On the 30th anniversary of its closing, Andy Pierce reminds us what's so magical about the Uptown Theatre

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Today, December 19th, marks the 30th anniversary of the day Chicago's famed Uptown Theatre closed its doors.  By the time I got around to it in the 1960's, the 4,300 seat former movie palace designed by Rapp & Rapp was past its prime.  Apart from the John Frankenheimer masterpiece, The Train, most of the films I saw there were unmemorable - The Ballad of Josie?  The Dave Clark Five in Having a Wild Weekend? - but I was always blown away by the grandeur, beauty, and sheer scale of the place.

 Since its closing, the Uptown has suffered the indignities of being owned by some of the city's most infamous slumlords, leaks, floods, freezes, neglect and decay.  In 2008, it was acquired by Jam Productions, which already books the Riviera across the street.  Last October, representatives from JAM, mayor Rahm Emanuel's office and freshman Chicago alderman Harry Osterman and James Cappleman met to discuss how a revived Uptown could anchor a new vision for an Uptown Entertainment Center.

In 2006, the price tag bandied about for fully restoring the Uptown was $30 to $40 million.  Today, it's more like $70 million.  If hope is to be had, it might be found in the examples of two New York City theaters, the 1929, 2800 seat Beacon, designed by Walter Ahlschalger, which withstood bad times and attempts to "improve" it into a disco to emerge as a beloved and active concert venue, despite being far from the Mid- Manhattan Theatre district.  Even more striking is the comparison to the 3,200 seat Loew's Kings Theater in Brooklyn, designed by the fame Chicago movie palace architects Rapp & Rapp, left to rot ever since it's 1977 closing.  Like the Uptown, those who cherished the theater battled to keep it alive for revival, and their efforts were rewarded in a project, launched last year for a 2014 completion, to restore the Loew's Kings to its former glory as the centerpiece of the renewal of the Flatbush shopping district.  The city of New York has committed $50 million to the project's expected $70 million cost.

This week's edition of Time Out Chicago has an excellent article by Andy Pierce, one of the people most instrumental in Friends of the Uptown. who have been tireless in championing saving the theater.  We're privileged to have Andy provide us his overview of the history, importance and future potential of the Uptown . . .

What makes a theater a movie palace?

At some point, almost any surviving vintage theater is referred to by fans or reporters as a “movie palace.”

photograph: Theatre Historical Society of America

 The long-closed Uptown Theater, 4816 N. Broadway, is truly an early example of the very large movie palaces of the mid-to-late 1920s. It is also one of the last great movie palaces to not yet be restored, renovated, radically altered or demolished.

Chicago’s remaining open and operating movie palaces -- used for live performances -- are the Riviera, Chicago, Congress and Oriental theaters. The Central Park has survived as a church since 1971 and the restored New Regal (originally Avalon) has been closed intermittently since 2003. [Note: Our Palace Theater was not a movie palace. Rather, it was built for Big-Time Orpheum Vaudeville.] 

Arguably the most profitable themed entertainment of the day, Balaban & Katz “presentation houses,” such as the Uptown, featured continuous performance of three or more shows daily; stage shows with themes, costumes and sets planned in consideration of the feature film; a full orchestra rising and falling on multiple stage lifts, with a conductor at the helm of projector speeds and tempos to keep on schedule and massive theatre organs to accompany the orchestra and provide the aural environments and voices for the early and yet-still-silent stars of the screen. 

In B&K’s deluxe presentation houses such as the Uptown, a system of colored cove lights controlled the accent lighting of the auditorium such that the audience was entirely encapsulated in the mood of the moment on screen; for example yellow for sunrise, red for war, blue for night, purple for love. 

Most of America’s movie palaces carried a Neo-Classical theme cohesively throughout their public spaces and were lavishly decorated not only with plaster relief but also with fanciful polychrome paint schemes, damask, drapes, elaborate chandeliers, antique oil paintings, marble sculpture groups and fountains. Patron comfort and service were augmented in the Uptown for example with amenities such as hat racks beneath seats, a parcel check, luxurious men’s and women’s lounges and a fanciful playroom with storybook themes for children. 

