for 160 imported cars. A four-story cantilevered garden; a ballroom where crystal chandeliers take up 80% of the ceiling.  A nursery for unicorns. And a staff of 600 to keep it all going. The opening is getting a lot of press, worldwide, but what you don't see much of is the happy architects - in this case Perkins+Will - beaming in the reflection of their bold new baby. The spectacular project seems to be missing in action on Perkins+Will website, although there is a page on the New Mumbai headquarters the firm has designed for Ambani's Reliance Group.

78% of readers responding to a New York Daily News poll claim to "outraged" at this "obscene, offensive display of wealth." 18% say, "Good for him." Larry Ellison wrote in,  "Why didn't I think of this? (Call me, Ralph Johnson.)"

photo courtesy Wikipedia - click on it for larger view

Chicago Streetscene: The Old Mag Mile Curiosity Shop

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Great Moments in Marketing: Is this the worst commercial ever?

Crispin, Porter + Bogusky  has just released the initial commercial for Microsoft's new Windows Phone 7, and it may be the worst ad in the company's history, which is a pretty impressive feat when you consider it had to top such campaigns as "Windows 7 was my idea", the print campaign that portrayed anyone who didn't leap to buy the latest version of Office as - literally - dinosaurs,  and the epically disastrous spots that attempted to make Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld a comedic tag team.

Windows Phone 7 is by all accounts an absolutely adequate product, which kind of falls short of what you need when your smart phone market share is plummeting and your competitors - primarily Apple and Google's Android - are eating your lunch.  Clearly, something major is required to reverse this trend.

Which brings us to the Crispin spot.  Big, undoubtedly.  Textbook awful, oh yeah.  What makes this ad so bad?  Let me count the ways:

1.  It's trying to sell smart phones by ridiculing people who are devoted to smart phones.
2.  It's trying to sell smart phones to an imagined class of consumers who aren't the people being ridiculed, in other words, people who have an aversion to the entire category of smart phones.  Really? How big of a market is this?
3.  Apparently ad agencies know of only four pieces of classical music:
a.  the Dies Irae from the Verdi Requiem.
b.  O Fortuna from Orff's Carmina Burana
c.  The Aquarium from Saint-Saens' Carnival of the Animals
d.  and the big winner - slathered onto the Crispin spot - In the Hall of Mountain King, from Grieg's Peer Gynt.  Could we please retire all of these, please?  From movie trailers, too, if possible.
4.  Is that really the grand staircase of the Paris Opera, enlisted for a slapstick middle-aged-lady-falling-down-the-stairs sequence?  The surest sign of an impoverished concept is a blank-check expensive,  overproduced spot, overpopulated with vignettes that, even when individually funny and engaging, don't match in tone and don't progress in any kind of dramatic arc - just a laundry list of ideas dumped together.
5.  The final tagline, "It's time for a phone to save us from our phones - designed to get you in and out and back to life," is never explained. 

How exactly is Windows Phone 7, even in future spots, supposed to substantiate the campaign's premise?  No report I've seen claims the OS is faster than its competitors.  I'm sure the cellular companies Microsoft are depending on to push phones running their new Windows 7 OS are overjoyed that it's being promoted as a way of cutting back the minutes users buy.

The final shot is of a young man in a restaurant finally able to focus on his lovely date, because he's left his cell phone sitting on the table.  Problem is, you can just as easily set an iPhone or a Droid on the table, as well.  All it takes is willpower, not a new OS.  (Now, if an OS let you text an electric shock to your significant other's ear when they were on their phone ignoring you, that could send product flying off the shelf.)

Obviously, neither Apple or Google are above running down the competition, but they've never lost sight of the fact that the ultimate focus needs to be, not the shortcomings of their competitors, or their competitors' customers, but the selling points of their own products.  As they've proven again and again, that's something Microsoft still doesn't get.

Brazilian Design for Real Cities, Modern Ball, Active Layer, Epstein in Racine, engineering for kids in Des Plaines - more great events for October

You'd think that by October 12th, we would have everything there was to find about what's going on in October.   You'd be wrong.  We've just put up over half a dozen great additions to the October Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.

