Architect as Goth: Odile Decq to lecture at SAIC/AIADO

Yes, I know it's the 19th, but it's never too late to be adding stuff to the November Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.

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Specifically, on November 27th, the School of the Art Institute, Department of Architecture, Interior Architecture and Designed Objects will be hosting a lecture by Odile Decq of Odile Decq Benoît Cornette, Architectes-Urbanistes, the French Goth architect who could be said to be the anti-Richard Meier.

what kind of clothes do you avoid wearing?
anything which is not black.

what I am very interested in when I design and conceive something, is thinking about the close relationship between body and space.

when you think about quentin tarantino, robert altman…the way the camera is in a space or the way the different sequences are organized, films don't explain how you pass from one place to another. you are just 'there' and then you are somewhere else. I like these kinds of transitions…

The above quotes come from interview with the architect in designboom, which has also published some views of her firm's Paris studio.


Odeq's design philosophy can seen in her new addition for MACRO , Museo D'arte Contemporanea Roma, inserted into what was originally a Peroni beer factory, and anchored by a blood-red auditorium structure floating within a larger lobby space.(Great photographs of the construction and finished product at SkyscraperCity here.)

This foyer has been painted in black.  I hesitated in the beginning.  I have to confess I hesitated to do it because I was thinking, do I have to apply to everyone the punishment that I give to me, to be black, but in a way, yes, because of this question of being neutral, with the white.  I was thinking that if I painted  in black, this is another neutral, another neutral color, but it's a stronger one. And this stronger one will have resistance, a stronger resistance for the art, and the art has to be stronger, to be in front. And now they hang art on these walls, and it works very well.

You can see the entire Columbia University lecture from which Decq's quote was taken here.   The Chicago lecture on November 27th will be 6:00 p.m. in SAIC's Columbus Auditorium, 280 South Columbus.

Elsewhere, we've also added an AIA/Chicago/Architect Magazine Arts Club event on the 29th with Chris Sullivan, Building Enclosure Trends: Design, Energy and Codes.

This is also the last week for the exhibition The Enduring Designs of Josef Frank at the Swedish American Museum in Andersonville.  The show closes on Sunday.

Things are sparse this holiday week, but today, Monday the 19th, there's An Te Liu at UIC, and a Chicago Makes Modern book launch with Ben Nicholson and Inigo Manglano-Ovalle at the Graham. Things pick up again next week, so check out the nearly dozen great items still to come on November 2012 Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.

Chicago Streetscene: Fifty Shades of Fall at the Lurie Garden

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Waiting for Mickey

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Just after we write about the abject dullness of Pioneer Court as a civic amenity, we come to the one time of year when its true potential is on display.  The plaza is abuzz with activity preparing for this evenings annual Magnificent Mile Lights Festival.

 Friday's lone flute player will be augmented by a day-long schedule of concerts that culminates in the America's most admired rodents (and the progenitors of the corruption of U.S. copyright law.) leading the Tree-Lighting Parade that finds over a million spectators filling every available square inch of space on Michigan Avenue, resulting in human beings actually stacking themselves atop each other as parents raise their kids on their shoulders to try and see what's going on.

Last year, the Trib's Rob Manker wrote a great history on how the event evolved - from how Saks Fifth Avenue first strunk white lights on the trees outside its store in 1959, to how the sparse first parade in 1992 actually halted at stop lights.

And so, you've got to ask yourself one question:  what kind of Chicagoan are you?  Do you feel convivial, punk?  Well, do you?  If you're completely happy living in the virtual realm, switch on ABC7 tonight and watch the parade in safety, warmth, and with great camera angles.   If you still delight in your own humanity and the physical world in all its imperfections, messiness and tactile delights of sight, sound and sweat, get your claustrophobia in check, and come on down!

 

 

Mickey . . .