Grand entrance lobbies gave standees a place to wait behind ropes while the previous audience exited through other lobbies and ambulatories. A full, working stage with scenery, a theater pipe organ, and multiple thousands of seats in floor, mezzanine and balcony areas completed the movie palace formula over tens of thousands of square feet of real estate. 

By Popular Demand
Closed 30 Years, the Uptown is Ready for Revival 

Baptized in oil, labor and love, friends of Chicago’s historic Uptown Theater, 4816 N. Broadway, are recognizing a peculiar anniversary for one of the world’s largest and most lavish surviving movie palaces today, Monday, Dec. 19, with a letter-writing campaign. Please see the Uptown Theatre, Chicago, Facebook page for details: 

photograph:  Theatre Historical Society of America

While the Uptown has been closed for 30 of its 86 years, demolition by neglect was held at bay largely through the work of volunteers who kept the theater graffiti free as high as they could reach, who stoked her shopworn boiler and who kept the landmark interior as dry as possible, using patches upon patches of hydraulic cement to seal cracks in steel roof drains that had been pushed open by ice. Uptown’s 12 different roof surfaces drain through this system of pipes. The failure of this system in the arctic winters of the early 1980s allowed water to damage to some interior areas of ornate plaster ceilings and walls.

Chicago: First Snow of the Season

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Door to the Heart: Bertrand Goldberg Reflections - the things he kept, the things he made (Open House This Saturday, 12/17)

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This Saturday, December 17th, The Arts Club of Chicago, 201 East Ontario, will have a rare Saturday opening for a public Open House of its exhibition Bertrand Goldberg: Reflections, from 10 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., with gallery talks at 11, 1 and 3.

In an oral history conducted by the Art Institute's Betty Blum, architect Bertrand Goldberg (1913-1997) talked about how he should have known more about his mother's life, "but her life was, like most mothers, always so close to mine that I thought that was the only life she ever had."

Our relationship with buildings is like that.  Apart from a small number that we actually watch growing up from the ground, we experience a building as a done deal.  As far as our personal everyday experience is concerned, it's always been there, always will be there.  And never could have been anything else. 

Yet, architecture is more than what's left over after the making is done.  Like all art, it is not just a product, but a process, and in being an essentially practical art - art for use - it engages the society in which it's created more deeply than any other art form.

Nowhere is this complex, anything-can-happen process better captured than in the exhibition,  Bertrand Goldberg: Reflections,  at The Arts Club  of Chicago through February 8 of 2012.

Reflections stands in the shadow of Bertrand Goldberg: Architecture of Invention, the long-awaited blockbuster retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago that runs through January 15 and draws on the museum's extensive Goldberg collection and archives, bequeathed to the museum by the architect. The show is spectacular and encyclopedic, beautifully designed by John Ronan and Cheryl Towle Weese, with a great, catalog edited by curator Zoë Ryan, richly illustrated and including a series of thoughtful and informative essays.  No question about it: if you care about architecture, it's a must-see show, which I hope to write about more before it closes.

As you walk through the wedge-shaped galleries with their mirrored gateways,  you feel the sweep of history, from Goldberg's 1938 North Pole Ice Cream stand, with its roof suspended from cables hung form a tall mast, to his last great vision, River City, from the 1980's.  Even as you observe the projects evolve, each individual stage looks inevitable and immutable.

In a small adjoining gallery, however, you get what's usually missing from exhibitions such as these: a sense of a building as it's experienced and lived through time.  Inside Marina City: A Project by Iker Gil and Andreas E.G. Larsson examines Goldberg's most famous creation by going beyond the abstract to see the architecture as it is experienced and transformed by its residents.  While in the big show next door, the photographs tend to hew black-and-white, Inside Marina City explodes with color.  In place of the snow-white, abstracted form of the Goldberg's pie-shaped wedges, we see those spaces animated through habitation, with glimpses of how dozens of Marina City residents have taken that basic container and made it their own.  Some of the views appear to extend all the way back to original tile bathrooms and pink-cabineted kitchens.

