Outriggers and Masterpieces

Two essential reads:

Supertalling It: Architecture critic Blair Kamin offers up a crackerjack story in this Sunday's Trib on the current rage in engineering skyscrapers, which involves a massive service core connecting to a ring of external columns through a series of "outrigger" walls that increase stability against the wind. All of these components are of reinforced concrete of varyingly large thicknesses.

In another sign that the Trib may finally be figuring out what web journalism should be, the on-line version of the story is not only as good as the print one, but better, despite carrying over key graphics, not in html or flash, but in a pdf file. The web version includes a video for each of the 1,000-foot-plus-high skyscrapers Kamin covers.

The first is on Santiago Calatrava's Chicago Spire which, as we reported two weeks ago, is now actually under construction, with fourteen caissons, ten feet in diameter and up to 120 feet deep, being drilled into the ground on the site west of Lake Shore Drive between the Chicago River and Ogden Slip. Kamin, a vocal skeptic of the project's prospects, now says the activity "sure looks like it's real," although, even at a cool quarter-million dollars each, the cost of caissons represent little more than a drop in the bucket of the Spire's eventual $2 Billion on up price tag. We're still a long way from any guarantee that it will make it to the finish line.

The second video enlists Skidmore's master engineer William Baker as a tour guide of the construction of Trump Tower. At one point he enlists a visibly amused co-worker to demonstrate with their two bodies the basic core/outrigger technique.

The final video features Teng & Associates' R. Shankar Nair, structural engineer for the new Waterview Tower on Wacker, who reveals that a large part of the southwest quadrant of that structure is empty, slabless space, since the way it windowlessly abuts existing structures apparently offers so little in rental/sales value that it doesn't make economic sense to finish out the floors. It's just there to support the units constructed above it, at the point where actual views kick in. Nair explains the Waterview's own core/outrigger system.

It's all made to sound revolutionary, of course, but the thickness of the core walls - in case of the Waterview, up to four feet thick where it wraps around openings - evokes memories of John Wellborn Root's load bearing 1891 skyscraper, the Monadnock, and the core/outrigger technique seems pretty much like how Bertrand Goldberg built Marina City four decades ago. (I still remember how, as a small child, I was fascinated by the seemingly minuscule round concrete cores soaring up into the sky, waiting for a Jack to come by to climb them on his way to the giant's lair.)

Still, especially on the web, this is a marvelous piece, the kind that wins awards - and deserves them. (damn him). You can begin at the starting point here.

Ten Modern Masterpieces - when you're dealing with a slick monthly like Chicago Magazine, you can never be too sure that an article with a name like that won't just be the latest variation on last month's Ten Best Body Wax Salons, but when the writer is the always reliable Jay Pridmore, the result can be depended on to exceed expectations. Like Kamin's, Pridmore's piece is light on analysis, and heavy on boosterism. That's what sells newspapers, and magazines. You have to keep in mind that even ten masterpieces can't make up for a pervasive cheapening of Chicago's architectural fabric. But drowning, as we are, in a contagion of dreck, its good to have Pridmore remind us that we're still capable of great things.

Pridmore's most controversial stand may be calling John Vinci's Arts Club "a brilliant updating of mid 20th-century modernism." I'm not sure even Vinci would go that far in defending his graceful building from its critics. Most of Pridmore's top ten are fairly safe choices: Ronan's Comer Center, Jahn's State Street Village, Gehry's Pritzker bandshell, Ralph Johnson's Contemporaine, Krueck and Sexton's Spertus Institute (which won't be finished until November), Lohan Caprile Goettsch's UBS Tower, and Jean Paul Viguier's Sofitel Chicago Water Tower, for my money the best Chicago building over the last decade. Filling out the list are less obvious picks: Dan Wheeler's Pritzker House, Booth Hansen's Republic Window and Door on Goose Island, and Stuart Cohen's shingle house in Glencoe.

