Seeing MacStars in Chicago's Grant Park

Is a franchised Hollywood-style Walk of Fame just the ticket for an underutilized portion of Chicago's Grant Park? Read all about it here.

Learning from North Lawndale - 2006 Burnham Prize Competition Announced

The Chicago Architectural Club has announced the theme for the 2006 Burnham Prize Competition: Learning from North Lawndale - Defining the Urban Neighborhood in the 21st Century. There is no specific program, but addresses the challenge of North Lawndale's 5,000 vacant lots, half of them owned by the City of Chicago. The competition seeks entrees "that address these lots or the or the urban fabric in-between."

Registration closes on January 20, 2006, and Phase One entries will be due next February 3rd. The first round jury, to be chaired by landscape architect Walter Hood and including architect Kerl Lejeune of Booth/Hanson and a balance of members to be named later, will narrow the entries down to five finalists. Second phase entries will be due May 15, 2006. The prize for the winner is an extended fellowship at the American Academy in Rome for the Fall of 2006. Full information, including program, materials and download, can be found on the CAC's website here.

Pigeons in the Rain - Chicago Streetscene, November 15, 2005

Neat new guide to Chicago's Public Art - and its free!

The Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, with the sponsorship of the Chicago Office of Tourism, has issued a rather splendid free publication, The Chicago Public Art Guide. The 80-page publication is a treasure trove of information on everything from the Picasso Statute in Daley Plaza, to artwork in the parks, at the airports and in the neighborhoods.

If you've ever wondered where to find a Henry Moore sundial (try Sundial: Man Enters the Cosmos right by the Planetarium) or who designed the seahorses at Buckingham Fountain (Marcel Francois Loyau), you can find it all here, with lots of photographs - all color - in an easy to carry format, which includes an attached fold-out map of artworks in the Greater Loop area.

The profiles of the artworks are somewhat sanitized - the extended entry on the Haymarket memorial doesn't mention that previous memorials were blown up by 60's radicals, and the description for Milton Horn's Chicago Rising From the Lake leaves out the great story of how it was lost after the Wacker Drive parking garage for which was created was torn down, only to be found decades later in a trash dump, restored and remounted along Chicago's riverwalk. Still, this is the kind of overview that usually exists only in expensive coffee table books, and you can get it for free. I found my copy in the Visitors Center at the Chicago Cultural Center. It may or may not have been distributed to the city's other libraries - my contact at Cultural Affairs wasn't sure - but you can also call The Department of Cultural Affairs at 312/742.1156 to request a copy. It's well worth looking for.

Designing Women - Last Week for CAF's Five Architects Exhibition

Five Architects, the Chicago Architecture Foundation exhibition showcasing the midwest projects of five women architects including Jeanne Gang, Carol Ross Barney, Julie Snow, Sejima Kazuyo and Zaha Hadid, is in its final week, closing on November 20th. “We don't know if women think differently than men, and we may not know it for a long time," architect Denise Scott Brown has said. In Designing Women, I look at women architects' long battle to make their way in a traditionally boy's-only-club, and considers how their presence is changing the face of architecture. Read about it here.

Preservation Chicago Debuts New Web Site, 2006 Seven Most Endangered

After a long gestation, Preservation Chicago, the city's grassroots preservation organization, has unveiled its new web site, just in time to cover the group's November 9th announcement of its 2006 list of The Chicago Seven, Chicago's Seven Most Endangered Buildings. The new list includes DePaul's Hayes-Healy Center, scheduled to be demolished for the CTA's rehab of the Fullerton Brown/Red Line Station, and the William LeBaron Jenney's New York Life Building on LaSalle, which stands to be substantially gutted for a new 50 story tower.

The new site offers a handsome design and a wealth of information. It provides a very thorough picture of the perils and posibilities of preserving Chicago's historic buildings. The only drawback I could find is the use of PDF's, rather than HTML, for descriptions of each entry on the Chicago Seven List. It's especially frank in talking both about the buildings they've failed to save as well as their many successes. There's always a concern about whether a site will be kept fresh and updated, but right now the Preservation Chicago website has become an indispensible addition to Chicago's architectural presence on the web.