 Others are almost surrealistically traditional.  Some are classically minimalist . . .

Others seem to be stage sets of our contemporary hyper-virtual world, as in a shot of a studio crammed to the gills with gadgets, bare-metal shelving and a digital designers desktop abutting the balcony window wall, soaking up the light.  The exposed gearworks inside a modern machine for living.

Inside Marina City defines a work of architecture by carrying from its point of creation forward into tine.  Bertrand Goldberg: Reflections, like the Art Institute's Architecture of Innovation, moves in the opposite direction, going back to the beginning and moving sequentially to the end to define a lifetime of work.  Reflections adds another dimension.  In addition to renderings and drawings, it draws heavily on Goldberg's "personal collection of art and artifacts."

Don't expect to find smoking guns -"Aha, that's where Marina City came from!" - but where a traditional exhibition makes you a passive observer of a fait accompli progression, Reflections invites you to bring your own imagination to connecting the dots between the things Goldberg collected and the meaning behind the work he created. 

No two observers will the see the connections the same way, but to me it begins with a late, chalk-on-paper work by Paul Klee, Kindes statt (childlike state), that is unlike anything else I've seen from that artist: a borderless membrane of cells in green, gold and rust, given depth with a chiaroscuro texturing, separated by a irregular grid of thin charcoal lines that angle, bend, branch and insinuate small pods into larger cells.  Klee pulls on the collapsed regularity of Miesian geometry until the grid dissolves and blossoms into an organic web of asymmetric spaces that flood with color, pulse with pattern.   The impression is not one of fragility, but of a mysterious, timeless strength, like  moss clinging to a rock, observing the millenia pass by.

The artwork reminds us that early in his life, Goldberg had a knack of being in the right place at the right time, traveling to Germany in 1932 to apprentice in the offices of Mies van der Rohe and study at the illustrious Bauhaus with such teachers as Wassily Kandinsky and Josef Alberts.  Paul Klee taught there, as well.  Goldberg was in Berlin when the Reichstag burned. He heard Le Corbusier lecture at the Arts Club in 1935.  In 1937, he accompanied Mies van der Rohe and helped translate for the famous visit to Frank Lloyd Wright in Taliesen.  It was all preparation for when Goldberg would break free of the what he called the "Right Angle Club" to create a new modernist alternative in such works as Marina City, the Hilliard Homes, and Prentice Hospital.

Reflections is like a time capsule, filled with  wonderful things, the collected and the created in equal measure.  The exhibition, designed by architects John Vinci and Geoffrey Goldberg, Bertrand's son,  subdivides the Arts Club's main gallery in two, as part of creating several intimate spaces for the show.  You enter into a room filled mostly with sculptures by artists with which Goldberg had a long relationship, including an untitled bronze sculpture by Pietro Consagra which seems almost like a premonition of Marina City's twin towers crossed with Magritte's Sirens.

The small catalogue places the objects of the exhibition photographed in their original context, such as in the kitchen Goldberg designed for his mother-in-law Lillian Florsheim, including rounded metal appliance "garages", a spice rack made out of baking tins, and an amazingly complicated winch, made out of perforated stainless steel and metal engine parts, that allowed Florsheim to adjust the height and angle of a large lighting fixture near the ceiling.  Its drill-like crank, detached and displayed to the side, has the aura of a Medieval torture device.  (Geoffrey Goldberg told me that once Florsheim got the light in the desired position, she never moved it again.)

Free from a chronological structure, the objects in the exhibition offer up striking juxtapositions, such as in the corner where a working drawing for the Ronchamp-like theater for Marina City is next to a drawing of swirling ornament for a recreation of the Belle Époques splendor of Maxim's de Paris in the basement of Goldberg's strikingly modernist Astor Tower, next to a collage of a color field design for a Jack-in-the-Box(!) drive-in, next to a beautiful cut-away rendering of the architect's design for the Unicel Plywood Freight Car.

