Green, Green - in Germany and the U.S., and at Chicago Architectural Club Round Table

Even as we head into the annual ceremony of ritual avian sacrifice, we're still adding events to the November calendar.

This Tuesday, November 20th at 6:30 P.M., going up against Hernán Díaz Alonso's appearance at the Art Institute beginning a half hour earlier, the Chicago Architectural Club, at the iSpace Gallery, will be holding the first of what it expects to be a series of roundtable discussions, this one exploring the questions of: What is the role of the architect in the Green Revolution? What role does technology play? What about authorship? And what does "Green" mean, anyway? Have we been too quick to define the term?

There's still more green a week later, November 27th from 1:30 to 6:00 PM at the Merchandise Mart, when the German American Chamber of Commerce in the Midwest and Baden-Wuerttemberg International (BW-I) present a forum, Transatlantic Perspectives on Energy Efficient Architecture in Germany and the United States, where the roster of participants will include Helmut Meyer of Transsolar, as well as Erik Olsen of the Chicago Department of Buildings talking about the city's Green Permit program.

Both programs are free, but require RSVP's. The Transatlantic Perspectives forum is limited to 60 participants. Click on each event's link above for more info.

Putti Gone Wild

Via the indefatigable Joan Pomaranc comes word that an antique bronze clock and matching candelabra owned by the late theater historian Joseph DuciBella will be put up for auction on Sunday, November 25th by Elgin's Bunte Auction. DuciBella, who died this past June, had rescued the ensemble from the Magnolia Street side of the lobby of the Uptown Theater, the grand, 1926 4000-seat Chicago movie palace that has been shuttered since 1981. (Chicago Inside is again reporting that no less than two national promoters - Jam Productions and Live Nation - are interested in rescuing the severely decayed landmark from its long slumber.)

Bunte Auction's backstory relates that DuciBella acquired the clock after it had been sold to the Hoosier Theater in Whiting, Indiana, and that "the three pieces were black as coal. Think of the accumulated tarnish and dirt of the theatre and the thousands of curious fingers that had touched it!"

Somehow the almost deliriously ornate clock seems a perfect distillation of the brief, populist era of the movie palace, when the high Baroque and the palaces of the super-rich were reimagined as a royal backdrop for the working class audiences who filled the massive theater, day after day.

The Sunday, November 25th auction will be at Bunte Auction, 755 Church Road in Elgin.

POSTSCRIPT: Please click on the comments to this post to read the Uptown Advisor's response to critical comments about this sale.

(Half) Billion Dollar Baby

In still another milestone in the city's growing TIF scandal, Crain's Chicago Business reported today that Cook County Clerk David Orr estimates that for the new tax year, the amount of money diverted into Chicago's TIF districts will cross the half-billion dollar mark, to $500.4 million, 29% more than just the year before, and triple the amount diverted just five years ago. At this rate, the amount of money diverted into TIF's may soon eclipse undiverted revenues - $820 million in 2008.

Even as TIF diversions were set to rise by $114,000,000, the Chicago City Council on Tuesday passed , by a vote of 29 to 21, the Daley's administration $86 million property tax increase, part of over a quarter billion dollars of increases in taxes, fees and fines.

With the mayor chortling appreciatively from the podium, 29th ward alderman Issac Carothers praised himself and his colleagues for being supine pushovers for Daley's unprecedented increases. "Thank God for the folks in this council who did the heavy lifting for you. Thank God."

"Heavy lifting" and "alderman" is, of course, an oxymoron, as the only energy usually expended by an alderman is the expulsion of hot air. The real heavy lifting will come from Chicago residents, including the city's poor, out of whose pockets the $270 million will be picked, even as TIF's funnel increasingly large bundles of money to increasingly questionable projects, ($40 million to the Chicago Board of Trade, $58 to the developer of an ill-conceived addition to Union Station, etc.).

So why are the mayor and his captive aldermen laughing? Because they know by the next time they're up for election, in 2011, you'll have forgotten all about it.