The Magazine also polled AIA Chicago for its picks, and got 140 replies that, when totaled, included only four of Pridmore's. The architects' alternative choices run from the obvious (Goettsch's 111 S. Wacker - an even better building than UBS - and Rafael Vinoly's U of C School of Business, with its wonderful atrium that marries the lightness of a Chicago train shed with Frank Lloyd Wright's mushroom columns), to the credible (Johnson's Skybridge and Notebaert Nature Museum, Henry Cobb's Hyatt Center), to the inexplicable (Kleihues' Darth Vader mausoleum for the MCA).

You, too, dear reader, can go on-line and cast your own votes, both for the top ten, and for the ten you'd most like to see bulldozed. Write-ins welcome. (My vote would be for Rem Koolhaas's reviled Chicago Tribune McCormick Tribune Student Center at IIT, which made as much of a contribution to shaking up Chicago's moribund architecture as any structure on Pridmore's list.)

This is another case where the article, and its sidebars, are all adeptly presented on the Chicago magazine website. Check it out here.

Let There Be (Less) Light

The current New Yorker magazine has a must-read article by David Owen on how our obsession with abolishing night through an evermore blazing slather of artificial lighting is disconnecting us from the cosmos by rendering it invisible.

Four centuries ago, Galileo, with a telescope so primitive that today it would be considered a children's toy, was able to see the the moons of Jupiter as well as the mountains of the moon. In our own time, "light pollution" has made this impossible in all but a dwindling number of remote locations such as the outback of Australia or the mountains of Peru. Owen notes that even standing on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon on a dark night, the brightest thing is the sky is not the Milky Way, but "the glow of Las Vegas, a hundred and seventy-five miles away." The sight of a sky flooded with stars blinking on and off is something most of us now experience only through a CGI cliche.

Owen chronicles the ongoing efforts of the International Dark Sky Association to return us to a darker world, which sounds like flake city until you realize how much of the energy we expend on night lighting is hugely wasteful and, at times, counterproductive, even destructive. He talks of "glare bombs", lighting fixtures that cast much of their light sideways, into the eyes of pedestrians, creating glare that actually decreases visibility, or upward, uselessly up into the sky.

New codes, like those in Tucson, mandate outdoor lighting that is of a "full cutoff" or "fully shielded" type, casting "no light above the horizontal plane and employ a light source that cannot be seen by someone standing to the side." Moving to that kind of lighting has recently saved the city of Calgary, Canada, roughly two million dollars a year.

Nighttime visibility is about contrast, and the blight of light actually undermines our vision's natural capacity to acclimate to - and perceive objects in - darkness. Human night vision is acute, but the rods in our eyes that make it possible can take a hour to adjust after exposure to something no brighter than a desk lamp.

Owen relates how indiscriminately bright night lighting actually becomes "criminal-friendly." A burglar whose flashlight is the brightest object is immediately conspicuous; one operating in the massive shadows created by glare bombs is not. There may even be major health implications. Harvard's Nurses' Health Study has speculated that many medical problems - night shift workers having an increased risk for breast cancer, for example - can be traced to the lack of melatonin, "a cancer-protective agent whose production is severely diminished in people exposed to light at night."

Excess nighttime lighting can have devastating effects on migratory birds, at times killing thousands in a single night. (In Chicago, this has led to getting skyscrapers like the Hancock to turn down their lighting during migratory seasons.) Bright lights have been linked to the decimation of insect populations, and in Florida, of sea turtles. Newborn turtles are drawn to the brightest horizon. "For millions of years," says Owen, that has been "the night sky over the open sea." The cover of darkness protected their journey, but today, the turtles may just as easily be drawn to the open parking lot of a floodlit shopping mall, where they find themselves lit up in a way that advertises a "come-and-get-it" ease to their predators. Think Mrs. Venable's cheery tale in Suddenly, Last Summer.

It's a fascinating read, well worth the $4.50 cover price of the print version of The New Yorker, which you'll have to shell out because the article isn't on their website.