Tonight's Three Architects Panel at CAF cancelled

Wednesday, November 9th. Tonight's panel at the Chicago Architecture Foundation with Jeanne Gang, Carol Ross Barney and Elva Rubio has been cancelled. Five Architects, however - the arresting exhibition that they all participated in along with Zahad Hadid, Julie Snow, and Kazuyo Sejima, continues at the CAF through November 20th.

Chicago Streetscene - Fall at Millennium Park: November 3rd, 2005

View larger image here.

Frank Lloyd Wright's Right-Hand Woman

Marion Mahony Griffin: Drawing the Form of Nature, an exhibition at Evanston's Block Museum, brings the work and career of Marion Mahony, the first woman to be licensed as an architect, out of the shadow of her collaborators Frank Lloyd Wright and Walter Burley Griffin. Read all about her remarkable career and rediscovered legacy here.

Predock Winner of Kroc Corps Community Center Competition?

The formal announcement is still awaiting coordination with the city of Chicago, but one unconfirmed report says Antoine Predock, the winning architect for a recent competition to build the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, has also won the competition to design the Salvation Army's new $60 to $70 million Ray and Joan Kroc Corps Community Center at 47th and State Street in Chicago. If it's true, you heard it here first. If it's not true, abject apologies in advance.

Chicago Streetscene - August 24th at Millennium Park

Goettsch Partners takes the stage

Effective today, November 1st, the architectural firm previously known as Lohan Caprile Goettsch Architects has officially been rechristened Goettsch Partners, taking the name of James Goettsch, the long-time Chicago architect who spent two decades with C.F. Murphy-Murphy/Jahn in the 70's and 80's before joining his present firm, which traces its lineage back to the original offices of Mies van der Rohe. The name change follows the 2004 departure from the firm of Dirk Lohan, Mies's grandson, to form Lohan Anderson LLC, and the surprise resignation last month of co-President Joseph Caprile. Goettsch is one of six principals who will run the firm that includes James Zheng, who has moved up from Associate Principal. Let's hope the business cards and stationary arrived on time - the company's web site continues to feature the Lohan Caprile Goettsch name.

(An aside to the folks responsible for the design of the Lohan Anderson web site: when you offer an alternative option to Open Fullscreen labeled Open in Pop-Up Window that also opens a window taking over your entire desktop, it's really annoying, especially if you have a large screen.)

The firm latest completed project is 111 S. Wacker, for the John Buck Company, which it claims as "the world’s first high-rise certified LEED-CS Gold." An interesting article in The Chief Engineer details some of structures most prominent features, including a 44-foot-high lobby ceiling formed by the underside of a parking ramp, and a floating foundation poured over the cassions of the old U.S. Gypsum building, a handsome Perkins & Will structure, turned 45 degrees on its site, that has the unfortunate distinction of being the first modern skyscraper to be demolished in Chicago, replaced in 1993 by a surface parking lot. In a post 9-11 move, 111 S. Wacker has stairs that transfer away from the core at the 10th floor, not to the lobby, but to a perimeter exit. There's a separate entrance for fire and emergency workers and equipment. The final component enabling the LEED certification is a green roof planted with wild-growing grasses.

Kroc Corps Community Center Competition Winner Picked - Awaits Announcement

According to Jennifer Mannhard, competition project manager at StastnyBrun Architects, Inc., the jury has met and picked a winner for the competition to design the Salvation Army's new $60 to $70 million Ray and Joan Kroc Corps Community Center at 47th and State Street in Chicago. Mannhard expects the winner to be named once plans for the official announcement are worked out with the office of Mayor Richard M. Daley, hopefully in the next few weeks. The four finalists include Chicago firms Murphy/Jahn, and Ross Barney + Jankowski, as well as Antoine Predock and Behnisch Architects.