From October 28th to the 30th, at locations including the Instituto Cervantes, the Graham Foundation, and the South Side Community Arts Center, there'll be a three-day symposium, Building Connections: Brazilian Design for Real Cities, which will include the participation of such architects, planners, and authors as Jaime Lerner, Carmen Vidal Hallet, Fernanda Barbara and Jorge Wilhelm.

Not yet maxxed out by benefits? Have $500 in your pocket? Can make your reservations by the 15th? The Architecture and Design Society of the Art Institute will hold its Modern Ball on Saturday, October 23rd,  in the new Renzo Piano designed Modern Wing, with dinner, cocktails, a video, and a live auction offering such morsels as a Chicago River tour with WTTW's Geoffrey Baer,  dinner with architect Dirk Denison at L20, and first-class sojourns to Hamburg and Berlin, New York and New Canaan, and Cap Martin, France.

If that's a little bit beyond your budget, there are plenty of free events to choose from.  This Friday, the 15th, there's a reception and lecture at the Extension Gallery at Archeworks for their new exhibition, Active Layer, an installation by Mason White and Lola Sheppard of the firm Lateral Office.

On Saturday, the 16th, there's a Chicago Architecture + Design Day at Hermann Hall, IIT, offering a college fair, admission and career workshops for students interested in Architecture, Interior Design, Construction Management, and Landscape Architecture programs.  It's part of Discover IIT Day.  On Wednesday, October 20, Michael Damore of Epstein Chicago will talk about their collaboration with Norman Foster on the expansion of the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed S.C. Johnson Campus in Racine, Wisconsin at the Häfele America showroom on Hubbard.

And if you have third-to-eighth graders with a budding interest in architecture and engineering, take them to the Des Plaines Library this Saturday the 16th for their Second Family Science Expo,  where they'll be able to get hands-on experience from structural engineers Chas Hague and Larry Novak, who will talk on High Rise Building Design and show an earthquake shake table testing the stability of towers made out of LEGO's™.   Also participating will be our tireless correspondent, engineer Bob Johnson, who gave a preview to ABC7's Linda Yu and Sylvia Perez.

And that's just the new stuff. There's the Tribute to Bruce Graham this Thursday, plus the Design Evanston Awards, the Traditional Building Exhibition and Conference, the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat symposium at IIT, Julie Snow, Dana Buntrock, Robert Bruegmann talking about his new book on Harry Weese in Weese's Seventeenth Church of Christ, Scientist, and dozens of other great events. Check out the entire October calendar here.

What's next for Cecil Balmond? (Balmond branded shelving at the Container Store? Or?)

The Architectural Record's Tim McKeough reported today that legendary engineer/architect/designer/polymath Cecil Balmond is leaving ARUP, the global powerhouse where, as head of the Advanced Geometry Unit (AGU), he partnered with prominent architects to create some of the most spectacular structures of the last decade, including Rem Koolhaas's Seattle Public Library and CCTV Tower, Daniel Libeskind's Imperial War Museum North, and Toyo Ito's Serpentine Pavilion, to name just a few.  (ARUP is also being sued for $10 million by the Art Institute for flaws in their new Renzo Piano designed Modern Wing, but we'll talk about that another day.)

Balmond has already been striking out as architect as well as engineer, most notably in 2007 with a stunning bridge in Coimbra, Portugal.  Now he's setting up his own practice, which will include both structures and products.  Think Phillipe Stark for eggheads.  I love to imagine having - and being able to afford - a Cecil Balmond watch, which probably wouldn't be a watch at all as we've come to know them, and might just as likely rethink the concept of time as tell it.  Let him loose on the design of a bra and support of the female breast might never be the same.  Seriously, though, Balmond's work has always been about amazing, one-of-a-kind creations, and it should be fascinating to see if he can translate his talent to the demands of a mass-manufactured product, as well.

I was able to interview Balmond at the time of his mind-blowing exhibition, Solid Void, at the Graham Foundation a couple years back.  Check out my consideration (copiously illustrated) of the war between the heroic and the reasonable, and the work, writings and ideas of one of most influential thinkers of our time here.