Even it its Death Throes, Bertrand Goldberg's Prentice Hospital inspires Brilliance as Future Prentice Competition winners are announced

First Prize Winner, Future Prentice competition (click images for larger view

At a sold-out event at the Chicago Architecture Foundation last night, the announcement of the winners in the Chicago Architectural Club's 2012 Chicago Prize Future Prentice competition marked the opening of an exhibition, handsomely mounted by CAF's Kate Keleman, of the issues surrounding the battle to save Bertrand Goldberg's Prentice Hospital, Reconsidering an Icon: Creative Conversations About Prentice Women's Hospital.  Competition winners are on display, and you can also view all of the entries, both at CAF, and on-line, here.

Demolished Additions, Second Prize winner by Noel Turgeon and Natalya Egon

From the time I've been able to spend with the submissions so far, I can say that the entries are of an extraordinarily high quality, balancing both the deeply researched and the extremely creative, often in the same concept.

Chicago Architectural Club Co-Presidents
Brian Strawn and Karla Sierralta

In addition to ten invited participants, the competition received 71 entries from 13 countries.  In addition to the CAC and CAF, the exhibition was co-sponsored by Chicago Bauhaus and Beyond. and AIA Chicago, whose Executive Vice President (and competition juror) Zurich Esposito announced the winners, which included an Honorary Mention, First, Second and Third prizes.

Juror Martin Felsen talked about what motivated the eight-member jury in selecting the competition's winners . . .

We met after Mayor Emanuel gave the big thumbs down for the survival of Prentice.  So that really affected our thinking, our mood, and how we judged the winners.

Martin Felsen

Innovation really had to be at the core of the ideas.  Practical solutions, while greatly appreciated - and awarded prizes in certain cases - were in a sense secondary to the idea that there's a kind of disciplinary innovation that had to be pushed ahead, and that was a direct result of the decision that was rendered by the Mayor.   We went away from saving Prentice, in a sense, to around it - ideas in general. The jury also discussed how these proposals could add real value to the health care sector in terms of innovation.

A big conversation - maybe the biggest conversation - was around the idea of a master plan and how a master plan maybe could have solved this whole problem in the first place.  Several of the proposals we see up here tried to repurpose Prentice as the heart of the Northwestern campus, highly connected between all of the different buildings and spaces in the neighborhood.  And on a more practical level, we just thought that a master plan that thought about the building itself, not as something to tear down or replace, but as something at the center of the campus, could have given a whole new meaning and function to the building as a place that the community could be centered on.

The First Prize winner, whose name draws on the work of word artist Robert Montgomery, was The Buildings are Sleeping, You Should Go and Wake Them Up, She Says, by designers Cyril Marsollier and Wallo Villacota.  Their proposal saves the foremost half of Goldberg's concrete cloverleaf, and builds Northwestern's new Research Lab behind it, in a way that the surviving half of old Prentice becomes whole when reflected in the glass curtain wall of the new structure behind.

badly shot video alert

Marsollier talked about the entry . . .

I think we really approached this project from a very pragmatic way.  I think we felt tied to the situation of losing Prentice.  That idea was frustrating in some ways, and so we really wanted to approach this project in a way that was a very real solution in our heads of how we can deal with this problem, as well as preserving the iconic imagery of the building.  Even walking by it how, it's extremely powerful, so I think that was  key to the whole project.

The new building is intersecting the existing structure halfway through and there's this reflecting facade that reflects the entire building.  The new building functions all by it itself, self-sufficient.      At the same time, we were trying to make sure that the existing structure and the new structure would kind of give each other different but shared values.

. . . We wanted to make sure that Northwestern could find its own reasons to keep the building for itself. . . 

Good luck with that.  In an article in Architectural Record,  spokesman Al Cubbage told reporter Fred A. Bernstein that Northwestern refuses to even look at the proposals.  With Mayor Rahm Emanuel safely stuffed in their back pocket, and all but one of the members of the Landmarks Commission little more than puppets to Emanuel's machinations, the courts are the only remaining check on Northwestern's arrogance and power.  Yesterday, Circuit Court Judge Neil Cohen issued a temporary stay of the Landmark Commission's revocation of the preliminary landmark designation it had unanimously granted Prentice less than two hours before.  The next hearing is scheduled for December 7th.