There's a selection of photographs taken by the architect, including a shot of Mies's iconic 860-880 North Lake Shore Drive apartments over which Goldberg places an arbitrary frame that challenges the geometric "perfection" of the offset box-like towers.  The great thing about the photographs is that they're not the usual shots that look like a neutron bomb went off, leaving the buildings but getting rid of the messy humanity.  In one Goldberg photo . . .

. . . the rooftop of Le Corbusier's  Unité d'habitation is framed and defined  by the people using it.  The man who fills and spills out of the frame to the left defines the foreground, just as the women vigorously walking towards the building defines the mid-distance. The bold, rounded patterns of her dress seem to grab the essence of the rounded concrete corner and spits it back against the unyielding rectilinearity of the facade.

In the Art Institute, there's a study of circles Goldberg did while studying with Josef Albers at the Bauhaus.  A quarter of century later, when Goldberg got the commission from Michael Todd to reimage Howard Crane's classically styled Harris Theater as a high-glamour showplace suitable for showing Todd's spectacularly successful Around the World in Eighty Days, Goldberg collaborated with Albers on a unique design for the theater's doors.  According to Chicago cultural historian Tim Samuelson, Albers had a succession of circles sandblasted at varying depths into the glass panels of the doors.  The aluminum doors bore concealed neon tubes all along the inside perimeter of the frames.  When the light from the tubes hit the glass, it became visible only on the sandblasted surfaces, creating the appearance of "glowing circles of light" floating on the glass.

photo: Hedrich Blessing Archive at the Chicago History Museum

Unfortunately, that glass no longer exists, but a section of the ceiling lighting Goldberg created for the Michael Todd, lovingly restored, rows of small round bulbs in counterpoint to the circles in the doors, has a prominent place at the Arts Club exhibition.

photo: Hedrich Blessing Archive at the Chicago History Museum

There's also a selection of furniture designed by Goldberg.  A menu from Maxim's.  A Clavilux, championed by no less than Leopold Stokowski as generating "a new art of color in form and motion" moving toward a day when art could be "pure spirit."  Two pairs of suspenders, one gold, one rainbow, some primitive sculpture, a monkey's skull.  Add up all the wonderful array of objects in Reflections and they spell - well, no, not "Rosebud" - but "Bud" (Goldberg), a man of unending curiosity and creativity, who wrote all the way back in 1967 . . .

Dynamic space is not an architecture of grids, of walls, of modular intervals of structure and form.  This is rather an architecture of forces, of energies, of movements of spaces.  This is an architecture regulated by time, volume, and change.  These are spaces which will be built from materials have have living plasticity, like the human body.  Cells of space, forming a structure as they combine together, will have a spatial biology

Walton-Seneca Building, 1977 (unbuilt)

Bertrand Goldberg was ahead of both the curve and his time in seeing what architecture could become.  Reflections is as close as you're likely be able to get inside this restless, ambitious, and relentlessly creative spirit.

Gene Summers dies at 83

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The Trib's Blair Kamin has a good overview of the life of architect Gene Summers, who has died at 83.  Summers worked with Mies van der Rohe on such projects as the Seagram Building and Chicago's Federal Center, going on to create the strikingly modernist McCormick Place after the dreadful original burned to the ground, and served as Dean as the College of Architecture at IIT.  Read it here.

The Rookery: How to Get Lit without Getting Drunk With It

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While we could always use a few more - I'm thinking especially thinking of 333 North Michigan, a gateway sentinel to the Loop (how about it, Rocky Wirtz?) - Chicago has no shortage of lit-up landmarks, with the blazing Wrigley Building the clarion princess of them all.  Floodlighting is the usual method of choice, but with increasing awareness of energy use, more subtle methods are now also coming in play.

Exhibit one might be Burnham and Root's 1888 Rookery Building at 209 South LaSalle, one of the glories of Chicago architecture.  On November 30th, a new exterior lighting system was switched on, designed by Jean Sundin and Enrique Peiniger of New York-based Office for Visual Interaction.