Burnham, Root and the man "responsible for the modern office building"

While all but a handful of his large commercial projects have been wantonly destroyed, a number of houses and smaller commissions designed by John Wellborn Root during his partnership with Daniel Burnham still survive. We'll be covering them in this and future posts. One of the most interesting is the William E. Hale at 4545 South Drexel Boulevard, completed in 1886.

It was designed for William E. Hale, who Louis Sullivan lauded in 1916 as one of two men "who are responsible for the modern office building." (The other was developer Owen Aldis.) In 1869, Hale patented the "Hale Water Balance Elevator", replacing the less reliable propulsion by steam with water hydraulics. Contractor Henry Ericsson speculated that a reference to "Passenger Elevator, $5,000" in a memo book of architect John Van Osdel, regarding an 1867 remodeling of the Tremont House, may have been the first known reference to "passenger elevator." (The Tremont House, then Chicago's premiere hotel, was at the corner of Dearborn and Lake, on a site that's housed two successive multi-story parking garages over the last several decades.) Hale's inventions were manufactured by Otis Elevator, where, as a key manager, he helped transform that enterprise into a powerful corporation.

But the house's greatest claim to fame may how it fueled the career of his son, George Ellery Hale, who revealed an early interest - and aptitude - for astronomy. It was at the Drexel Boulevard house that the younger Hale began his experiments, building a 4" refractor telescope on its roof. While still a student at MIT, Hale invented the spectroheliograph, which was able to record solar eruptions not just during rare solar eclipses, but in broad daylight. After graduation, Hale returned to Drexel Boulevard, where his father built Kenwood Observatory for him, complete with a spectroheliograph with a 12 inch lens, right in the house's back yard.

Even more remarkable is George Ellery Hale's relationship with Chicago traction magnate Charles T. Yerkes, who made his fortune wallowing through - and mastering - the city's notoriously corrupt politics to create a public transit monopoly. An outcast from the city's business elite with no discernible interest in science, Yerkes was persuaded by Hale to bankroll what would come to named, for reasons I'm sure you'll understand, the Yerkes Observatory, built by the University of Chicago in Williams Bay, Wisconsin, and completed in 1897. The observatory, featured in the 1996 Andrew Davis/Keanu Reeves/Rachel Weisz film Chain Reaction, narrowly eluded the wrecker's ball last year in a deal that included granted developer Mirbeau Company rights to build 72 homes on 45 acres adjoining the observatory.

As for the Drexel Boulevard mansion, it looks beautiful on the outside, but it's been carved up into the twenty units of the "Observatory Condominiums and Lofts."

This Sunday's CAF tours benefit family of docent Steve O'Rourke

The Chicago Architecture Foundation will donate all money from its walking tours leaving from the ArchiCenter Shop, 224 South Michigan, this Sunday, August 19, 2007, to the family of Rachel McKee, whose husband Steve O’Rourke, a popular CAF docent, lost his life in a hit and run accident on July 18th, leaving behind wife Rachel and three young children, ages 9, 4 and 1.

“Steve was an enthusiastic and devoted volunteer and loved to give CAF tours, especially those teaching young children about the “secrets of skyscrapers.” CAF volunteers and staff will join together on August 19th to give the tours Steve cherished so much to raise money to help support his family. Special Structure: The Secret of Skyscrapers tours will be given for families in Steve’s honor. All of CAF’s regularly scheduled walking tours will also be given in tribute to Steve, and the money collected will be donated to the Rachel McKee Family Assistance Fund.”

Walking tour tickets will be the regular price of $15.00 for adults, $12.00 for students and seniors. A special slideshow companion to Erik Larson’s best-selling novel, Devil in the White City will be shown and narrated by CAF docents, with a minimum entry charge of $20.00 CAF will also be collecting individual donations at the event, and through on-line contributions.

Reservations are suggested - for CAF members through Member Services at 312/922.3432 x230, and for non-members at ticketmaster on-line or at 312/902.1500.

See information on the full schedule of tours here.