Driehaus Foundation Bungalow Award winners announced

The first annual Richard H. Driehaus Foundation Bungalow Award winners were announced last Thursday at the Chicago Architecture Foundation. Supported by a grant by noted investment manager Richard Driehaus, who himself grew up in a bungalow, the awards included first prizes of $750 in each of four categories - best exterior rehabilitation, best interior rehabilitation, best interior restoration, and best landscaping- plus four honorable mentions. You can view the winners (bring your Acrobat) on the Chicago Historic Bungalows website. Especially intriguing is this "Best Rehab" awarded to Loleti and Hensley Gooden, which added living space in the attic and basement, linking it together with this staircase.

Tigerman, Venturi, Gang, Ross-Barney, Rubio, Garofalo and much more - November's architectural events in Chicago

Stanley Tigerman on his new design for Pacific Garden Mission, Robert Venturi on Mies (already sold out), Elva Rubio, Carol Ross-Barney and Jeanne Gang at CAF, Tod Williams and Billie Tsien at the Art Institute, Doug Garofalo's lunchtime lecture at CAF - November offers up another bumper crop of lectures, seminars and panels, and you can preview them all here. Repeat's monthly calendar of Chicago architectural events lets keep track of what's going on. Visionary Chicago Architecture at the Graham Foundation, Sustainable Architecture in Germany at IIT and CAF, a SEAOI symposium on anti-terrorism design for structural engineers - nearly 40 events in all, which you check out on the Repeat monthly calendar for November.

Uptown Theater Update

The situation with the 1925 Uptown Theater, a 4,000 movie palace on the city's north side, continues to deteriorate. As can be seen in this photograph from the Friends of the Uptown, scaffolding has arisen over the ornate front facade, and weatherproofing has been placed over locations where original bricks and ornamental terra cotta have been removed and stored for safekeeping. Otherwise, the building's state of being closed and secured remains unchanged, and boosters continue to try to come up with a plan that could draw investment for the theater's revival.

Thom Mayne and CAC Water Tanks Competition winners tonight at Art Institute

The Chicago Architectural Club will be holding the awards ceremony for its Chicago Prize 2005 Water Tanks competition tonight at the Art Institute. Entries will be on display in the Louis Sullivan trading room beginning at 5:30 P.M., and the program itself will begin in the Rubloff auditorium at 6:00 P.M., ending with a lecture by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Thom Mayne of Morphosis, who chaired the competition's jury. The competition "challenges entrants to salvage a part of Chicago's urban fabric, the industrial water tank, through creative reuse and preservation." In a demonstration of it's unique acoustical properties, Mr. Mayne will give his address from within a vintage water tank reconstructed on the Rubloff stage. (or maybe not)

2.000-foot-high Pigeon Roost Proposed for Chicago's Lakefront

In this morning's Trib, architecture critic Blair Kamin and real estate columnist Thomas Corfmann reveal plans for a $300,000,000, 2,000 foot-high HDTV broadcast tower to be constructed by a partnership of J. Paul Beitler and LR Development along Chicago's lakeshore, not from another 2,000 structure, the Santiago Calatrava designed Fordham Spire. Read about it - and why it's such a bad bet - here.

The Red Line Lake Street Station: It's Great - Let's Trash it Up!

The bright and hugely attractive SOM rehab of the Lake Street subway station on the Red Line has only been open a short time, but that was apparently too long for the CTA, which has erected, smack dab in the middle of the platform, an incredibly shabby and outsightly wood shack whose sole purpose seems to be to shelter a huge new metal display case as if it were the Ara Pacis. Since a large part of the beauty of the station is in the interrupted sweep of its tile-covered vaulting, we can only hope that whatever work is still to be done won't linger forever and the ugly gray box will soon be dismantled and carted away.

We riders are also playing our part in trashing the station. Discarded chewing gum is accumulating in dark, flattened gobs over the surface of the beautiful, pink granite flooring. Where's Lee Kuan Yew when you need him?