New ways of seeing architecture: Alex Roman's The Third&The Seventh

Spanish-born artist Alex Roman describes his striking film, The Third&The Seventh as trying "to illustrate architecture art across a photographic point of view where main subjects are already-built spaces. Sometimes in an abstract way. Sometimes surreal".  The twelve-minute work, best viewed in HD full screen, includes meditations of the interplay of light and nature on such iconic structures as Mie's Barcelona Pavilion, Louis Kahn's Yale Library and Santiago Calatrava's Milwaukee art Museum.

And it's all virtual. "I use 3DS Max and Vray for rendering," says Roman to Motionographer's Justice Cone, "Photoshop for texture work, AfterEffects for compositing and color grading and Adobe Premiere for edit it all."

The piece's consistently slow rhythms makes the work a bit on the lugubrious side, a little slow, a little heavy, a little too much in love with its own artistry, but there's no denying this is a stunning piece of work, one that could help lead the way past the press-agent photography of architecture that too often manages to kill any sense of the magic - and mystery - of the buildings.

(thanks to EuroRSCG Chicago's Baptiste Limb for showcasing this film)

Marathon! (Chicago 2010)

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click Read More to see all 16 photographs

 

 

A Summer Day's Odyssey in Chicago, October, 2010

click images for larger view (highly recommended)

click Read More after the fourth picture to see photographs for the entire journey

 

Picasso's Lady looks down her nose at faux Trevi

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As part of this year's Fiera Italiana, a free-standing replica of Rome's Trevi Fountain made entirely of calf's butter has arisen in Daley Plaza. Visitors can stand with their backs to the replica, make a wish, and throw a coin over their shoulder. A security guard will then inform them that the actual fountain is at the opposite end of the plaza and make them pick up the coins from the ground.

How many of you saw it? Awesome Patrick Stewart/Kate Fleetwood Macbeth on PBS Wednesday night - soon on DVD

I'm astounded there wasn't more promotion on this; I just happened to stumble across last night's 9 p.m.  premiere on WTTW of the film version of 2007's acclaimed Patrick Stewart/Kate Fleetwood production of Macbeth that one London critic hailed as the "The Macbeth of a lifetime."

Both the original stage production and film were directed by Rupert Goold, setting the play in an imagined Stalinist society of the mid 20th-century, a conceit that could easily have become a gimmick, but in this production's specificity of detail only heightens the immediacy of the drama.  What was a single-set as a play has been opened up to use a visually stunning array of found locations, including a decaying, glass canopied cloister that co-producer John Wyver noted would probably have cost over $100,000 if it had been created as a set.

The film was shot in wide-screen HD using a pair of the fabled RED digital cameras by cinematographer Sam McCurdy, perhaps best known for bringing creep-out visuals to such horror films as The Descent and Dread.  That style proves an embracing fit for the fear and loathing world of Macbeth, even if some of the visual tricks sometimes seem like a crib from a Mark Romanek music video, especially one scene where the three witches are portrayed as un-Florence Nightingale-like angels from hell.  (Which will no doubt be appropriated in commercials for the next campaign to dismantle nationalized health care.)

Part of what gives the production its power is how it gains an incredible intimacy through setting some of the play's most intense scenes in the family kitchen, including Lady Macbeth steeling her husband's resolve to murder Duncan as she retrieves the dessert cake from the fridge to serve to the party of the soon-to-be martyred king in the adjoining dining room, or, most famously, the scene were Macbeth instructs the two men he's enlisted to murder Banquo as he makes cheese sandwiches.

None of this would be worth much is there weren't two extraordinary performances at the core.  Kate Fleetwood's Lady Macbeth is beautiful, seductive, brittle.  Patrick Stewart's performance as Macbeth is the zenith of a long, varied, and distinguished career.  Stewart's strength has never been in an actor's flamboyance, but rather, in a rock-solid centering of the character in the Spencer Tracy mode.  You can't just sit back and observe impassively.  Stewart draws you in: you know this man; more to the point, you begin to feel that, in different circumstances, you could be that man.  You begin to experience the action of the play as if you were in his skin.  You feel what, in our modern times, has become an increasingly elusive sense of the tragic.  Like Oedipus after questioning the messenger, Stewart's Macbeth has just enough self-awareness to realize how he's allowed himself to be trapped.  He sees how fate has plotted his end, but he must play it out, even if he already knows the dread conclusion.