Sixteen Short Pieces on a City Neighborhood

A walk through the pleasures and pains that form the texture of Chicago's Logan Square. Read all about it, and see all the photos, here. [originally published, in much better-edited form, and with far more professional photographs, in the Chicago Reader, August 10, 2007, under the title, Between the Boulevards.]

Grease Fire = Street Theater

A fire in one of Chicago's tallest residential towers made scarcely a blip in the city's newspapers and broadcasts Saturday (despite a station helicopter hovering above), but it drew Saturday evening crowds along a bustling stretch of State Street in River North. Reports said the fire, in the Grand Plaza complex, just across the street from the historic Tree Studios, began in a restaurant garbage chute, and then triggered an ammonia leak that led to evacuation of a Jewel grocery store at the base of the tower. The smoke spewed black, turned quickly to white, and then ebbed and dissipated across the Loop skyline as the spectators below returned to their social engagements. There were no reported injuries.

Chicago Streetscene - Funeral Home Directional

An Urban Legend Revisited - earlier this week, the Chicago Inter Ocean ran a disturbing story about a young Chicagoan who picked up an attractive brunette at a hotel bar, got very drunk, and wound up taking her to a room upstairs for the night. The next morning, he awoke, naked and groggy, in the room's bathtub, soaking in freezing water infused with his own blood, his head, save for openings for his eyes and mouth, packed tightly in ice.

His cell phone had been placed on the ledge of the tub, and on the mirror, a note was taped, written in lipstick, that read, in large letters, "Call 911!" Trembling with cold and with dread, he placed the call and related what he knew of his predicament to the operator. She asked him to very slowly reach up to feel his face, and when he did, he found two tubes, one attached just below each cheekbone. The operator fell silent, and then told him to remain very still. She said that she was sending help, but refused to answer the man's increasingly desperate questions.

Soon the paramedics arrived. One of them, a young woman with sad eyes who spoke in a Danish accent, leaned down beside the tub and whispered, seemingly at the point of tears, into the man's ear: "Listen carefully. You've been drugged, and they've taken your adenoids."

As the man was being placed on a stretcher for transport to the emergency room, a Chicago police investigator who had arrived on scene told him that not only was the woman he had picked up a known psychopath; she was notorious for being an extremely poor judge of the current black market value of various body parts.

On The Edge

Ah, for the old days, when not even a Rockefeller could bend the will of an obstinate small property owner who just didn't want to sell. (I'm thinking here of the famous case of Hurley's Saloon, whose owner forced Rockefeller Center to build its massive RCA building around the small bar.)

Today, of course, developers assemble neat, contiguous rectangles for their sites. And if the current owners resist their blandishments, the city will most likely be more than happy to invoke its expanding powers of eminent domain to muscle them out. Today, the premium is on relentless efficiency, and the often numbing regularity upon which it feeds. Which makes for cityscapes that are much more ordered, and a lot less interesting.

All this was brought to mind by an encounter with a new development from the Alter Group, 111 West Illinois, a ten-story office co-op that will be the new home of the Erickson Institute, which will leave behind its handsome brick loft building on Wabash, just north of the IBM Building and garage. For whatever reason - and I'd to imagine there's a good story behind it - two small, mundane commercial buildings on LaSalle somehow survive, even though they pinch 111 West Illinois to little more than a third of its Clark street frontage.

The irregular site has inspired an elegant solution from Solomon, Cordwell, Buenz's Martin Wolf, who recently won high praise from the Trib's Blair Kamin for his 340 on the Park highrise residential tower, part of the Lake Shore East development. As you can see from the rendering, he takes advantage of the finger jutting out from the main bulk of the building to give 111 West Illinois a triangular taper that reduces to a razor sharp exo-edge where it meets LaSalle.

The rise of the structure's steel skeleton has left behind some striking, almost Golgotha like images of spiking columns reaching skyward in the midst of giant cranes.