LPCI website showcases Driehaus Foundation Preservation Awards

On October 15th, the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation honored nine preservations projects with its Preservation Award. Top prize went to the Renaissance Initiative, Inc., which has rescued 10 historic structures in Danville. Other honorees included the 1920's era American Bankers Building in Jacksonville, and the Hinsdale project that saved the endangered R. Harold Zook Home and Studio and moved it to a village park two miles to the south of its original location. The Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois has done an exceptional job of documenting these projects on their website. There's a brief one page description of each project, accompanied by a slide show that documents it in photographs from start to finish. Particularly good is the slideshow depicting the rescue of a little known civic gem, the 1903 Jackson Park Animal Bridge, from a state of vandalized disrepair to a complete $6,200,000 reconstruction and restoration in 2003 that made the bridge and the numerous animal heads new again and secured their future new generations of delighted visitors. In another sign that Chicago's architectural institutions are finally coming to terms with the power of the internet, the LPCI site does an exceptional job of documenting the honored projects and illustrating the actual process of restoration.

Chicago Streetscene - Blue Cross Blue Shield Building

Ross Barney Jankowski's Swenson Science Building

Since I'm unlikely to get up to Duluth in the near future - and neither, in all probability, will you - I thought I'd go ahead and post some images from Ross Barney + Jankowski of their latest project, the Swenson Science Building at the University of Minnesota at Duluth. The 100,000 square foot, $33,000,000 edifice was dedicated on September 16th, replacing previous chemistry and biology labs built in 1949 and 1968, respectively, and will house over 1,000 students a semester. More about the building, including photos and plans and the story of three teenagers who vandalized the project and caused $8,200,000 in damage, here.

Crab Tree Farm Benefit for Unity Temple

The Unity Temple Restoration Foundation will be holding a benefit on Saturday, October 29th, with the proceeds going to the ongoing restoration of Frank Lloyd Wright's groundbreaking Oak Park building. It will consist of a day at Crab Tree Farm in Lake Bluff, whose collection of American and British Arts and Crafts is seldom open to the public. Included will be a talk by School of the Art Institute President Tony Jones on the relationship between Wright and Charles Rennie Macintosh. Cost is $70.00 for members, $90.00 for non-members. Call 708/383.8873 for information.

When Modernism Goes Bad - Milwaukee's Amtrak Station and a Plan to Fix it

Late in his life, Mies van der Rohe was asked to describe his typical day. "I get up," Mies replied. "I sit on the bed. I think, 'what the hell went wrong? We showed them what to do.'" It's doubtful he was thinking of Milwaukee when he said this, but that city's 1965 Amtrak terminal is a perfect demonstration of how the principles of modernism could be hijacked by the less talented to create an often dreadful work of architecture, but one that still has its charms. Read about it here.

Chicago Streetscene: Saint Francis of Diversey Harbor - October 5, 2005

Six Degrees of Edmund Bacon

The Philadelphia Inquirer's architecture critic Inga Saffron has written a cogent overview of the life of Edmund Bacon, the legendary and influential Philadelphia planner who died on Friday at age 95. By the time I read Bacon's The Design of Cities in 1975, his legacy was already being discredited. As Saffron relates, his large-scale projects often traded squalor for sterility, and he pushed the development of expressways that carved up the city, at the expense of its residents for the benefit of those who were just passing through. Yet, although I haven't seen it for thirty years, I still remember the Bacon book, especially the maps and the drawings that tried to lay out exactly how creating a vibrant city was done. The book is still used in university courses today.

The best planners imagine better new worlds that the general public may have no interest in. More likely, they may be actively hostile, with a strong attachment to the present, in all its corruption. That's the rub. Although planners are never elected, they don't stand a chance unless they master the political game. And if they do that too well, we run the risk of them becoming autocratic "power brokers," of the type of New York City's Robert Moses.

If Moses had died in 1945, we would have a very different, far more positive view of him than we have today. Robert Caro may never have existed. We would remember him as a reformer whose projects helped revivify New York under mayor Fiorella Laguardia. Instead, Moses held on, becoming more powerful and enduring than any mayor or governor, a master at subverting the democratic process and pushing through schemes that were increasingly destructive of the city's essential character and fabric.

Bacon kept Louis Kahn out of building in downtown Philadelphia. Would Kahn's own set of bold visions - a new city hall like a tinkertoy construction on steroids, and huge parking garages surrounded by office and residential towers - been an improvement on Bacon's vision? Or would they have just been the flip side of the coin of Bacon's own decidedly mixed achievements?