Chicago Streetscenes - Bridgework, Towards the Light

Classicists Double the Stakes

It was announced last week that philanthropist Richard Driehaus has doubled the dollar amount for the annual Driehaus Prize, the counter-Pritzker recognizing anti-modernist architects, from $100,000 to $200,000. The Henry Hope Read award, given to classical supporters who are not architects, also doubles, to $50,000.

Both awards are administered by the University of Notre Dame School of Architecture. The jury for the 2008 award, whose recipients are to be named later this month, included Driehaus, Notre Dame architecture dean Michael Lykoudis, and New Yorker architecture critic Paul Goldberger, among others. Last year's winner was Jaquelin T. Robertson, whose Charleston Judicial Center is show here. Other past receipients include Quinlan Terry, Demetri Porphyrios and Leon Krier.

Meanwhile, the opening of Driehaus' Museum of Decorative Arts in the restored Nickerson Mansion has been pushed back indefinitely. For a preview of its spectacular interiors, check out the photos accompanying this October Chicago Magazine profile of Driehaus here. You can also read Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin's interview with Richard Driehaus about his doubled efforts here.

Also this week, classicist Thomas Gordon Smith will be delivering The Classical Perspective, a talk about the "current reanimation of classical architecture", at a Landmarks Illinois Preservation Snapshots lecture 12:15 P.M. this Thursday, November 15th, at the Claudia Cassidy Theater at the Chicago Cultural Center, 77 East Randolph.

"What Elephant?" says Civic Federation report

The Civic Federation released its report on TIF's (tax increment financing) today, and the local media are reading into it what they want to see.

The Chicago Tribune, big corporate's best friend who's been largely silent on the Chicago TIF scandal, ran its story under this headline:

Special tax districts hit wallets but spur growth, study finds. Study says spurring growth is trade-off

Crain's Chicago Business, which along its political reporter Greg Hinz has been uncovering the stink of the city's TIF slush funds, ran its own story with:

TIF programs need reform: Civic Federation

The most hallucinatory conclusion of the Civic Federation study, as reported in Crain's, is that while TIF's raise taxes on the parts of the city not in a TIF, that's not a really a problem, because "when the district expires, all property-tax revenues, including that from the new growth, return to the regular pool shared by the city, county, public schools and other local governments."

Well, I guess that makes it all OK then. According to the Civic Federation, all that criticism of Chicago's TIF's is just a big misunderstanding. Except, wait - exactly how does money start flowing back to schools and public services when, as of today, NOT A SINGLE Chicago TIF district has EVER been terminated. Most of Chicago's TIF districts have a life of 23 years, but, like copyright, they throw off too many goodies for addicted politicians not to convert them into permanent fixtures.

The poster child for this is the Central Loop TIF, created in 1984. Even after a full generation and three quarters of a billion dollars in spending, its still appears to have failed to have raised the Loop above the level of an officially "blighted" area - the Daley administration keeps dropping hints it will push to renew the TIF when it expires next year.

When the Civic Federation talks about TIF districts being abolished, it's like Marx talking about the State withering away - pretty soon a Commissar has taken up residence in your house and is guzzling down all the good vodka. I've heard some people claim to have quit heroin "cold turkey", but for most drunkards - with wine, with poetry, with virtue, or with TIF's, à votre guise - salvation comes only with intervention.

Whitewash though it is, the Civic Federation still makes some interesting recommendations on increasing transparency and accountability, and includes a great deal of analysis and data not found on the city's new TIF pages, including a complete list of all the projects funded by the Central Loop TIF. I'm still working my way through its 97 pages (and hoping Ben Joravsky will provide his usual cogent analysis in the Reader), but you can grab a cup of hot chocolate, stretch out before the fireplace, laptop in hand, and download it for yourself here.

Louis Sullivan: Under Construction

Last November, we were covering the destruction of the 1888 George Harvey House, the last of no less than three rare, irreplaceable Adler & Sullivan designed structures to be destroyed by fire in a single year.

2007 comes to close on a more positive note. This time it's not destruction, but construction that's going on at another three of Louis Sullivan's designs.