Openings still available for Archeworks fall term

Archeworks, the alternative design school founded by Stanley Tigerman and Eva Maddox, still has a few spaces available for its fall certificate program, beginning September 5th. Among projects students will work on over a nine-month period:

Systematizing a Sustainable Natural Food Ecosystem - develop a long-range plan for a sustainable, natural food cycle with the partnering Notebaert Nature Museum.
Bid for the 2016 Olympics - work with local government and neighborhood groups to ensure planning and development for the Summer Olympics in 2016 connects to the broader community landscape.
Design of Products for Stroke Survivors - partner with the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago (RIC) to explore design applications for improving work and home life of stroke survivors, with a specific focus on aphasia.

For more information, visit the Archeworks website, or call 312/867.7254

Wit on the Rise?

A year after its originally announced groundbreaking date, and after a year before that as an open, gaping pit, there's finally signs of actual construction on the site at northeast corner of State and Lake that's slated to become home to the Wit, a 26-story, 238 room hotel scheduled to be completed in 2009. Crain's Chicago Business reported in June that financing had been finalized for the $100 million project, from ECD Company, which is also building another hotel, the Aloft Millennium Park, at Balbo and Wabash, actually about six blocks south of the park, but who's counting? (It's replacing a long-lived surface parking lot next to the Blackstone, now Merle Reskin, Theater.)

The Wit's architect is Jackie Koo of Koo and Associates, an alumnus of Destefano + Partners, where Koo worked on a number of hotel and residential projects. Koo majored in philosophy from the U of C, and has a masters in architecture from UIC. (Thanks to the sleuths among the skyscraper enthusiasts on Skyscraper City for the info. )

Any architect who has the good sense to set up shop in John Wellborn Root's extraordinary Monadnock Building is off to a good start. The rendering of Koo's design for the Wit shows a rather mundane, servicey looking element to the north, abutting the Unitrin Building, and a thin spine, with a square notch at the top, on Lake Street to the east. (On one early depiction, these were colored black, but now appear a neutral concrete.) Between them is a shimmering glass curtain wall block spreading out from the corner, with a gold or yellow trimmed cutaway that incises a shallow triangular setback in the building's upper half. The trim doubles back on a diagonal that stretches down to a large central canopy over the State Street entrance.

Last year, ECD had talked about having trademarked Fritzel's, the name of the legendary Chicago restaurant that anchored the site for decades, declaring it was "planning to bring the iconic Chicago supper club back to State and Lake." I couldn't find any reference to this on the company's current web site, but I still wouldn't expect the Govnor's Pub/KFC/Taco Bell/Dunkin Donuts combine that occupied the former Fritzel's building until June of '05, when the city helpfully declared the whole thing unfit for habitation, to be coming back to serve the Wit's somewhat more upscale clientele.

CTBUH: Third stairwells in skyscrapers won't prevent another WTC

The Chicago-based Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat has come out against a proposed change to the 2009 International Building Code that would require skyscrapers of a height of 420 feet or more to have three exit stairwells. The proposal, recently approved by the International Code Council, comes out of the National Institute of Standards and Technology's investigation into the 2001 collapse of the World Trade Towers in New York City. The NIST came up with a list of 30 recommendations, including increasing the bonding strength of fireproofing of structural steel by up to a factor of seven, photoluminescent markings of exit paths, and recommendation 17, which mandates the third stairwell to expedite evacuation while separating occupants fleeing the building from firefighters entering the building to battle the emergency. That recommendation is now part of the proposed 2009 IBC.

CTBUH claims the change would not improve safety, but "if applied to many current or proposed schemes, would make them economically unviable and could de-value existing tall building stock." It classifies the proposal as "an outdated method for designing tall or complex buildings. A performance based approach where one tests the design against a set of functional aims using risk based and engineering analyses is the preferred solution internationally and will lead to buildings where the level of safety is demonstrated to be adequate, not assumed to be acceptable." The new IBC would set new safety standards that would likely be incorporated into local building codes of individual municipalities.