Daniel Burnham might have done it best. He created the landmark Plan of Chicago that bears his name in 1909, and died just four years later, before any curdling of attitude or reputation could set in. Edmund Bacon retired in 1970, at the top of his game, allowing him to spend the next several decades sniping from the sidelines, and to continue refining his beliefs to the point where he made his last big stand, at age 93, taking a spin on a skateboard to protest the city's banning of skateboarders from LOVE park, the plaza he created across from city hall.

Glenlivet Scotches Chicago Architect

The October 17th New Yorker Magazine, dubbed "The Art & Architecture Issue", includes an ad, created by the Berlin Cameron/Red Cell agency, for their client The Glenlivet Scotch that features Chicago architect Douglas Garofalo. The ad copy labels Garofalo one of "The Originators" for bringing the "avant-garde" to the suburbs, and features three photos, unidentified, of Garofalo's dazzling Nothstine Residence in Green Bay, Wisconsin. (To New Yorkers, Green Bay is apparently a suburb - let's hope they don't try to make that argument to a Packer fan.)

It's easy to make fun of this sort of thing. (Submit your own ideas for product endorsements by specific Chicago architects to the comments section of this posting - I'm not going to touch it.) However, the bottom line is marketing has taken over our culture, and as much as it may give Stanley Tigerman fits, Garofalo's Glenlivet ad could be another sign that the creativity of today's Chicago architects is entering the mainstream of America's cultural awareness.

The current New Yorker is worth picking up. There's articles on the troubled history of the Sydney Opera House, on the building boom in Dubai, and Paul Goldberger on pre-fab designer housing.

Sense and Strangeness Mingle on Chicago Architecture Foundation's List of 2005 Patron of the Year Nominees

The Chicago Architecture Foundation has announced the list of nominees for its 2005 Patron of the Year Award, to be presented at a November 17th luncheon. The award "seeks to honor those individuals or organizations that have helped promote innovative architecture in Chicago." You can see the entire list - in PDF format - here.

While many of the nominee's are no brainers - Studio Gang's Chinese American Service League's Kam L. Liu building, the Ratner Center and Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago, some of the other nominees are fairly inexplicable, especially in the business category, where's there's respectable choices such as Florian Architects' Hyde Park Bank restoration, Brininstool & Lynch's Vue20 Condos on South Michigan, Jim Goettsch's 111 S. Wacker and Pei Cobb Fried's Hyatt Center, and Krueck and Sexton's Shure Technology Center addition, but also such puzzling choices as completely mediocre Pinnacle and Fordham Towers (and no, I'm not trashing them because of their classical detailing, but for being ungainly mishmashes of elements and form), Central Station, and Lakeshore East, which is a combination of the splendid (its new park), the decent (the Lancaster), and the ungainly (The Shoreham.) Somehow age also doesn't seem to matter. Lucien LaGrange's Erie on the Park is an exceptionally fine building, but it's been around since 2002, the same year construction was completed on another nominee, KPF's 191 North Wacker. One suspects the nominations are as much about honoring major CAF contributors - or potential contributors - as it is about recognizing great architecture.

Which is a good thing - it's always a great idea to tap the pockets of wealthy developers to support a good cause. Maybe it's like the Academy Awards, where clunkers like Airport or The Towering Inferno actually garnered Best Picture nods to placate their studios, but the actual awards went to Patton and Godfather II. Last year, the Patron of the Year's first, the actual awards went to a mainstream but solid roster of Millennium Park, the Contemporaine, and the revived IIT campus.

New York Producer Casts Spell on Chicago Critics

David Stone, producer of the surprise Broadway smash, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, apparently thinks he's the new David Merrick. Merrick, the legendary producer of such diverse megahits as Hello Dolly, Gypsy and Marat/Sade, was, as a person, a throughly unpleasant bit of business who cherished his feuds and had few principles. Perhaps his most infamous stunt was opening night of his revival of 42nd Street, where he kept secret the news of the death of its director, Gower Champion, until the opening night curtain calls, when his announcement transformed the rapturous applause of the audience to a grim funereal pall as if with the flip of a switch. It made front pages all across the world.