Love is a battlefield, Pet Benatar has told us, and this Macbeth is a very warped love story, indeed. Fleetwood's Lady Macbeth is the ultimate trophy wife, much younger than her husband, inwardly unnerved by the intimations of his mortality to the point of projecting her lust through him and past him, into a carnal craving for blood and power that Macbeth, when we first meet him, has buried deep within himself beneath a mask of amiable soldierly loyalty.  Like Macduff ripped from his mother's womb, Lady Macbeth reaches into Macbeth's entrails and pulls these dark longings back to consciousness.  Entwined scorpions, the Macbeths reinforce each other's venomous cravings.   They give birth to their crimes in primal embrace, only to be condemned to live out the annihilating consequences apart, and utterly alone.

This is a rare case where a landmark theatrical production has not only not been ruined by its translation into another medium; in many ways, it's been enhanced.  The raw theatricality of a live performance is, of course, missing, but the skill with which Goold opens up the play actually helps to ground it and give a visceral presence.  You're not in row K listening to actors project; you're inches from a character's face, leaning in to hear their whispered confessions. 

I was blown away by this production.  If you missed it - and given the lack of fanfare, that's a good possibility - the DVD goes on sale October 19th, and it's only $19.99.  If this were a theatrical release, Macbeth would be one of the best films of the year, laden with Oscar nominations.  As it is, it's transformed the term "direct to video" from a epithet to a bloody wonderful gift.

Chicago Streetscene: Ellen Degeneres, by Lorado Taft

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David Shah, Bruegmannx2, National Public Housing Museum lectures - more for the October calendar!

 And the hits just keep coming.  Just added to the October calendar of Chicago Architectural Events:

This coming Monday, October 11, trend forecaster/provocateur David Shah will kick off the School of the Art Institute/AIADO's Mitchell lecture series, with a talk on Design in a Time of Change, 6:00 p.m., in Fullerton Hall.

On Wednesday the 6th (make your reservations by noon today), UIC's Robert Bruegmann will talk about The Rise and Fall of Public Housing: An International Perspective, followed by a tour of the site of the National Public Housing Museum, one of a series of five lecture/tours this month that will feature such people as Little Italy's Peter Pero,  great-granddaughter of Ida B. Wells Michelle Duster and City Design Center's Robert Feldman.

On Tuesday, the 26th, Bruegmann is back at a Graham Foundation event held in Harry Weese's dramatic Seventeenth Church of Christ, Scientist, talking about the new book he's co-authored with Kathleen Murphy Skolnick, The Architecture of Harry Weese.   This first monograph devoted to Weese's work has just been published.  I'm making my way through it now, and it's a worthy successor to Bruegmann's 1997 The Architects and the City: Holabird & Roche of Chicago, 1880-1918.  Along with a recent profile of Weese by Robert Sharoff in Chicago Magazine, it's jump-starting what looks to be a renewed appreciation of one of Chicago's most creative architects.

There are over 60 great events still to come on the October calendar.  Check them all out here.

And speaking of great Chicago architects, while we don't usually list tours - there's just too many of them - I did want mention a one-time only tour that's part of Docomomo North American Tour Day for 2010, Architecture in the Round:  the life and work of Bertrand Goldberg, a bus tour co-sponsored with the Chicago Architecture Foundation, from which it departs at 12:30 p.m. this Saturday, October 9th. The tour takes in four of Goldberg's designs: Marina City, the Hillard Homes, River City, and the endangered Prentice Hospital (just don't try to take pictures of it.) $38 per person; $33 seniors/students; $33 CAF members, 3.0 AIA Continuing Education Credits. Registration and information on-line.

What Happens When You Don't Listen: Art Institute opens up Ando Gallery, lets out the magic

Japanese architect Tadao Ando had never done a museum space, when in 1988 he was enlisted by Art Institute President James Wood to create a gallery for the museum's collection of Japanese screens.  The space Ando created has often been written of as the best room in the museum.

