The Brick Stackers

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No city in the world, not even New York, has found such general use for common brick as we have found here on Lake Michigan.  Chicago brick, in addition to being used in business blocks, factories, residences and other buildings is widely used in building sewers and other construction work.  The outside demand for Chicago brick has been beyond the ability of the local plants to supply with their present equipment.  Millions of brick are  shipped to every surrounding state, as many as thirteen states being served with Chicago brick.

Chicago is fortunate in possessing a supply of what is known as “surface” clay.  This clay is the result of the glacial drift and is entirely suitable for the manufacture of what is known as common building brick.  In fact, it is superior to many other clays for this purpose, because of the ease with which is is prepared and the rapidity with which it can be fired and burned.  It is of a quality that can be manufactured into brick by what is known as the stiff-mud process, the most rapid method for making brick, and Chicago is now consuming brick at the rate of over a billion brick annually.

             - Chicago The Greatest Brick Center,
                   the Chicago Examiner, 1910

As with so many other things that were once the city's pride, Chicago stopped making brick a long time ago.  And yet the demand remains for what has come to be known as Chicago brick.  Not the high-toned glazed or polished brick with which buildings prepare the face to meet the faces of the other buildings it meets along the street, but the homely, rock-solid, non-face brick for secondary elevations along the side or alley,  There's still a strong demand for that unpretentious work-a-day brick retaining an abject beauty all its own.

And so when we knock down buildings, as we're wont to do, the crews move in to sort through the rubble for the bricks not ruptured in the wrecking, to chip them clean to be neatly stacked and strapped and recycled.

As we've written previously, the Sterling Bay Companies is slowly becoming Lord-of-the-Manor to Chicago's historic Fulton Market District, transforming it from its century-plus role as home to the city's meatpackers and food and dairy resellers to a high-tech district replete with health clubs, art galleries, fashion boutiques and trendy restaurants .  Sterling Bay's first assault was its most audacious - taking over the massive, windowless fortress of 1920's 12-story, nearly four million cubic foot Fulton Market Cold Storage building, melting decades' buildup of ice, stripping off the old facades down to the bare concrete bones, and converting the structure into office space where Google will consolidate its Chicago operations.

Last week, Fulton Market Cold Storage, now renamed 1K Fulton, was well on its way, with a new annex rising just to the west and retro-styled piers - of newly manufactured brick - being put in place on the spare concrete frame for the building's redesigned windowed facades.

Now Sterling Bay is mopping up the scraps. Among other Fulton Market acquisitions, last fall they snapped up a series of properties along Lake Street west of Morgen, old one-story buildings of no particular aesthetic merit but that had served a succession of business well for nearly a century.

No more.   Those buildings are dust.  With some surviving bricks left behind.  Good Chicago bricks, finding a new home at a place where their character -  if not their provenance - still finds respect.

Gustave Courbet, The Stonebreakers (destroyed)

(Architectural) Scenes from the City

We continue to work on several pieces, from 740 North Rush to Jones College Prep.  To hold you over for the moment, here's some shots from the city over the last few days.

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First Warm Day in April

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In which the long winter has left even the trees with frayed nerves, and the branches of the ferris wheel still mostly unbloomed.

 

 

 

 

 

Jeanne Gang updates Freud: Will Tell - Not Ask - "What Mammals Want" at the Logan Center

Sigmund Freud finally admitted he didn't have a clue . . .

The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is 'What does a woman want?'

Was it that he didn't know or that, push to shove, he wasn't all that curious?

Alexander Pope wrote, “The proper study of Mankind is Man” but his words became less an invocation for deepening human knowledge than a license for an geometrically accelerating stream of narcissistic rationalizations for our appetites and aggressions.  Now that our technology is giving us an unprecedented and frightening domain over the earth's ecologies, might we be better off, as we send species after species hurling towards extinction,  spending a little less time in infatuated self-contemplation and a lot more studying the living things with which we share not just the world but the fundamentals of our animal nature?

But I digress.