You can see all the winning entries on the CAC's website here.  Reconsidering an Icon: Creative Conversations About Prentice Women's Hospital is currently running in the Lecture Hall of the Chicago Architecture Foundation, 224 South Michigan.  Bertrand Goldberg's Prentice Hospital - the actual building - is running at its original site, 325 West Huron, at least through December 7.  Extensions are uncertain; see it while you can.

Goldberg's Prentice gets reprieve as National Trust, Landmarks Illinois file suit to reinstate Landmark Designation

Update:  Cook County Judge Neil Cohen ruled that preliminary landmark status is effect for Prentice until another hearing is held December 7th.

This morning, lawyers representing the National Trust for Historic Preservation and Landmarks Illinois filed a lawsuit in Cook County District Court challenging the Commission on Chicago Landmarks' revocation of preliminary landmark designation for Bertrand Goldberg's Prentice Hospital only hours after the Commission voted unanimously to grant that designation in the same November 1st meeting. The lawsuit charges the Commission with acting beyond its legal authority in going beyond defined landmarks criteria to also consider economic conditions, which the suit claims is the legal purview of the Chicago City Council. The suit also contends the Commission violated the landmarks ordinance by not providing public hearings on the preliminary designation as defined by the ordinance.  You can view the entire complaint, uploaded to Scribd by Crain's Real Estate Daily, here.

The winners of a Chicago Architectural Club design competition for ideas for reuse of the Bertrand Goldberg building will be announced this evening, with an exhibition of the entries to open tomorrow at the Chicago Architecture Foundation.

Mother of Mercy, is this really the Gateway to the Mag Mile? The dull void of Pioneer Court.

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How much should we expect from our great public spaces, especially when those spaces are actually private? New owners are reviving and rebuilding the plaza between the two cream-white tours of the iconic Wrigley Building, as that passageway has become the gateway connecting Michigan Avenue to the beautiful Trump Tower riverwalk, and to booming River North to the west.

But when you cross Michigan Avenue, what do you find?  It's been two decades since Pioneer Court was last rehabbed.  The massive public square between the Chicago River and Tribune Tower has not aged well, nor, I would argue, has the 2.5 acre park just to the west at Cityfront Center, where a new 42-story-high apartment tower is now rising as architect David Hovey has finally headed into the city, with Optima Chicago Center.  Pioneer/Cityfront, raised high above the natural level of the city, remains ungraciously integrated to the lower, rapidly developing neighborhood to the east. Is it too early for reform?

A Short (?) History of Pioneer Court and Cityfront Center

The first thing to remember is that what we experience as the usual terra firma promenade of streets and sidewalks is often actually a massive succession of viaducts.  Where Pioneer Court stands today was the site the home and trading post of Jean Baptiste Point Du Sable in 1770's, which became the mansion of early settler John Kinzie in the early 1800's.  It was here that one of early Chicago's great economic engines, the McCormick Reaper company, built its factories, and it was here, after it all burnt down in the Great Fire of 1871, that the James S. Kirk and Company constructed the brick-walled factory - five stories high, 520 feet long - where its 600 workers turned out 50,000 tons of soap each year.  Although the plant was described as "a model of cleanliness", the rest of the riverfront was a seemingly random, but densely interlocking matrix of docks, roads, rails, grain elevators and industrial structures that cared little about putting on an attractive face.

A long way from its current status as a recreational gem, the Chicago River then was an essential but ugly thing, and the gentile city turned its back on it.  And so when it finally came time to build the great bridge envisioned by the Burnham Plan, it was raised up 35 feet above natural grade to allow all those commercial functions to continue unimpeded below.  As is often the case, however, the functions which were carefully accommodated by a visionary new project were already in decline. Less than a decade after the Michigan Avenue Bridge's 1920 completion, the Kirk soap company was sold to Procter and Gamble and the factory demolished. 