You entered through a pair of standard issue glass doors, and found yourself face-to-face with a forest-like grid of 16 free-standing foot-square dark columns, in four rows, stopping short of the high ceiling.  Beyond them, the art is displayed behind a L-shaped wraparound of continuous glass that begins flush with the floor and stops about halfway up the wall.  Two spare, backless benches, also designed by Ando, are in the back corner of the room.

The visible focus of the room was the space for the art, the only strong light source in the room.  The forest of columns stood in near darkness; the gallery itself had the feel of golden hour just before evening.

That was wonderful in itself, but what was most remarkable was the silence.

The room was not soundproof - you could hear louder noises from outside, but just barely.  It was if you were hearing them from beneath the ocean.

Most often, there was silence.  A silence that you didn't experience as a negative, the mere absence of a sound.  It was a presence, palpable, as if all the aural crud that fills each second of our every waking hour - televisions, iPods, cell phones, Muzak, traffic, sirens, the hum of appliances, mindless chatter - had been gently washed away to reveal a mysterious, embracing essence, waiting for us patiently at the lowest threshold of our hearing.

Now it's gone.

The Art Institute has just opened a major revamp of its Japanese Art Galleries in the museum's Roger L. and Pamela Weston Wing, designed by wHY Architecture and Planning, whose Kulapat Yantrasast is an Ando protege.   He created light-filled galleries that added 55% more space.  And he removed the doors to the Ando Gallery.  "Moving was designed to be free flowing, giving the visitor views of several rooms at once while also providing carefully placed focal points."

free-flowing = homogenization

The architecture of the Ando Gallery remains unchanged, the experience of the space has been eviscerated.  With the acoustical seal broken, sound - and light - "flow".  They seep in as an alien presence, invading the room, making it a sideshow extension of the generic, bright-white galleries outside.  The columns seem more widely spaced, the dimensions of the seating area appear to have expanded.  The sensual, almost sacred sense of intimacy has vanished.

Keep the pathways clear, unambiguous.  Keep the bodies moving.

The Ando Gallery remains a visually striking work of art.  How strange, though, that the caretakers of one the world's great cultural storehouses seem able to work only on the level of the visual; that they should be - or choose to be - deaf and unfeeling to the centrality of our other senses in experiencing spatial art to its deepest, most profound level.

On the great stair of the Art Institute, fear and hope stream beneath your feet in color and light.

Words, words, words, words
I have no words
To describe the vanity of life,
The insane inanity of life . . .
           Martin's Laughing Song, from Leonard Bernstein's Candide

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Postscript, March 8, 2017:  Over six years ago, when this exhibition took place, who could have imagined the kind of nightmare world  we today find ourselves in, with the kind of fanaticism, xenophobia and authoritarianism that had been kept in the shadows for so many decades now seemingly in full control of the United States government.   Perhaps a new Parliament of the World's Religions should be reconstituted in Chicago, for never has the message of Swami Vivekananda been more needed to be heard.

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[October 3, 2010] Through January 2 of next year, the sedate grand staircase of Chicago's Art Institute has been transformed.  The black backgrounds of its risers have burst worth with strips of lettering in day-glo colors.  The bright LEDs that subvert the abstract classicism have been compared by Robert Venturi  to temple hieroglyphics, "where the sparkle of pixels can parallel the sparkle of tesserae and LED's can become the mosaics of today [creating] an architecture that embraces human dimensions over those of abstract expression--that celebrates the beginning of an age of virtually universal literacy and embraces meaning over expression."

The installation at the Art Institute, Public Notice 3, is the work of the Mumbai-born artist Jitish Kallat, and it draws on a historical synchronicity.

In 1893, the Art Institute building, then home for the World Congress Auxiliary of the World's Columbian Exposition, hosted a 17-day Parliament of the World's Religions.

To east of the grand staircase, two large, 3,000-seat auditoriums, the Hall of Columbus and the Hall of Washington, had been erected where galleries now stand. On the Parliament's opening day, the platform of Columbus Hall was filled with dignitaries from "almost every national and every religion . . . The big oak doors of the Art Institute were besieged by visitors as early as 9 o'clock eager to secure seats in the auditorium or gallery . . .  when the doors were thrown open there was a wild scramble to gain access to the body of the hall."