Last year, Sullivan's ornate long-lost cornice for his 1899 Carson Pirie Scott store was beautifully reconstructed under the direction of preservation architect Gunny Harboe, just in time for the century-old department store to announce it would be closing its doors early in 2007. The new owner, Joseph Freed & Associates, is in the process of converting most of the structure to office space, and is still seeking tenants for retail on the lower floors.

Now the Chicago City Council has given final approval to a $9.48 million TIF subsidy towards the estimated $11.82 million cost of repairing and restoring Sullivan's intricate, almost obsessively fecund foliate cast-iron ornament that frames the shop windows of the first two floors of the building. "Experience the Magic" proclaims the signage covering the scaffolding, echoing the "Something Magic is Happening" slogan on the shade put over Macy's windows when they're being changed, a Disneyfied invocation of the occult that manages to be creepy and insipid at the same time. In the case of Macy's, the unveiled "magic", except during the Christmas holiday, is usually just another pedestrian window setting. At Carson's, at least, the finished product has a much better shot at actually fulfilling the promise.

One block down State Street, opposite the Palmer House, a far more mundane - and largely unnoticed - Sullivan design, the 1884 Morgenthau, Bauland and Company store, trashed long ago in a clunky "modernization", is also covered in scaffolding for a new Ulta cosmetics store.If you look up to the building's crown, you can see the last remnants of Sullivan's ornament.
Things are also looking up at the 1881 Jeweler's Building on Wabash, designed by Sullivan before he became Sullivan, in a sort of 1870's commercial Gothic style that still manages to carry intimations of a master's touch. For as long as I can remember, the building's been trashed by the second floor windows being covered up with green-painted wood inserts.
Now, the wood is gone, the windows again revealed. The building is losing its haphazard derelict patina, and the rough beauty of the young Sullivan's conception allowed to again come through.

Farewell to Norman

Brooklyn, however, beautiful Brooklyn, grew beneath the skyscrapers of Manhattan, so it never became a great city, merely an asphalt herbarium for talent destined to cross the river. Chicago did not have Manhattan to preempt the top branches, so it grew up from the savory of its neighborhoods to some of the best high-rise architecture in the world, and because its people were Poles and Ukrainians and Czechs as well as Irish and the rest, the city had Byzantine corners worthy of Prague or Moscow, odd tortured attractive drawbridges over the Chicago River, huge Gothic spires like the skyscraper which held the Chicago Tribune, curves and abutments and balconies in cylindrical structures thirty stories high twisting in and out of the curves of the river, and fine balustrades in its parks. Chicago had a North Side on Lake Shore Drive where the most elegant apartment buildings in the world could be found -- Sutton Place in New York betrayed the cost analyst in the eye of the architect next to these palaces of glass and charcoal colored steel. In superb back streets behind the towers on the lake were brownstones which spoke of ironies, cupidities and intricate ambition in the fists of the robber barons who commissioned them--substantiality, hard work, heavy drinking, carnal meats of pleasure, and a Midwestern sense of how to arrive at upper-class decorum, were also in the American grandeur of these few streets . . .

Norman Mailer, Miami and the Siege of Chicago

London and Chicago Olympic Stadiums - Separated at Birth?

London		Chicago
Olympic size
80,000 seats		80,000 seats
Post-Olympic size
25,000 seat stadium		5,000 seat amphitheatre
Mayoral Hyperbole
" . . . the best stadium ever constructed anywhere on the planet.” - Ken Livingstone		". . . will create an urban legacy that will outlive the end of the Olympic Games" - Richard M. Daley
Original Cost Estimate
£280,000,000 ($590,000,000) (2004)		$300,000,000 (September, 2006)
Latest Cost Estimate
£496,000,000 ($1,044,000,000) (November, 2007)		$366,000,000 (June, 2007)
Initial Reaction to Revised Design
"a bowl of blancmange"		still awaiting first revision

Stop Taking Pictures of Marina City!

(Plus, a spectacular 1965 film on the construction of Bertrand Goldberg's masterpiece)

Serving on a condo board can be a thankless, high-pressure job. That's the only excuse I can think of for the declaration, equal parts loony and arrogant, of the board of the Marina Towers Condo Association:

"Because of the architectural significance of our building, the Condominium Association holds a common law copyright on the use of the Association name and building image. This means that under Federal and Illinois law, advertisers, movie makers and others cannot use the Association name or image without first obtaining express written permission from the Association . ."