You can see the designers talk about the project for the John-Buck managed building in the promotional video below.  Sundin calls it "beautifully illuminated with very low energy",  a claimed total of 2304 watts.  (In contrast, the Wrigley building uses well over a hundred 1,000 metal halide lamps to get its knock-you-out-glow.)

The fixtures, from Austrian company Zumtobel, were hand crafted specifically for the Rookery.  "Nothing touches the building," says Sundin.  The brackets extend from the sills and rest on structure rather than attaching to it.  "The light fixture [is] not even two inches high and it's a little bigger than an index card.  This made the microsize fixture really vanish invisibly into the architectural detailing"

The red terra cotta that makes the Rookery so distinctive in daylight tended to make the building become something of a looming glob at night, punctuated by light coming from rectangular and often arched windows of isolated offices burning the post-5 p.m. oil.  There's something to be said for the organic and dynamic qualities of such improvisational lighting, but OVI's new lighting plan is subtle enough to preserve that kind of variance while still giving the Rookery a gentle visual pulse in the urban nightscape.

Now That's How to Get Their Attention - Barenboim/Carsen Don Giovanni at La Scala

Director Robert Carsen is known for his often controversial interpretations of classic operas, and his new production of Mozart's Don Giovanni which opened at LaScala Milan this past Wednesday would appear to be no exception, but - especially if you were in the audience and didn't know it was coming - the opening scene, played to the beginning of the overture, has to be one of the most spectacular conceits ever executed. 

The danger with well-known works is that familiarity shears away the audacious qualities that put them at the forefront of creativity.  Carsen's shock treatment of beginning - not raising, but pulling down the curtain, revealing not a set, or even a bare stage, but the audience looking at themselves in an unstable mirror that seems to have placed them at the bottom of a fish bowl - is the shock that pulls the rug out from under business as usual and invites the audience to see one of the greatest creations of Western culture as if for the first time.  Critical reaction seems to have been mixed, and if you watch the entire trailer above some scenes look great, while others, such as the Commendatore running through Don Giovanni with a comically bendy sword, seem to have missed boarding the A-train.

The all-star cast includes Petter Mattei, Bryn Terfel, Anna Netrebko, Giuseppe Filanoti and Barbara Frittoli.  If you have the time and the money (up to $500 bucks or more a ticket), the LaScala production plays through December 28th, and returns in January with a substantially less starry cast.

If you can read Italian and make your way through a post of consists almostly entirely of scanned newspaper pages, check out the indispensable Opera Chic's coverage of the premiere, which was attended by both Italian President Giorgio Napolitano and new Prime Minister Mario Monti, as well as broadcast live across the nation on Italian television.  And if you don't mind bleeding chunks that look like they were taken from someone's cell phone, you can check out these excerpts on YouTube. 

If you want to see the entire production, apparently in Chicago proper you're out of luck, but you can catch the opera on December 13th at the Marcus Theaters in Orland Park, and on December 18th and 22nd at the Wilmette Theatre in, you know, Wilmette.

Curator's Talk: Bertrand Goldberg Architecture of Invention, noon today at the Art Institute

"Join curatorial staff on a guided walk through the exhibition, Bertrand Goldberg: Architecture of Invention, the first comprehensive retrospective exhibition of the architect's career. Featuring over 100 original architectural drawings and models as well as graphic and furniture designs, this seminal exhibition explores Goldberg's 1930s futuristic designs to the iconic towers and hospital complexes of his mature career and his life-long dedication to architecture for urban environments."  12:00 - 12:45 p.m. today, December 9th, Art Institute of Chicago, 111 South Michigan.  Free with admission.

Chicago, Close-up and On-High

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Night and the City

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Bertrand Goldberg Reflections Open House, percussive Taliesen, North Grant Park, Rüedi Ray's Bauhaus Dream House, Cannon's Sullivan, Dahlman's Marina City, Teshigahara's Antonio Gaudi - and more holiday events on the December Calendar

Even with things winding down for the holidays, there's still over three dozen great programs on the December 2011 Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.