The decline in river-bank industry was hastened by the bridge's construction, which began to transform North Michigan Avenue into what would eventually come to be known as the "Magnificent Mile," with the gleaming new Wrigley Building and Tribune Tower its two sentinels.  The Kirk factory site, just south of Tribune Tower, remained an open pit and a surface parking lot.

photograph courtesy C. William Brubaker Collection, UIC

Finally in the 1960's the Tribune Company and Equitable Life Insurance redeveloped the property.  To insure a continued clear view of their gothic tower, the Tribune made sure the new Equitable Building was set far back from Michigan Avenue,  creating Pioneer Court as an open breathing space, 100,000  square feet of red brick paving, rising up - long before Koolhaas and Balmond's floor that becomes a wall - to form large planters that broke up the monotony.  At the northern end, a large circular fountain had the names of 25 of Chicago's pioneers - from Burnham to Pullman, duSable to Kinzie, Ward to Wacker, but no Al Capone or Cap Streeter - set in bronze inserts along the low retaining wall.

photograph courtesy The Chuckman Collection

And so it stood for a quarter century, when a new mega-development was envisioned for the 60 acres between Pioneer Court and the lakefront.  The area east of Columbus was slated residential.  The western edge of Ogden Slip was filled in, the 1,600-foot-long Pugh Terminal Warehouse, truncated at the eastern end for a new tower, was redeveloped as North Pier.

As recounted in City Front Center, The Design and Approval Process, a 1988 dissertation by Wyllys Thomas Baird and Anne Elizabeth Winkler, an early plan envisioned decking over the entire site at the level of Pioneer Court, but a 1984 master plan created  by Alexander Cooper of Cooper, Robertson and Partners opted instead for decking over only the portion west of Columbus.

That plan took the 1970's development Illinois Center as the poster child for how not to do a mega-project.  With its endless dull corridors, repetitive buildings and seclusion from Michigan Avenue, Illinois Center was the place everyone loved to hate.  Unlike the recently fashionable "superblock" concept of development that Cooper rejected, Cityfront Center, to be built west of Columbus behind Tribune Tower and the Equitable building, would be made up of regular-sized blocks connected to the existing streetgrid.  Cooper was careful to maintain vistas, such as the view from Ogden Slip to Tribune Tower in the distance.  Instead of small "vest pocket" parks such as you can find next to the Harris Bank or Brunswick (George Dunne) buildings downtown, Cooper opted for a new $23 million central greenspace, designed by Ted Wolff when he was still at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill as a "grand civic space. Trees and landscaping . . . in the center of a one-way loop roadway system."  The $55 to $75 million cost of the new infrastructure was completely borne by the developers.

An initial proposal to provide vehicular access to Cityfront Center along a new street to be constructed just south of Tribune Tower was blocked by community groups, but Pioneer Court was still torn out and reconstructed along the lines we see today.  Pioneer Fountain was demolished.  The 37-story-high NBC Tower was completed in 1989, and the University of Chicago's Gleacher Center followed in 1994.  The Fairbanks began in 2000, stalled after the parking garage floors were constructed, and then was finally completed in 2008.  Hovey's Optima Center is scheduled to open next year.  As you can see in my crudely annotated map, several undeveloped parcels remain.

map: Google Maps; crude amendations by author

So this is where we are now

Long gone are the planters and the fountains, the concrete seating circles, the handsome streamlined pavilion that housed escalators descending into the Equitable's lower level arcade.  All swept away in the 1990's rehab.  Gone also Marilyn, Forever - not to mention John Kearney's metallic but anatomically correct Moose.  We are left with this enormous, flat, featureless plain that, aside from the occasional art fair, remains an uninviting, windswept nullity.

And while the larger part of Pioneer Plaza in front of the Equitable seems well maintained, in the section south of Tribune Tower, as the plaza's original paving cracks and decays, it is not restored, but replaced with mismatched slabs of poured concrete.

The form of a graceful promenade centered within landscaping is, at Pioneer Court, inverted.  The landscaping is in the center, anchored by a high trellis-like metal frame structure at its core.  You walk by it rather than through it.  Have you ever tried to walk through it?  You can't - it's closed off at the eastern end.  You're shunted off to the left or right as if pushed off into a ditch. 