Bloggers such as Marina City Online have been having a field exposing the shear stupidity of the declaration, reportedly drafted by the board's long-time attorney Ellis Levin, a long way away from his days as a progressive, independent legislator.

What kind of idiot do you have to be to actually insert the phrase "under Federal and Illinois law," when copyrights are a federal protection, and have nothing to do with state law? Then there's the inconvenient fact the condo owners only own the top 40 floors of each 60-story tower. Exactly how can they claim to own a copyright to "Marina Towers" when the first 20 stories of the towers, and the other structures of the commercial complex, are owned by someone else? And then there's the matter of exclusivity. Upon a quick Googlecheck, here are just a few of the other "Marina Towers" throughout the world.

Alexandria, Virginia
Corpus Christi, Texas
Marina del Rey, California
Oceanside, North Carolina
Beirut, Lebanon
Chennai, India
Dubai

No doubt the MTCA will soon be attempting to shake them down for royalties.

Marina City Online's Steven Dahlman deftly dissects the sloppy posturing of the board's proposal here. He has even engaged attorney Thomas D. Rosenwein, who refutes its basic legality here. Chicago Carless' Mike Doyle, redeeming himself from his support for the Chicago Children's Museum land grab in Grant Park, has also covered the topic here. And to get feel for the eclectic mix of residents at the towers, check out the MarinaWatchDog blog, which consists entirely of comment postings - some reasoned, some impassioned, some almost inscrutably strange.

As you probably already know, I am also a long term resident of Marina City. I feature numerous photos of Bertrand Goldberg's masterpiece on my website and this blog, and I guess I actually qualify as a commercial interest, as I receive regular, if pitiable, checks from Google from the ads they run there.

The proposed change to Rule Number 5 is scheduled to be voted on November 15th. So I say to Ellis and the board, pass your rule and then - please, please, please - come after me. If you're so dead set on embarrassing the building, the board, its residents, and - come to think of it - the very notion of intelligent human life, I will be a willing co-conspirator in getting your buffoonery the widest possible audience.

The Making of Marina City
On a much more positive note, an unexpected pleasure I encountered when researching this post is photographer Steven Dahlman's aforementioned Marina City Online website, co-created with real estate broker Michael Michalak. As opposed to MCTA's own almost laughably pedestrian website, Marina City Online has a wealth of useful information, including a listing of recent unit sales, maps and floorplans, and an encyclopedic history of Marina City, beautifully illustrated.

Did you know, for example, that Marina City is located on Block 1 on Chicago's original 1837 township map, or that the site was once owned by former Chicago Mayor Thomas Dyer (1856-57)? There's even a Currier and Ives lithograph showing the site and its environs circa 1892.

But perhaps the most spectacular feature of the site is a 1965, documentary, This is Marina City, produced by the Portland Cement Association. The bad news is that film has grown more than a little fuzzy with time, but the film's color images are still nothing short of breathtaking. You see the site before construction begins, surrounding by a vanished city, huge cold storage warehouses on the other side of Dearborn, surface parking at the level of the river where the IBM building is now. The film was a showpiece for the trade unions, who financed the project as a calling card for their services, just as the PCA would produce the film to promote its products.

Every phase of construction is covered - the excavation for the caissons, the complex formwork for the central cores, rising like slender reeds high into the skyline; more formwork, this time like something out of Gaudi, for the curving balconies, the painstaking pouring of the floor slabs, and views of the building at the time of its opening - the skating rink and the modern sculptures that once encircled it, the original elevator lobbies, Johnny Lattner's riverside restaurant, the gleaming glass displays cases of the first grocery store, and the office building, now the Hotel Sax, that then included the offices of Bertrand Goldberg, himself. An enthralling time capsule of a great building and its time. See it here.