Toplined is a special open house for Bertrand Goldberg: Reflections, at the Arts Club of Chicago,  201 East Ontario, on December 17th 10:a.m. to 4:00 p.m. .  This may be your only chance to see this don't-miss exhibition, which I expect to be writing about this week, on a Saturday, liberated from the Arts Club's usual bankers hours of 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., Monday through Friday.  The day will include gallery talks at 11 a.m. and 1 and 3 p.m.

There's a lot there in December, including volume 20 of the 20-slides-20-seconds each presentations of Pecha Kucha Chicago, at Martyr's on Tuesday the 6th.   Wednesday the 7th, updated plans will be unveiled for the North Grant Park (a/k/a/ Daley Bicentennial Plaza) Project, this time at the Fairmont Hotel, while at  CAF lunchtime, Katerina Rüedi Ray discusses her new book Bauhaus Dream-house: Modernity and Globalization.  On Thursday the 8th, Friends of Downtown's annual meeting will feature a presentation by Steven Dahlman, the man behind the essential website Marina City Online.  That weekend, Glessner House will be offering its annual Holiday Candlelight Tours of both the H.H. Richardson mansion and the historic Clarke House.

On Sunday, December 11th at the Cultural Center, the Third Coast Percussion Ensemble will be offering the Chicago premiere of Common Parts in Uncommon Time, a new work by David Skidmore celebrating the 100th anniversary of Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesen.  On Wednesday the 14th, the last CAF lunchtime lecture this year features Patrick F. Cannon discussing his new book, Louis Sullivan, Tragedy and Triumph.

There'll be a Holiday Party/ Book Sale at the Graham on Thursday the 15th, Kim Nigro at Chicago Women in Architecture's Party and Silent Auction benefiting their scholarship fund at Häfele this Thursday, and the annual meeting and Awards Presentation at the Rebuilding Exchange on Friday. On Saturday, the 10th, Rush-Presbyterian will be offering public tours of its spectacular new building by Perkins+Will.  And 2011 ends from December 16th through the 23rd with what's become a Gene Siskel Film Center holiday tradition:  Hiroshi Teshigahara's hypnotic documentary, Antonio Gaudi.

Check out all the great items on the December Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.

Sunday reading: The Lost City of Rangoon, Christmas-mad China, mad-as-a-hatter GOP

The weekend Financial Times is  always a great read, but this weeks edition is particularly rich, with Thant Myint-U's Forgotten Treasures, a fascinating report on the time-capsule colonial architecture of Rangoon. now Yangon, a remnant fantasy world that could disappear as fast as it's being rediscovered as Myanmar emerges from its long isolation. Elsewhere, we find out that Christmas is becoming a really big deal in China, with the city of Yiwu, self-billed as the "Christmas ornament capital of the world",  now claiming over 600 companies manufacturing holiday decorations.  And in Republicans respond to anger over inequality, we read about the New Feudalists' plan to derail public outrage over increasing U.S. inequality by offering legislation to cut $9 billion over the next decade by closing loopholes that the reliably hallucinatory Newt Gingrich describes as an Obama conspiracy to give food stamps to millionaires.  Apparently, this will distract us from the fact that, over the same coming decade, the cost of the GOP's obsession to extend Bush tax cuts largely benefiting those same millionaires will come in at a somewhat larger  $3.7 trillion.

Life and Work of Benjamin Marshall Today, December calendar tomorrow (we hope)

Maintaining a time-honored tradition, we're a little late with the December calendar, which we expect to have up tomorrow.

So here's a heads-up that at 12:15 p.m., today, December 1st, in the Millennium Room of the Chicago Cultural Center, Friends of Downtown is sponsoring a talk by Stephen Monz on the life and work of architect Benjamin Marshall, whose work includes such buildings as the Drake and Blackstone hotels, and 1550 North State Parkway.

Thursday is also the day, 12:45 p.m., in the Council Chambers of City Hall, 121 N. LaSalle, for the monthly meeting of the Commission on Chicago Landmarks, which continues to be nowhere to be found in the battle to save Bertrand Goldberg's gravely endangered Prentice Hospital, but has an agenda item proposing landmark designation for the Art Deco DuSable High School at 49th and Wabash.  No landmarks report on the structure has been posted yet, but there's an informative piece on the building by Lee Bey here.