Ring a Rosy Lighting Spirals Trump Garage

The garage for Chicago's new Trump Tower is among of its most distinctive elements, and one of the few that actually approaches a human dimension. With its scalloping glass curtain wall, it provides a new visual terminus to Kinzie Street. Its lights, just turned on, create a dashed underline to the structure's continuous, spiraling parking ramp. (As you may notice, the weather in Chicago has been rather murky.)

Where Am I?3 The Answers Revealed

Can you identify these locations? Answers to follow.

3. Score one for Frogger, who correctly identified the last photograph, of the former Stock Yards Bank Building, at Exchange and Halsted, which is obviously in grave need of a savior.


2. The bust comes from the masonry gate in front of the Newberry Estate Houses, 827-833 North Dearborn. It's taken from Adler and Sullivan's lost masterpiece Schiller Theater, where it was one many similar visages of the giants of German culture.

1. The 1901 rectory of Adolphus Druiding's 1893 St. John Cantius Roman Catholic Church, on Carpenter, just north of Chicago and just east of Halsted. one of the first in Chicago to restore the Tridentine Latin mass. Its church bells used to be heard reliably on the quarter hour from 6:00 A.M. to 11:00 P.M., but now thanks to the protests of (two) gentrifying neighbors, if you want to know the time late in the evening, don't look to God. You'll have to settle for your digital watch -the bells are silenced at 9:00 P.M.

It's Official - Calatrava's Chicago Spire Hole in the Ground

So far, he's been true to his word. Garrett Kelleher, the Gatsby-like developer behind the $2 billion Chicago Spire, a project he's launching without a single pre-sale, had said he expected to get architect Santiago Calatrava's twisting, 150-story tower into the ground quickly, and if its not quite the spring launch he predicted before the Chicago Plan Commission last April, it's close. See a photo essay on the early stirrings on the site here.

Chicago Streetscene - Wedding Picture at Millennium Park

Thompson Commissary Update - Blame Alschuler!

After I wrote some less than kind things about the new polished granite at the base of the Thompson Commissary Building on Clark, an anonymous reader, whose depth of knowledge launches me through the five stages of reaction - envy, annoyance, despair, acceptance and admiration - brought to my attention that the material used in the rehab was chosen after a careful historical investigation that found that it closely matched the base pieces' original color and patterning.

It's impractical to carry terra cotta down to the sidewalk level. Rain, snow, ice and our city's addiction to the liberal use of melting salts, coupled with time, eat through the material like Kobayashi through hot dogs. So, another material is substituted at the base.

For the Thompson Commissary Building rehab, they were able to find some broken panels that still held the original color and pattern, along with a historic photograph that confirmed the original base was much darker than the facade's terra cotta, presenting the same high contrast that's found in the new polished granite replacements.

So it turns out that if I've got a beef with anyone, it's not with developer Albert Friedman, whose been a conscientious custodian of historic buildings in the booming River North district that's largely his creation, beginning with the rehab of the Otto Matz's 1893 Cook Country Criminal Court Building at 54 West Hubbard, now known as Courthouse Square. Yes, I still think the polished granite is a poor match for the rising cream of the terra cotta above it, and yes, I'm second guessing the Thompson's highly accomplished architect, Alfred Alschuler.

His contemporaries found ways of dealing with the same, inescapable problem with solutions that seem a lot more fitting.

In the case of the Reliance Building, Charles Atwood didn't even start the terra cotta until the second story. The double-height entrance floor is faced in granite with bronze trim. At the Wrigley Building, the terra cotta carries all the way down through the ground floor, but the bottom pieces, replaced only a few years ago, are of Bedford limestone.

I'm glad the base of the Thompson has been restored with such an attention to historical accuracy. It doesn't falsify the past to make it fit our current aesthetic preferences, but brings it back to us with the bark off. I still say it's spinach, but what do I know? Stroll by and check it out for yourself, and come to your own conclusions.

CAF collecting donations to assist family of docent Steven O'Rourke

Anyone who's ever taken a Chicago Architecture Foundation tour knows that the volunteer docents who lead them - profoundly knowledgeable enthusiasts for our rich legacy - are among the city's most treasured assets.