Stone is not in his league. He had a security guard bar Sun-Times theater critic Hedy Weiss from Monday's press conference for Putnam County. That was merely stupid. What happened next was incredibly puerile. He had four of the city's leading critics come up to the stage, and had them spell words, just as members of the audience apparently do in the actual show. Merrick must have been laughing from his dark circle of Hell to see how easily Stone made the critics an appendage to his PR stunt.

"Ms. Weiss was being held in detention for harassing the other students," Stone is quoted in today's Sun-Times. "We have also decided to withhold her juicebox."

I've only met Hedy Weiss once, waiting for a symposium to start, where we had a very pleasant talk about the mechanics of being a critic. However, I am also aware of her reputation of being a fierce competitor who aggressively protects her turf. Apparently at a press conference earlier this year for Wicked, Stone's megahit that's having an highly successful open-ended run at the Ford Oriental theater, Weiss was very vocal in expressing his displeasure at what she saw as an unfair leak of information exclusively to the arch-rival Tribune.

Stone said Weiss was banned for behaving "erratically and unprofessionally," but my bet is he knew she would have quickly - and loudly - blew the whistle and awakened the other critics from Stone's spell before they could be transformed from objective reporters into bit players in his marketing campaign. (The Sun-Times story reports that the Trib has lodged a complaint about the affair.)

Big Blow in the Windy City

If you're not already maxed out on all the stories, I have an op-ed, Big Blow in the Windy City, on the Marshall Field saga - including a discussion on how deeply ingrained the Field name is in Chicago's history - in this Sunday's Long Island Newsday.

Classicists at the Gates

Both classicist architects and their more pragmatic Chicago counterparts have a weakness for returning to the past, but the way they choose to do it couldn't be more different. Read it here.

Old Cook County Hospital Again in Jeopardy

Cook County Board President John Stroger has three basic obsessions: protecting his massive base of patronage workers' jobs in the safe harbour that is county government, raising taxes to support them, and tearing down the historic old Cook County Hospital. He may not place much of a priority on figuring out how to stop making poor people wait 8 to 12 hours or more to have their prescriptions filled at the new Cook County, which he modestly allowed to be named Stroger Hospital, but when it comes to protecting his perceived turf, he's a bulldog.

Last year, Chicago's Antunovich Associates architects created an extensive pro bono study that documented the old Cook County Hospital's viability and provided a detailed reuse plan. Stroger fired back, using pinched county funds for a $1,400,000 no-bid contract awarded to politically-connected U.S. Equities, which has now fulfilled its mission by producing a report telling Stroger exactly what he wants to hear: tear down Cook County.

The Beaux Arts building, dating from 1914, was the primary health facility for many of the city's poor. In 1983, it became the site of the city's first HIV/AIDS clinic. It's ornate terra cotta facade has been the backdrop for many of exteriors on NBC's ER television series, and the hospital also appears in the 1993 Harrison Ford film, The Fugitive.

Preservation groups like the Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois and Preservation Chicago have again raised the alarm. Although the County Board has so far refused to vote for demolition, the U.S. Equities report may provide cover for machine loyalists on the board to fall into line behind the increasingly embattled Stroger.

This morning the editorial page of The Chicago Tribune weighed in that "the political pedigree of the consultant study raises questions about its impartiality. When the study was announced earlier this year, we said: 'This exercise is launched with a fair amount of suspicion.' That cautionary advice still rings true today."

Kroc Corps Community Center Competition down to Four Finalists

With little fanfare, last month the competition to design the Salvation Army's new $60 $70 million Ray and Joan Kroc Corps Community Center at 47th and State Street in Chicago was narrowed down to four finalists: Chicago firms Murphy/Jahn, and Ross Barney + Jankowski, as well as Antoine Predock and Behnisch Architects. The four will submit their proposals to the jury beginning on October 24, with the announcement of winner scheduled for October 27th. You can download PDF's of the profile and team descriptions submitted by each finalist from the competition website.