The larger, main portion of Pioneer Court has the tour buses pulling up at it's periphery and tour boats being hawked at river's edge, but it's a thin crust with absolutely nothing inside.   Cityfront Plaza is a place of great density, but it's as quiet as death.  It's like Rockefeller Center, with all the life sucked out. The view from Cityfront Plaza down Pioneer Court to the great, floodlit towers of the Wrigley Building and Annex is one of the Chicago's great vistas, but in the current design it barely registers.

When you get to the end, where the level of the city drops down, you get an escalator that seems out of service even in warmer months, and the gesture of a grand double staircase negated by being executed in the style of a fire escape . . .

The top landing is designed so clumsily that the space between the parapet and the end of the handrails barely provides enough room to turn left or right to the next flight of steps . . .

As a backdrop to the Equitable Building and NBC and Tribune Towers, the Pioneer Court/Cityfront Plaza combo works beautifully.  As a public amenity and gateway, it fails miserably.  It's like the the modernist city Jacques Tati satirized in Playtime, a lot of skyscrapers hermetically sealed from the plazas that link them. Don't touch.  Keep moving.

Equitable has an NBC sidewalk studio that, unlike the similar facilities for ABC on State Street and CBS at Dearborn and Washington, actually turns its back on the plaza and the public.  Although new dining from Bottleneck Management was announced for the WGN Radio storefront studio space this past January, there are still no restaurants or cafes, and the only shop is the University of Chicago bookstore in the Gleacher Center.  Even though Pioneer Court was rebuilt to co-ordinate with Cityfront Plaza, there is no sense of continuity between them in either style or plan.

I've always loved the long strip of lawn at Cityfront Plaza, but, truth to tell, there's also way too much gravel that goes with it . . .

 . . .  the circular islands at north and south ends are ungraceful . . .

. . . and the quartet of "monumental" light fixtures have always reminded me of a concrete version of those cactus lamps that were fashionable - briefly - in the 1960's.

I make the trek from the Wrigley Building to the Columbus Drive stair often, and it seems longer than it is because there's nothing to stick to - it's more like a pedestrian chute than a true promenade.  I'm always struck by how I seem to encounter just as many people using the ugly underside of the viaduct as I do on the pathways above.

Soon, the 1992 design of Pioneer Court and Cityfront Plaza will be at the same quarter-century mark at which the original Pioneer Court was rethought and rebuilt.  It's time to start thinking about how this grand twin gateway - to the Mag Mile to lower, residential level of Streeterville - can become more human-scaled, inviting and alive.

Also Tonight, at Crown Hall: Jean-Louis Cohen: Architecture at War 1940:1945

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We've just been given the topic for what sounds like a fascinating lecture by  Jean-Louis Cohen's  at Crown Hall at 6:00 p.m. tonight (Wednesday, the 14th): Dark Times, White Spots: Architecture at War 1940:1945.  If you can't make it to Crown Hall, you can also catch Cohen tomorrow at the Graham talking about The Russian Avant-Garde between East and West, part of what we've already written is a logjam of events Thursday the 15th including, but far from limited to, Karen Kice's gallery talk at Building: Inside Studio Gang Architects at the Art Institute, and the unveiling of the winners of the Future Prentice competition at the Chicago Architecture Foundation.

And if that's not enough, we've also been reminded that tomorrow at 6:30 at the Superior Street driveway of Ann and Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital, artist Mark Davis will be on hand along with Michael Pucker and other donors and dignitaries to official dedicate his new sculpture Healing Waters.

Check out the more than dozen a great events just through Saturday on the November Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.

FIELD UIC faculty exhibition, opens Tonight

 There's an opening reception tonight, Wednesday, November 14th for FIELD . . .

The UIC School of Architecture is pleased to present FIELD, the first in a series of semiannual collaborative faculty exhibitions. This iteration cuts through the concept of “field” within architecture in two ways: one half of the show re-frames six recent faculty projects with the the term “field” in mind, and the second half presents a temporary installation on the School’s Bridge conceived, designed, and executed by this same group of faculty. The resulting strains of dialogue—at times subtle, at others overt—re-invigorate the term, and in doing so, make new claims on its productive architectural capacities.