You've already probably read the tragic story about how one of these great docents, Steven O'Rourke, an architect who gave tours to third and fourth grade students, recently lost his life to a hit-and-run driver, leaving behind wife Rachel, and three children, ages 1, 4 and 9.

The Chicago Architecture Foundation is currently collecting donations to assist Steven O'Rourke's family through this difficult time. Checks should be made out to CAF, which will combine the funds into a single contribution to the Rachel McKee Family Assistance Fund, which the CAF is hoping to make by August 15th. "Please be sure to include your full mailing and e-mail addresses along with your contribution so your assistance to Steve's family can be properly recognized."

The mailing address is:

Chicago Architecture Foundation
224 South Michigan Avenue
Chicago, Illinois 60604

If only Fazlur Khan had thought of engineering Sears Tower in renewable Pine

"Oh, no, Mr. Thornhill; there is no George Kaplan."

Apparently, there's no Mr. KAPLA, either. The pine blocks bearing that name are the creation of Dutchman Tom van der Bruggen, and the name itself is an abbreviation of “Kabouter Plankjes”, which, the company website tells us, is Dutch for "gnome planks".

They're the kind of blocks Mies might have loved, as they're all based on "progressions of the uneven numbers 1:3:5. 3 thickness for one width and five widths for one length." They don't snap together; the constructions are held together by basic gravity. Add a measure of creativity, and the rectangular blocks can create constructions that are both flexible in shape, and of incredible size and intricacy, as can be seen in the various models posted on the KAPLA USA website.

The master gnomes of KAPLA have visited the Chicago Tourism Center at 72 E. Randolph, and left behind a mini-city of KAPLA towers, ringed by its own Loop L, in which the centerpiece is a soaring replica of the Sears Tower. Courtesy of roving correspondent Bob Johnson of Bowman, Barrett & Associates, we offer you this photo of the Tourism Center installation, which also includes a number of other skyscrapers a la Kapla. (See if you can find the shrunken head version of Taipei 101 in the photo's lower right.)

Staff hopes to keep the installation up for a while, and this weekend, Saturday and Sunday, July 28th and 29th, from 11:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M., the KAPLA master builders will be back to demonstrate KAPLA building techniques and create replicas of other Chicago landmarks.

Conceptual Architecture made Flesh - Apu's Kwik-E-Mart

Yes, today marks the opening of the long awaited opening of The Simpsons Movie, and so after this weekend the Kwik-E-Mart returns to the realm of the cartoon. For the next few days, however, you can still visit one of only 11 Seven-Elevens in the U.S. that have been transformed into replicas of the legendary convenience store in the long-running series. So here's a few photos from our roving correspondent Nora Fitzpatrick from Apu's Chicago Brigadoon, at 6754 W. 63rd Street.

As reported by the Chicago Tribune, manager Frenko Rahana has temporarily been taken over by the spirit of Apu, answering the phone using his name, and, just like in the series, telling each departing customer or shoplifter, “Thank you. Come again.” The Kwiki-E-Mart is stocked with all products Simpson, from KrustyO's cereal ("Now with 20% more air"), Buzz Cola, and pink (or Pepto-Bismal, in the words of Trib writer Charles Leroux) frosted Sprinkilicious donuts

Ummmmmmmmmmm,

donuts

which the Wall Street Journal reports are flying off the shelves at the L.A. Kwik-E-Mart at the rate of 4,000 a day.

Architecture in the Simpsons' Springfield will be the subject of an upcoming 2008 exhibition, From Concert Hall to Maximum Security, Paradigms of Virtual Architecture, to be curated by Joe Rosa for the Art Institute. (just kidding . . . I think.)