Studio Gang/s Peoples Gas Pavilion, inspired by a tortoise's shell,
at the Lincoln Park Nature Boardwalk

To sell a great story, a great headline is half the battle, and architect Jeanne Gang has certainly picked a provocative one for her April 28th lecture at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts on the University of Chicago campus.  The flyer, shown at the top of this post, sends mixed signals.  First it says seating will be first-come, first served, and then in the very next paragraph asks us us to click to respond to the invitation by April 23rd.  The flyer is a jpg, so clicking the link goes nowhere.  If we get more information, we'll pass it on.

Studio/Gang Architects, Chinese American Service League,
with titanium shingles like the scales of a dragon's skin

I have no idea what a lecture called “What Mammals Want” will be about.  Almost certainly it will nothing to do with my own musings.  But when an architect declares they are going to give a talk that has neither “Form”, nor ”Autonomy”, “LEED”, ”Theory”, “Parametricism” or even “Architecture” in its title,  and it references humans only by their parent class, well, that's a very interesting proposition.

Gang was last year's recipient of the U of C's Jesse L. Rosenberg Medal, recognizing achievement “deemed of great benefit to humanity.”  Yet, Gang will be at the Logan Center Performance Hall, 915 East 60th, at 5:15 p.m. on Monday the 28th, telling us - not about humanity - but about the Mammals.  And what they want.  And what it might have to do with us.

Inaugural Garofalo Fellow Molly Hunker shows her cards: at UIC with Myth, through May 10; at the Graham in person Monday night with Spiritual Kitsch

Last August, architect and designer was Molly Hunker, co-founder of the Los Angeles design firm SPORTS, was named as the first recipient of the Douglas A. Garofalo Fellowship, established by the School of Architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago to honor the talented architect who died far too soon in 2011.

Hunker took up residence at UIC last fall, with the plan of teaching courses, pursuing independent research, and preparing a public exhibition and lecture. That exhibition, Myth, is now up in the South Gallery of the Arts and Architecture Building at UIC, 845 West Harrison, where it runs, 9 a.m. through 5:00 p.m., Monday through Friday through May 10th. The exhibition . . . 

. . . focuses specifically on the religious genre of the home shrine, re-envisioning the richly decorative and kitsch assembly through the lens of the architectural installation. . . . Myth re-envisions the home shrine through the lens of the contemporary architectural installation. The project learns from the careful collection and curation of sentimental objects commonly found in home shrines, producing an emotionally resonant experience that recalibrates contemporary notions of atmosphere and engagement.

Myth uses the decorative prayer candle as the primary object through which to explore how home shrines can provoke new understandings of visual and atmospheric opulence in the architectural interior .

The project suspends hundreds of handmade wax container - candles on cotton wicks, creating a semi-enclosed shrine-space by the accumulation of the colorful objects . While the overhead candles are geometrically simple, the candles closer to the ground are increasingly articulated with a grotesque featuring strategy inherent to the transformation of wax from liquid to solid . This articulation technique partners with a gradient of increasing color saturation and shimmering cosmetic in order to engage with a kitsch sensibility that provokes greater emotional resonance with visitors.

Tonight, Monday, April 7th, 6:00 p.m. at the Graham Foundation, 4 West Burton Place, Hunker will deliver a lecture, Spiritual Kitsch.  

The discussion will explore how home shrines and related assemblies can provoke new understandings of visual opulence and lead to the production of emotionally resonant architecture.

 More information and registration here.

Facade slices cut from pizza building - Fewer rounded brick columns at 740 North Rush in renderings for new 45-story Hyatt

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In anticipation of a public meeting on the project on Monday, 42nd ward Alderman Brendan Reilly on Friday released a couple of preliminary renderings for a new 45-story, LEED-certificed hotel project pairing up White Lodging Services with developer Albert Friedman.

When Crain's Chicago Business first revealed the project in February, the site identity was pegged to 740 North Rush, the former Crain's Communications headquarters building best known as home to a very busy Giordano's pizzeria.  As now revealed by Reilly and the renderings, however, 740 isn't being slated for annihilation but truncation.  About half of its Superior Street elevation is set to be demolished for the new tower.  This is not unprecedented.  The landmark 1872 Delaware Building at Randolph and Dearborn, for example, not only had floors added to it in 1888 - several of its easternmost bays were demolished to make way for the Oriental Theater Building.

Even less lucky is the blocky seven-story stone-faced structure with three large displays on the ground floor (was it originally an auto showroom?) that currently serves as Giordano's annex.