A follow-up on Lightscape; Pop-Up Galleries still alive

Yesterday afternoon, we received a note from the Chicago Loop Alliance's Ty Tabbing regarding my post on the new Lightscape installation on State Street, admirably restrained considering how rough I was on the project.  Mr. Tabbing informs me that the listing I noticed in some of the "reeds" - the individual light poles - is actually intended to help withstand Chicago's winds - with today's 40mph gusts, they'll get a workout - and mimic the movement of Midwest prairie grass.  He also challenges my characterization of Lightscape as a "one-size-fits-all" solution with a reminder that it was designed specifically for the State Street site.  It was not my intention to suggest otherwise, and if that was the impression I gave, I apologize.  When I wrote "one-size-fits-all", it's referring not to the origin of its design, but to the generic nature of the project.  Changing the color palette and music at different times of year doesn't disguise the fact the entire thing is numbingly uniform, to the point where I believe Lightscape will ultimately become as invisible as a street lamp, which by the way, actually have more varied decoration by replacing the globes with Jack O'Lanterns for Halloween, golden baubles for Christmas, etc.

More importantly, Mr. Tabbing corrects what he says was a quote taken out of content in Crain's.  While the decreasing vacancy rate on State has reduced the venues for display, Mr. Tabbing assures me - and I hope he won't mind me quoting him here - "Pop-Up galleries were, and will remain, an important strategy to bring art and artists into the Loop."  And that's very good news.

Chicago Streetscene: Shadow Branches

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Pathetic on a Stick: Lightscape on State

This is what a million dollars looks like today . . .

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The fad of the cactus lamp died out decades ago, but it lives on in Lightscape, a series of a dozen clusters of  9-foot-tall "prairie grass" lights that has just been unveiled down State Street that, according a report in Crain's Chicago Business, cost a cool $1 million.  It replaces the traditional holiday lighting on the street, for which Crain's quotes the Chicago Loop Alliance as saying cost about $120,000 a year.  Only 9 years to breakeven.

They were paid for by assessments on State Street retailers, in largest part by allocating the next five years of the former holiday light funds to Lightscape.  They're using new energy-efficient LED lamps from OSRAM Sylvania, cutting electrical costs, and sharply curtailing labor expense, 'cause they're never going to be taken down.  They're up year round,  "changing" with the seasons and for special events.  There's also supposed to be embedded speakers for "special announcements" and syncing the light show with musical selections, although during the two days I scoped out Lightscape, if there was any sound being produced it must have been in the range only dogs can hear.

The project reeks of the usual greenwashing (we're saving thousands of dollars in electricity, and it only cost a million!) and hype, from the self-congratulatory claim that now they won't have to just throw away all the lights each year (as if the whole point of the exercise wasn't to encourage shoppers to buy tons of stuff they'll hopefully mostly throw away by next year so they'll have to do it all over again), to descriptions of the anemic displays as "setting the Loop ablaze."

Well, the second coming of the Great Chicago Fire, Lightscape ain't.  Instead, it's just another flavorless homogenization of a once great shopping street.  The  faux-glitter of the poles look cheap, and a number of them already look to be listing away from plumb.  A lot of time watching the clusters at the end of last week consisted of waiting for them just to light up, then seeing one or two lamps slowly come to life, and then colors that appeared to have nothing to do with the traditional green and red of the holiday, but instead completely generic whites, yellows, oranges and purples.  And then back to a long waiting period of nothing being lit at all.

Some of this, I'd like to think, is just a matter of early performance jitters.   Soon, it's hoped, the music will start to play, and it won't sound like it's coming from a $2.00 boom box.  Soon, the co-ordination between the music and lights will start to take hold, creating patterns that are interesting rather than just erratic.  And the selection of colors will actually have some relationship to the holiday they're supposed to be celebrating.