The Road to Widgitdom - more on the sale of the Chicago Reader

More on the sale of the Chicago Reader, the alternative weekly that gave me my writing career, which was sold yesterday (see yesterday's post) to Creative Loafing:
1. The Reader's Mike Miner reports on his blog on Wednesday's staff meeting with new owner Ben Eason. While Eason told Miner his view of the importance of editorial was "It's everything," Miner seems less than convinced. "A newspaper, I think I read somewhere, is supposed to be a community talking to itself, and owners from a thousand miles away make an intrusive addition to the conversation." Only recently consolidated from four to three sections, the Reader will now become a single-section tabloid.
2. Editor and Publisher reports that, just as Conrad Black sold off the Chicago Sun-Time's prime riverfront site to Donald Trump, the Reader is being divested of a key asset - its real estate. The Hubbard Street loft building in which the Reader operates is not part of the Creative Loafing deal, but is being sold in a separate deal to InStep Software. On its website, a company named InStep Software LLC lists its Chicago headquarters address as 55 E. Monroe.
3. San Francisco Bay Guardian blogger Tim Redmond speculates the Creative Loafing deal had to involve at least $25 million.
4. Pepsi or Coke? Both E&P and New York City's Gawker raise the possibility that just two mega-chains, Creative Loafing and Village Voice Media, may wind up essentially controlling alternative weeklies throughout the nation.

So here's what we're left with. One emerging chain of alternative newspapers, Village Voice Media, based in Phoenix. A second, Creating Loafing, run out of Tampa. Assurances notwithstanding, how much can these managements have their fingers on the pulse of their flagship cities of New York and Chicago?

Newspapers traditional role as engines of local identity is being rapidly eroded. In our market economy, efficiency is all. While Macy’s or the Tribune Company may talk of consistently and reliably high quality being the result of standardization, the more likely result, as mandated by the supply chain, will be the lowest common denominator they think consumers can be induced to tolerate.

Macy’ service and standing among consumers won’ be improved by its just announced policy to cut associates’ pay, down to the lowest tolerable denominator, but if parent Federated Department Stores thinks it will give a quick shot to the bottom line, no matter how short-lived, who cares?

The Tribune Company is loading up with billions of dollars of debt in a buyout deal where the cash goes to Sam Zell and his partners while the employees are left holding the bag. As the nominal owners of the company under an ESOP (Employee Stock Ownership Plan), their principal holding will be a mountain of IOU ‘s so overwhelming that, more than likely, it will soon send the corporation careening towards bankruptcy. Will Ben Eason ‘s investors be any more patient in expecting what they consider an adequate return on their $25 million stake? Can there be enough cuts to satisfy that beast?

Eason appears to smitten with the old media idea that the way to conquer the web is to throw money at it. ""You need money and manpower to compete on the Internet," E&P quotes Eason as saying. "I can sit there and publish in four markets and let every venture capitalist guy in Silicon Valley fund some fresh new start-up and come after us or we could go and do our own national company and get out in front of them."

Of course, most Internet phenomenons started out as almost guerrilla-like operations. Think Craigslist. The very mention of its name raises terrors in the hearts of old media, but it had its genesis in the actions of just one man, Craig Newmark, and as a hobby. It grew through the use of volunteers and contractors.

Old media types like Eason are always looking through the wrong end of the telescope. In his mind, if he bulks up enough, national advertisers will be so seduced by his massive corporate physique that they won't be able to keep themselves from throwing business his way. Oh, and now that you've got that all worked out, take a few seconds to figure out how to redesign the product to fit the business model.

The irony is that in obsessing over consolidating and homogenizing, old media companies blind themselves to the true power of the Internet. While their product is looking more and more interchangeable, the genius of the Internet is how easy it is to match up readers to content in a very individualized way. RSS, blogs and portals allow Internet users to make up their own newspapers from millions of different sources. The question is not how to take The Reader, or the Chicago Tribune, or even New York Times, to the Internet, but what professional news delivery should be in a wired universe. And the killer app isn't going to come out of a boardroom or an endless series of conferences with venture capitalists, but from a student center, or a rooftop deck, or a Starbucks, from someone with a laptop cruising the Internet with curiosity and intent.