Participants include Kelly Bair, David Brown, Stewart Hicks and Allison Newmeyer, Clare Lyster. Andrew Moddrell, and Xavier Vendrell.  The reception begins at 6:00 p.m. and the exhibition runs through December 14th in the Second Flood Ribbon Gallery, in the UIC Arts and Architecture Building, 845 West Harrison.  The school is also sponsoring lectures by Ciro Najle of General Design Bureau on Friday the 16th and An Te Liu of the University of Toronto, Monday, November 19.

Update: Inside Studio Gang Archi-Salon to feature Gang, Gil, Jacobs, more

Not longer after we published our post below updating the November Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events, we received more information about the Archi-Salon being held this Saturday in conjunction with the Art Institute's exhibition: Building: Inside Studio Gang Architects.

The salon, Inside Out: Uncovering Possibilities from within the Discipline will look "into the new possibilities generated by approaching and exploring aspects of the architectural discipline from new and uncompromised perspectives [and] uncovering possibilities related to issues of context, materiality, space, and program in architecture."

The moderator will be Iker Gil, director, MAS studio, and editor in chief, MAS Context.  Panelists are scheduled to include Jeanne Gang, principal, Studio Gang Architects; Matthias Hollwich, co-founder, Hollwich Kushner (HWKN); and Michel Rojkind, founder, Rojkind Arquitectos. Respondents will include Kelly Bair, principal, Central Standard Office of Design; assistant professor, UIC; Julie Flohr, founder, Oisse Architects; clinical assistant professor, UIC; Grant Gibson, principal, CAMES/gibson; clinical assistant professor, UIC; Thomas Jacobs, principal, Krueck + Sexton; adjunct associate professor, IIT and Mary Pat Mattson, studio assistant professor, IIT.

The event will take place this Saturday, November 17th, in the Modern Wing architecture space, Galleries 283-285, from 2:00 to 4:00 p.m., and is free with museum admission.  More information here.

Future Prentice, Russian Avant-Gardists, Studio Gang, Bloomingdale Trail, Mies+Massive - it's the Thursday logjam!

This coming Thursday evening, November 15th, is another one of those architectural event standoffs where great choices find themselves all crammed into the same timespace.

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 Over at CAF, there will be the unveiling of the winners in the Future Prentice competition for the Bertrand Goldberg masterwork that the signed, sealed and delivered Commission on Chicago Landmarks just made sure will have no future.

Meanwhile, over at the Graham, Jean-Louis Cohen will be discussing The Russian Avant-Garde between East and West, at the same time that, over at the Art Institute, curator Karen Kice willl be offering a Gallery Talk/Exhibition Overview of Building: Inside Studio Gang Architects, ASLA Illinois will be offering Ben Helphand on The Bloomingdale Trail: Tracking Progress on Chicago's Next Great Park, and at Oakton Community College, there's an opening reception for a new exhibition, messy MIES + MASSIVE middle.

That's just the p.m. portion of nine events this Thursday that will also see the Chicago Wilderness Conference 2012, and  director Lise Dubé-Scherr discussing Chicago’s Own American Palace: The Richard H. Driehaus Museum at the Cultural Center for Landmarks Illinois.

Elsewhere this week, if you can't catch Jean-Louis Cohen at the Graham, he'll also be lecturing at Crown Hall at IIT on Wednesday, the 14th, the same day Chan-li Lin, Partner, Rafael Viñoly Architects PC discusses the new U of C's new Center for Care and Discovery and two other Viñoly-designed hospitals at CAF at lunchtime.

Tonight, November 12th, Eva Castro Iraola of Plasma Studio lectures at the Art Institute, whole tomorrow, the 13th, Nick Hyatt discusses the Christchurch Earthquake at CAF for SEAOI and Chistopher Enck discusses 20th Century Furniture Design at the Herman Miller showroom for AIA/Chicago.  This Friday, Ciro Najle lectures at UIC, and on Saturday, Iker Gil of MAS Studio offers up an "Archi-Salon" inside of the Inside Studio Gang Architects exhibit.

I know! Take a deep breath and take the plunge.  Even with the turkey day hiatus, there are still over three dozen great events to come on the November Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.