Several times throughout the day's session, a young Hindu monk from India, Swami Vivekananda, declined invitations from the podium to speak.  "My heart was fluttering and my tongue nearly dried up; I was so nervous, and could not venture to speak in the morning.  All were prepared and came with ready-made speeches.  I was a fool and had none . . . I who never spoke in public in my life."

Late in the afternoon, at the chairman's insistence, the Swami Vivekananda rose.  A rapt silence descended on the hall.  "Sisters and Brothers of America," he began, and the room erupted.  It would be several minutes before the applause and cheering subsided and the Swami could deliver his speech, which included these words:

Sectarianism, bigotry, and its horrible descendant, fanaticism, have long possessed this beautiful earth. They have filled the earth with violence, drenched it often and often with human blood, destroyed civilization and sent whole nations to despair. Had it not been for these horrible demons, human society would be far more advanced than it is now.  . . .  I will quote to you, brethren, a few lines from a hymn which I remember to have repeated from my earliest boyhood, which is every day repeated by millions of human beings: "As the different streams having their sources in different paths which men take through different tendencies, various though they appear, crooked or straight, all lead to Thee."

I fervently hope that the bell that tolled this morning in honor of this convention may be the death-knell of all fanaticism, of all persecutions with the sword or with the pen . . .

On the exact same day, September 11, one hundred and eight years later, the hijacked planes crashed into the Twin Towers.  Over the intervening century, the Swami's fervent hopes have been confounded by a unyielding parade of what Voltaire called "the heroic butchery."  Christians murdering Jews, Muslims Hindu's, Hindu's Muslims, in variation and explication across geographies, religions, and sects, all in the name of the one true God. 

So back at the Art Institute, the colorful light show winding cheerfully through that stately, self-satisfied stair is actually the full text of Swami Vivekananda's brief address.  And the significance of the colors?  Jitish Kallat explains:

Now his speech is illuminated, conceptually and actually, in the threat coding system of the United States Department of Homeland Security. I find it interesting how the advisory system co-opts five colours from a visual artist’s toolbox into the rhetoric of terror, by framing them as devices to meter and broadcast threat (much like its predecessors, the British BIKINI alert state and the French vigipirate). Treating the museum’s Grand Staircase almost like a notepad, the 118 step-risers receive the refracted text of the speech. I see Public Notice 3 as an experiential and contemplative transit space; the text of the speech is doubled at the two entry points on the lower levels of the staircase and quadrupled at the four exit points at the top, multiplying like a visual echo.

Is Northwestern trying to make Prentice Hospital disappear even before they try to destroy it?

 

click on image for larger view

Shortly after snapping this photo of Bertrand Goldberg's wonderful and endangered Prentice Hospital, I was pursued by a guy with a badge hanging around his neck who kept insisting I couldn't take pictures of the building without getting prior permission.

Sullivan at the Block, Design Evanston Awards, Music's sway over Frank Lloyd Wright, Traditional Building Exhibition and Conference - still MORE great October events

As if 50+ events weren't enough, we've just added another half dozen to the October Calendar of Architectural Events.   Saturday, October 2nd, the Pleasant Home Foundation will offer up A Tour of Oak Parks Arts & Crafts Interiors in Oak Park.  On Wednesday the 6th, the Häfele America Chicago showroom will offer  Digital Solutions: Locker Management (yes, even getting shut up in your own locker by the school bully has now gone digital.)

On Thursday the 7th, musicologist David Patterson will talk about The Five Influences: Music and Mr. Wright's Architecture at Frank Lloyd Wrights Unity Temple in Oak Park.  On Thursday, the 14th, Design Evanston will offering up their 2010 Awards, while from Wednesday the 20th through Saturday 23rd, the Traditional Building Exhibition and Conference will convene at Navy Pier with dozens of panels, workshops, seminars and tours.  Access to the exhibition hall is free with registration.

And on Thursday, October 28th, there will be another screening of Mark Richard Smith's new documentary, Louis Sullivan: The Struggle for American Architecture at the Block Museum in Evanston, part of the Block's film series, The American Architect in Focus, that will continue into November.

The October Calendar is now at 60 great events and counting. Check them all out here.