Preservation of Historic Muslim Architecture on exhibit at Symphony Center - Wright Wasmuth Portfolio show extended

The Aga Khan Historic Cities Programme Exhibition will be making a stop at Symphony Center, 220 South Michigan Avenue, this weekend, part of a ten city American tour. A project of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, Historic Cities, established in 1992, promoting "the conservation and re-use of buildings and public spaces in historic cities in the Muslim World" and how it can "build bridges, not only between the past and present in the Muslim world, but also between the Muslim world and the West."

Among the projects featured in Humayun's Tomb, constructed between 1562 and 1572 in Delhi, Indian. The red standstone monument is reputed to be the first example of the type of garden tomb that would reach its apex with the Taj Mahal. The Aga Khan Trust funded a 2003 restoration that returned water to the tomb's fountains and the grid of waterways that divide its garden into four large squares. Projects will also be on display from Egypt, Mali, Afghanistan and Syria.

The exhibition is free and open to the public on the 2nd and 3rd level of Symphony Center's rotunda Friday, November 9th from 12 to 10 P.M., Saturday the 10th from 10 A.M. to 10 P.M., and Sunday the 11th from 10 A.M., to 5:00 P.M. The exhibition is being held in conjuction with a Friday, November 9th 8:00 P.M. concert, Spiritual Sounds of Central Asia, featuring "Alim Qasimov, the legendary mugham singer from Azerbaijan, whose music cellist Yo-Yo Ma says 'can be described in just three words: simplicity, depth and transcendence'; Tajikistan’s seven-person Badakhshan Ensemble, performing its trance-inducing mystical songs; and the Bardic Divas from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Kalmykia demonstrating the power of the female voice."

On another note, the exhibition of lithographs from the legendary 1910 Wasmuth Portfolio that brought the work of Frank Lloyd Wright to the attention of Europe has been extended through December 29th. The portfolio established Wright's reputation, and influenced a generation of European architects, many of whose work, as emigres to America during World War II, channeled Wright's ideas into an "International Style" that Wright himself would come to detest. The exhibition is on display, with individual items available for purchase, at the ArchiTech Gallery, 730 North Franklin, Suite 200, open Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays from noon to 5:00 P.M. "or by chance or appointment."

"The Library" at IIT dedicates new expansion.

Last Friday night, the Graham Resource Center, commonly known as "The Library" of the School of Architecture of the Illinois Institute of Technology, celebrated a major expansion of both its space and its collection. The library, located on the lower level of the Mies van der Rohe's iconic Crown Hall, has doubled its space, to 6,000 square feet.

"About two years ago," said Dean of Architecture Donna Robertson, "Professor Harry Mallgrave, who was new to my faculty, said to me, 'You know, this library is not up to snuff.' I said, 'I know, I know. I'm trying to grow it, with no money.' He said, 'I'm going to write a letter to the alumni and ask them to donate. He did, and it worked."

"I would say around 20 to 25 alumni responded," says Head Librarian Matt Cook. "That seems low, but they gave us 13,000 books. Some of those donors gave us huge collections. We've got George Danforth, Myron Goldsmith, Paul Thomas. Deever Rockwell donated some Alfred Caldwell works, which we currently have on display."

"Since I started here four years ago, we've gone from 5,000 to 15,000 books. We've hired a second librarian to get the new donations processed. It's only going to be a couple of years until this library is filled. It's capacity is 35,000 and we'll be there relatively soon. We have about 35,000 slides. We're working diligently at digitizing those."

"Champaign-Urbana, I think is the best architectural library in the Midwest. I think we're awfully close to being the best architectural library in the city."

"We're open to the general public. Anyone can come in. We're open and people can use our collections." Cook said the library's current hours are 8:00 A.M. to 10:00 P.M., Monday through Thursday, closing at 7:00 P.M. on Fridays, 10:00 A.M. to 8:00 P.M. on Saturday, and noon to 10:00 P.M. on Sundays.

Robertson also announced the school is starting an endowment fund to support the Graham Resource Center.

The evening concluded with a lecture by Kenneth Frampton, Ware Professor of Architecture, Columbia University, who gave a preview of a book to be published by Rizzoli, documenting Frampton's course on the Comparative Critical Analysis of Built Form. ("The publishers," said Frampton, "being publishers, don't exactly think [that's] a swinging title.")