Image courtesy Google Streetview

The Superior Street entrances to the building have been long sealed up.  It seems to be built around a central courtyard, with its footprint extending all the way north to the alley, cutting deeply into the back of 740.

image courtesy Google Streetview

It looks as if the new building will go all the way west to Wabash, which would also spell doom for two older buildings - one which until recently was home to 1492 Tapas, the other what looks to be an 1870's rowhouse housing a number of businesses including Intuition Astrology (do you think they saw this coming?)  At the corner of Wabash, there's a surface parking lot, and a small Chicago Archdiocese garage that once bore signs on the driveway reading “Thou shalt not park here”.  (Update: a reader is reporting that site does not include the buildings closest for Wabash)

Aloft, Hyatt Place, Fairfield Inn River North, HOK Architects

Friedman is expanding beyond his usual River North territory, which he transformed from a skid row of seedy bars, decaying lofts and hotels to one of Chicago's trendiest districts of upscale bars, pristinely renovated lofts and - just last year - a Friedman development of three different hotel brands - an Aloft, a Fairfield Inn, and a Hyatt Place - all sharing a single site.

A similar mashup is planned for Superior, countering the high priced Four-Star Peninsula right across the street with an extended-stay Hyatt House and mid-priced Hyatt Place.   At least in the preliminary renderings released by Reilly, the design of the new 45-story tower is numbingly generic, but at least we get to keep the delightfully funky 740 with its long arcades of three-story rounded columns done up in the same brick as the rest of the facade.  In full along Rush, in sample along Superior. 

Four Chicago Rooftop Scenes

Cuppola with birds griffins (click images for larger view)

bottle in mesh carry

Renaissance Scrabble

Chicagoisms, Dyja, Szot, Baker, Carson, Krueck iandSexton, Kwinter, Manferdini, Metter, Tham and Videgard, Kamin, Enquist, Johnson and much more - it's (finally) The April Calendar

It's the third of the month, so it must be time for the April Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.

We have another jam-packed month.  Over the next week. there's a discussion on Jane's Walk for Friends of Downtown lunchtime today,  Bolle Tham and Martin Videgård at Crown Hall, IIT on Friday, and on Saturday afternoon at the Graham, editor Alexander Eisenschmidt will lead a panel including Penelope Dean, Ellen Grimes, Sam Jacob, Mark Linder and Jonathan Mekinda marking the publication of Chicagoisms: The City as Catalyst for Architectural Speculation, which is both a book (available for purchase), and a new exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Next Tuesday lunchtime at the Cultural Center, Thomas Dyja, author of The Third Coast: When

Chicago Built the American Dream, will discuss The Battle for the Mecca, inside the must-see exhibition Mecca Flat Blues.  Tuesday evening at the Chicago Architecture Foundation, Metropolis editor Susan S. Szenasy will be in conversation with  Bill Baker on the Well-Oiled Machine of SOM Chicago Structural Group, while architect John Szot talks and offers up the premiere of the third and last part of his video project, Architecture and the Unspeakable, for MAS Context at the Logan Share.

Architecture and the Unspeakable 3 - TEASER by brooklynfoundry

Next Wednesday, Lisa Napoles discusses The Unrepentant Revivalist: William Carbys Zimmerman

at CAF lunchtime, where in the evening the Trib's Blair Kamin will lead a panel including SOM's Phil Enquist and Silas Chiow, Ralph Johnson of Perkins+Will and Jonathan Solomon of Syracuse University on the topic of Kamin's recent Tribune series, Designed in Chicago, Made in China.

And that's just the next week, and not everything at that.  Coming up later this month.

Architects, designers and thinkers:
David Carson, Ron Krueck and Mark Sexton, Sanford Kwinter, Elena Manferdini, Andrew Metter, Ernest C. Wong, Wright and His Assistants, Louis Sullivan and John Edelmann

Topics: 
How Paris Became Paris: The Invention of a Modern City; the GSA rehab

on State Street; Tracking the Lost Treasures of the Auditorium; First American Skyscrapers: Chicago and New York; Chicago's Historic Hyde Park

Seminars: 
Designing the Classical Interior, 11th Annual Midwest Bridge Symposium

This are just some of the highlights.  To learn the who, what, when and where on nearly 50 great items, check out the April Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.