Even if all this comes to pass, however, the bottom line is this: Lightscape is a lightweight - a supply-chain, one-size-fits-all solution for a shopping district that desperately needs a distinctive identity.  Again according to Crain's, funding for Lightscape not only has killed off traditional holiday decorations, but it's also resulting in pulling the plug on the work of real, distinctive artists who exhibited in the "pop-up" art galleries in empty State Street storefronts.  Loop Alliance director Ty Tabing told Crain's they're no longer necessary.  He may wind up being the only guy actually blinded by Lightscape's dim light.

Follow-up:  Ty Tabbing of the Chicago Loop Alliance has written to tell me that "reeds" - the individual light poles - are actually designed to sway as a way of dealing with Chicago's high winds, and also that the Pop-up Gallery program, despite a reduction in venues due to decreased vacancies along State, is still very much alive.

Art Institute Lion On the Prowl and Back to Nature for Christmas 2011

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No plastic bubbles this year; the Art Institute of Chicago is going back to nature.  Friday, the workers from the museum's Physical Plant department were working with physical plants during this holiday season's ceremonial wreathing - the 20th - of On the Prowl, the northernmost of the the two lions, sculpted by Edward Kemeys, that guard the Michigan avenue entrance.  (The name of the southernmost lion?  Surprisingly enough: Murray.)

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The large crowd assembled for the event enjoyed the joyful singing of the Wooten Choral Ensemble, while the lions on the Peoples Gas Building looked down on the scene with the usual mixed emotions of envy and hurt feelings.

The Great Chicago Christmas Tree, Placed versus Constructed

This was the scene at Daley Plaza late Wednesday afternoon, as mayor Rahm Emanuel and ABC7's Val Warner and Mike Caplan lit Chicago's official 2011 Christmas Tree. A 55-foot-tall Colorado spruce brought in from the Spangler home in Western Springs, where it was threatening the foundations, it's s all of a piece.

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It wasn't always so. Not that long ago, the Daley Center Chistmas tree soared over a hundred feet tall, a construction project of over a hundred individual trees carefully stitched together to appear as one. Check out our photo essay from 2007, It's the Great Chicago Christmas Tree (Some Assembly Required).

Norman Foster Weighs Buildings at the Siskel, Geoffrey Baer walks the Loop for 'TTW

In his new memoirs, Designing Buildings to Burn, Stanley Tigerman writes of an encounter between Buckminster Fuller and Chicago architect Charles Murphy, Jr., regarding the rough-hewn skyscraper now known as the Daley Center.

Fascinated by the long-span high-rise structure that had been designed by Jacques Brownson of the Murphy organization, Fuller asked Murphy not what the building cost per square foot, but what it weighed per square foot.  Murphy's puzzled expression told the story; he had never perceived a building in those terms, whereas Fuller, not trying to put down Murphy, merely wanted to ascertain the building's value so that he could measure it against other structures built in a like fashion.

Tigerman adds that Fuller's question was decades ahead of its time, but not much later Fuller was asking a variation of the same question of Norman Foster, and although the British architect was also taken aback, his reaction was quite different.  He was completely intrigued by Fuller's investigation of minimizing structure and "working with nature".  Not only did those questions become hallmarks of his work, but Foster also entered into a working relationship with Fuller that ending only with Fuller's death in 1983.  Last year, Foster paid tribute to Fuller by recreating his pathbreaking 1933 Dymaxion car.

Fuller's irreverent and probing question has now become the title of a documentary, How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr. Foster?, that's coming back to the Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 North State, for two encore showings, Sunday, November 27th at 3:15 p.m., and Wednesday, November 30th at 6:15 p.m. More information here.

Also on the documentary front, on November 29th at 7:30 p.m., WTTW will be offering up the premier of Chicago's Loop: A New Walking Tour with Geoffrey Baer, including the story of how Bruce Graham illustrated the design for Sears (Willis) Tower as he "picked up a fistful of cigarettes and extended some of them from his hand in a staggered profile" (Fazlur Khan didn't smoke). There'll be a number of repeat showings throughout early December. More information, and a trailer, here.

(I really need to be starting on an iPhone app.)