"The dinosaur is still in the habit of showing the slides," Frampton confided, but the lecture was accompanied by what "I also have to say in perfect embarrassment, is the first Powerpoint presentation of my life." The slides appeared to be page mockups for the future book, which left, to Frampton's chagrin, many of graphics small and sometimes difficult to decipher. There may be something to said for the old-fashioned kind of slides, after all.

Frampton developed the comparative analysis exercise in the 1960's from the observation that, "Analyzing one building was a sort of tautological exercise . . . if one analyzes two buildings that had a number of things in common, one could come to a kind of revelation, if you like, a consciousness of the sameness and difference between of the two buildings . . . in order to exemplify the potential of built form" and bring the intrinsic character of the examples into sharper relief. "That's why I begin the course with two buildings that both have polemical manifesto's attached to them. One has the Five Points of New Architecture, which is Maison Cook of Le Corbusier, and the other has the Sixteen Points of a Plastic Architecture," G. Rietveld's Schröder-Schräder House.

Chicago's $895 Million Dollar Elephant in the Room

Sometimes Chicago's infatuation with Mayor Richard M. Daley is understandable - the city is green, clean and with lots of new construction. Other times - in the face of pandemic corruption, the continuing protection of torturing cops, the shambles of the CTA - it seems to take on the form of mass delusion.

How else to explain the schizoid ability of the city's major civic associations and mainstream media to rant and rave about Chicago's mounting pile of crises while remaining willfully blind to the billion dollar scandal behind them. The mayor has taken a sound development tool - the TIF, or tax increment financing, district, used to jump-start private investment in depressed neighborhoods - and transformed it into a massive slush fund that diverts nearly $400 million each year from schools and basic city services.

The only Chicago journalist regularly paying attention to the scandal, the Chicago Reader's Ben Joravsky, has an article this week analyzing information the city has finally, after years of keeping them it a deep, dark secret, posted about the TIF program on the city's website. Joravsky added up the amount of TIF money sitting in bank accounts, as of December 31st. And what did he find? How does $895,000,000 strike you?

Let's put this in perspective: that number is 8 times the mayor's proposed $108 million hike in property taxes. It's 8 times the CTA's 2007 operating deficit, and 3 times the mayor's proposed $293 million overall increase in taxes, fees and fines. It's even more than the outrageous $888 million dollar in tax hikes sought by Cook County Board President Todd Stroger.

And yet all the pontificators continue to swallow the mayoral kool-aid. They faithfully cover the mayor's press conferences demanding Springfield get it's act together to save the CTA, but they always seem to forget to mention that Diamond Jim Brady's own contribution has been stuck at a paltry $5,000,000 a year for a better part of a decade. Even as he points fingers everywhere else, he's shown absolutely no interest in increasing it.

Yet Daley's administration has earmarked $40 million in his TIF slush fund for the Chicago Mercantile Exchange/Chicago Board of Trade, despite the fact that:

1. the CME/CBOT has never threatened to leave the city.
2. far from being economically distressed, it's rolling in money, recently announcing a 94% increase in third quarter profits, to over $200 million.
3. it's not adding jobs, but slashing them, as it eliminates redundancies in the merged organizations.

TIF's have been allowed to become chronic enablers of massive - and massively costly - stupidity. The "superstation" under Block 37 could said to be its poster child. Its basic concept of creating a crossover track between the Red and Blue subway lines - at what is arguably the most expensive location in the city to do it - is designed to support express service to the city's airports that does not exist. There is no plan to make it exist. There's no source for the additional funding - upwards of a billion and a half dollars, according to some estimates - required to create the track bypasses to make such a service possible.

No matter - at a time when basic CTA maintenance was being deferred for lack of funds, $217 million was commited to the superstation project and $42 million of that was TIF funding. Now it's become the nightmare that keeps on giving. Crain Chicago Business's Greg Hinz is reporting this week that cost overruns on the project are at $100 million and counting, with TIF funds again being eyed as one way to plug the deficit.