Holy Motors - a one-week window to see a One-of-a-Kind film, drunk on the power of architecture

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Holy Motors is playing at the Music Box this week.

I saw two films yesterday.  The first, Steven Spielberg's Lincoln, is excellent.  Caveats are minor:  some of the exterior shots seem washed out and lacking in detail, and the U.S. Capital looks so blazingly white (didn't they burn coal in those days?) that it appears to be made out of spun sugar.  Daniel Day Lewis's performance is masterful, as is the script by Tony Kushner.  There was some disappointment that the film's opening was held back until after the election, but the current timing is even more appropriate as, in its essence, Lincoln is a film about Congressional gridlock.

Lincoln will be breaking into wide release next week, and I hope to be writing about it more in the future.  Another film, however, will probably only be here for a single week, and in every way it is extraordinary.  Not for everyone's tastes perhaps, but extraordinary.

I'm referring to Holy Motors.  For those who know his work, just mentioning the name of its director, Leos Carax, is enough to draw you into the theater.  His last completed feature was 1999's Pola X,  Eight years previous to that, he made Les amants du Pont-Neuf, the Heaven's Gate of French film, with a runaway budget that made it the most expensive picture made in France to that time.  Like all of Carax's work, it's more than a little mad, and one of those rare knock-you-on-your-ass experiences.

You may well hate Holy Motors, but why risk the chance of missing something you may find, as I do I, absolutely unforgettable?

Holy Motors begins with a man - Carax himself - awakening in an apartment that looks like it's on the edge of an airport, one of those anonymous, alienating cityscapes that have become central to our time.  He punches through a curtained wall and finds himself in the empty balcony of a large theater.  As he moves forward, he sees that the main floor below has a full audience, watching a film.

We next find outselves at the side of a massive, stretch limousine, white, waiting for a tycoon (the great Denis Lavant) to depart his white International Style house for a day of work.  That long day will consist of nine - ten? - episodes, in which of which this man, Alex Oscar (Carax was born Alexandre Oscar Dupont) transforms himself into different people - a hunched aged beggar, an obscene pure-Id leprechaun, a shaven-head assassin, and, in one ecstatic sequence . . . an accordion player.

Carax, though only in his early fifties, is - and has been - a man out of synch with his times, who sees today's increasingly dominating virtual world as "a thing imposed by rich countries."  In a rare interview, with Filmmaker's Scott Macaulay, Carax continues . . .

In our world, I mean, the Western world, it seems everything is made to limit us. We think everything liberates us, you know? Every gadget is supposed to save us time. After a few years, you find out it’s the opposite. That’s been the case with my nephews and kids. They have not experienced life. They’re stuck at home with gadgets and stuff. Virtual reality is very interesting, and I do feel the possibilities are enormous, but I don’t want to get stuck in it. I would say that’s true with everything. I don’t like the world that I live in; I like the invisible world that inhabits me.

Carax found his inspiration for Holy Motors in those stretch limos, "a bubble, like a virtual world . . . good vehicles for fiction."  His exploration of the architecture of our cities is hypnotic, from that ocean liner of a house in the beginning, to the industrial bowels of basements and back alleys, to the ruined grandeur of La Samaritaine, the great Paris department store which figured prominently in Les Amants. Carax has an almost infallible ability to bring out through his story the poetic aura of the architectural spaces - from elegant to abject - he uses as backdrops.
 

 Holy Motors is, in turns, pretentious, incoherent, disgusting, sensationalist, raw - and all the better for it.  The sequence where Alex dons a motion capture suit and engages a like-costumed female partner is astonishingly beautiful.

 "We must disenthrall ourselves," Abe Lincoln said.  "Étonne-moi!" added Diaghilev, upping the ante. The curse of CGI is to make the fantastic as mundane as the every-day.  Says Leos Carax, "The problem is to find again that primitive power of cinema, that first shot of the train in La Ciotat. It’s harder and harder to do today. You have to reinvent that power, which is almost a mystical power, a magical power."

Holy Motors comes as close as we're liable to get today.  See it at the Music Box this week.