In August, Crain's reported the city was talking with Macquarie Bank, which did the $1.8 billion 2004 deal leasing the Chicago Skyway from the city, about a possible similar deal to bail out the city from its station from Hell. It would become the latest addition to the mayor's ongoing fire sale - with Midway airport next - of Chicago's assets. The mayor gets a huge pot of money upfront in exchange for a 99-year lease, and unseen future residents, onto the fifth generation, get stuck with the problems. And if you don't think there's a good chance of there being problems, check out Fortune magazine's cautionary article where one analyst portrays Macquarie's business model as bearing "the hallmarks of a Ponzi scheme." In the case of the Skyway deal, Fortune reports: "In 2007 the Skyway will pay interest of just $129,000 on $961 million of debt. But the interest payment for 2018 is to be $480 million - that's not a typo."

Mayor Daley has been in office nearly two decades. He still struts down the street in his pinstripe master manager suit, but the threads have begun to fray. Can Chicago's media and civic elite ever bring themselves to call him to account? Or will they persist in seeing only what he wants them to see, the emperor's new clothes, until the garment completely disintegrates and we find only Abe Beame underneath?

Mayne, Cruz, Mau, Park, Kaijima, Lee, Smith, Diaz Alonso, Harboe, Sex Pistols

Can you spot the only one of the preceding list of names who will NOT be appearing in Chicago in November? On this month's calendar, UIC has no fewer than four lectures, including Momoyo Kaijima of Atelier Bow-Wow on the 12th, Alejandro Zaera-Polo of Foreign Office Architects on the 16th, Kamiel Klasse of NL Architects on the 19th, and Morphosis' Thom Mayne on the 7th. Gunny Harboe discusses his recent projects at a lunchtime CAF lecture on the 28th, while Thomas Gordon Smith discusses The Classical Perspective for Landmarks Illinois noontime, November 15th, at the Cultural Center. Bruce Mau appears at Archeworks on the 14th - that same day Christopher Lee will dicuss his firm's recent work at another CAF lunchtime lecture. SOM's Mark Sarkisian will talk about the legacy of legendary engineer Fazlur Khan at the Union League for SEAOI on the 13th.

It all begins tonight, Thursday, November 1st, with architect Teddy Cruz delivering the APA/NBM L'enfant lecture, From the Global Border to the Border Neighborhood, at the Cultural Center, while over at Archeworks, you can take in projects at the Midterm Student Critique. Then on Friday, the expanded Graham Resource Center in Crown Hall at ITT celebrates the debut of its expanded facilities, followed by a lecture by Kenneth Frampton, followed, in turn, by a concert by this son, Peter. (Again, two of three statements in the preceding sentence are true.)

But why exaggerate when the month is so stuffed with goodies, including an appearance by Xefirotarch's Hernán Díaz Alonso at the Art Institute, the 2012 London Olympic's Ricky Burdette on Global Cities at CAF, Douglas Kelbaugh on the current "state of the art" of sustainnable architecture in the U.S., China, and worldwide, for the Chicago Humanities Festival. There's a program of short films on Chicago and its architecture showing at the Gene Siskel this Saturday and next Tuesday, Jinhee Park at IIT, religious architecture at AIA Chicago, Richard Cahan and Michael Williams talking about and signing copies of their book, Chicago: City on the Move at CAF�, and Roald Gunderson talking about Whole Tree Architecture at the Chicago Center for Green Technology.

Believe or not, there's actually a lot more great events we haven't even touched on - over 50 in all. Check them all out here.

Mies' IBM seeks day rates, landmark status

Crain's Chicago Business had a story Monday filling in some of the details of a pair of agenda items for this Thursday's monthly meeting of the Commission on Chicago Landmarks. The first includes - all in one swoop - "Preliminary Landmark Recommendation, Report from the Department of Planning and Development and Final Landmark Recommendation to City Council" for the last skyscraper designed by Mies van der Rohe, the 1973 IBM Building, now known, after the departure of its namesake tenant, by its address, 330 North Wabash.

Immediately following this is the second item, "Review of Pre-Permit Submission and Recommendation to City Council for Approval of Class L Property Tax Incentive " also for the IBM Building.

Now it all makes sense. When a classic unprotected building is under imminent threat, the Commission is more than likely to crawl at the official pace of a lumbering bureaucracy, but in the case of the IBM, it's the developer, Prime Group Realty Trust, that is pushing for designation, in order to qualify not just for local tax incentives, but federal tax credits, as well. The plan is to convert office floors 2 through 14 into a 300 room hotel.

The IBM has been suffering as an office building with the loss of several key tenants. (When Trump was planning an office component in his tower, he attempted to lure IBM tenants with the fact that his building was going to block their views. Then he decided to dump office space from his own project.)

Chicago is reaching the peak of a hotel construction bubble. According to Crain's, room rates have jumped 24% over the past two years, while occupancy rates have hit levels not seen in at least two decades. The number of new rooms either planned or under construction is topping 9,000, including, just across the street from the IBM, a five-star, 286 room hotel at the base of the Trump Tower, scheduled to open - depending on who you believe - in either December or February. If Prime Group's plan goes through, minimalist Miesians and glitz-crazed Trumpists will soon be able to glare at each other in mutual disdain from either side of Wabash.

Two blocks to the south, Kimpton Hotels has just announced their plans to purchase the 27 story-high 203 North Wabash - opened in 1928 as the Old Dearborn Bank and one of only two office buildings designed by Rapp & Rapp, the movie palace architects behind the Chicago, Oriental, Palace and Uptown - and convert it into a 220 room boutique hotel. Two blocks to the north, the beautiful park next to the AMA building has been obliterated for still another hotel, the 259 room Hotel Palomar.

Making IBM an official landmark means any future changes to the protected exteriors will have to be approved by the Landmarks Commission. Let's hope the Commission doesn't give away the store in getting to that point, as they almost did recently at the Palmer House, bargaining away the historic retail facades for a jarring storefront "modernization". A protest led by Preservation Chicago scotched that plan, but the decimation of the hotel's grand block-long arcade, rubber-stamped by the Commission, is well under way.

At the IBM, garish oversized elevator signs as glaringly bright as a shopping mall parking lot, part of a Philippe Stark redesign, have already been slapped on Mies' travertine. Meanwhile, on the other side of State Street from the IBM, Bertrand Goldberg's Marina City complex, among the most iconic and important emblems of the city, yet one the Commission has made no visible effort to landmark, continues to undergo a series of desecrating alterations under the commercial properties' new owners.

Because Monday's Can Be Difficult . . .

. . . leaving you feeling as dense and achingly extruded as a wet compacted swirl of excavated Chicago clay . . .
. . . what better way to start the week than with a giant cat clock billboard hawking wine? That's something to stand for, at least until the emptied bottle makes it difficult.

Piano's Magic Carpet Begins to Loom

The whole thing won't be finished until spring of 2009, but the topping out of Renzo Piano's new Modern Wing for the Art Institute of Chicago has already begun.
Construction of the beam lattice that will support what the architect has called the "flying carpet" is well underway. Suspended above the roof, the lattice will eventually be covered by rows of curving, extruded aluminum wings that filter northern sunlight through the skylights of the third floor galleries in a way that doesn't degrade the art, but cuts energy costs by up to 20%. Overall, the carpet will be 216 feet square, covering both the building and adjacent Griffin Court garden, with a surface area of 47,000 square feet.
According to Zero Gravity, the catalogue to an exhibition on the new building, the white-painted blades are "creating a dialogue with the stainless steel Pritzker Pavilion across the street in Millennium Park. Piano has said that while the music pavilion expresses its definition of space through sound, the Art Institute's new building expresses it through light."
You can see Charles G. Young's far superior Flickr portfolio of photographs here.

Nuages

Herda added to Rosa, Somol, at Chicago Architectural Club Event TONIGHT

As if Art Institute Curator Joe Rosa and new UIC School of Architecture Director Robert Somol aren't enough, the Chicago Architectural Club has also added Sarah Herda, the new Director of the Graham Foundation to their program tonight. It's open to the public, and it begins tonight, Tuesday, October 23rd, at 6:30 P.M. at Jak's Tap, 901 West Jackson Boulevard.

Chicago Traffic scenes - Late Boat Run, Intersection Roulette