Reminders: Matthias Schuler at UIC tonight, Blair Kamin on the Chicago Seven in yesterday's Trib

Matthias Schuler of Transsolar, one of the foremost environmental architectural engineers of our time, will lecture tonight at 6:00 P.M. at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Details here. A regular collaborator of Helmut Jahn and, co-consultant, along with Atelier 10, on the environmental rehabbing of Mies van der Rohe's Crown Hall, Schuler's global projects are documented in the firm's book, TRANSSOLAR: Climate Engineering.

Also, if you missed it in yesterday's Chicago Tribune, catch Blair Kamin's account of the reunion of the Chicago Seven, the young architects who in the 1970's helped redefine Chicago architecture by bucking the city's Miesian autocracy, at the Museum of Contemporary Art last Tuesday. (You have probably about six days to read the article before it passes into paid archive hell. My own writings, on the other hand, may be long-winded, poorly argued and needlessly beligerent, but they're free.)

The sold-out event actually wound up being a reunion of the Chicago Six, with the ever iconoclastic Stanley Tigerman declining to appear, causing him to be compared by one panelist to Bobby Seale, one of original Chicago Seven, activists indicted for their actions during the 1968 Democratic convention, who was bound to his chair, gagged, and eventually separated from the trial by Judge Julius Hoffman. The comparison was engaging, if imprecise. If Judge Hoffman were alive today, he would soon discover that any effort to gag Stanley Tigerman would be an effort in futility, and that the only enforcable separations would be those myriad instances where Tigerman, himself, has chosen to sever himself from those whose efforts, attitudes or ethics he has found wanting. The event at MCA began with a concise and adroit overview of the history of the Chicago Seven by IIT architectural historical Kevin Harrington, Kamin provides a good overview of that history, but covers very little of the actual discussion, which was moderated by architect Doug Garafalo. It's hoped that the Chicago Architectural Club, which sponsored the event, will document the evening by putting a transcript or synopsis up on their website.

Chicago Streetscape: Prefab Stonehenge on Irving Park Road

September 30, 2005 - Prefab concrete elements lowered in place at metroNorthliving condo project on Irving Park Road on Chicago's northwest side.

September 30 Final Deadline for submitting abstracts to Greening Rooftops Conference

A last-minute reminder that today, Friday, September 30th is the last day to "submit your research project, your innovative green roof project, or your green roof idea to the Green Roofs for Healthy Cities committees for review. Composed of industry professionals, researchers and experts, the GRHC Committee members will jury all submissions for acceptance in our International Conference." Submission requirements: A 300-word abstract and 50-word biography by September 30, 2005. See details at www.greenroofs.org or email jphilp@greenroofs.org."

"The fourth annual Greening Rooftops for Sustainable Communities Conference, Awards, & Trade Show, May 10-12, 2006 in Boston, will bring together experts from diverse fields across North America, and around the world. The conference will raise awareness of the many benefits of green roofs, share new research findings and provide information on the latest designs, implementation techniques and products. It is a great opportunity to broaden networks and develop new business contacts while building more sustainable cities through green roof implementation."

Signs of Life outside the MCA

Courtesy of Edward Lifson of WBEZ's Hello Beautiful, here a few shots of this past Sunday's Musicircus, which provided a touch of humanity, however briefly, to the grave haunches of the building housing Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art, designed by the late Joseph Paul Kleihues. The work was first created by composer John Cage in 1967, since which it's been put on throughout the world, but Sunday's performance represented it's Chicago premiere.

The Chicago Symphony at Gehry's Pritzker Pavilion - There IS a Difference

Classical music in American, like pretty much everything else, is increasingly about marketing. Very fine ensembles, often in the suburbs, market proximity, price and informality as much as music they play. It's just too much of a hassle to trek down to the Loop to attend Chicago Symphony concerts, they assure us. The suburban counterparts are "good enough," and a lot more convenient. This, of course, is like a Roman saying they've never visited the Sistine Chapel because the parking is better at the local parrish. Read about it here.

Alert: new Stand competition registration deadline is October 1st

Information on the new Stand competition sponsored by Architecture for Humanity Chicago here. The inexhaustible Stanley Tigerman will head the jury, which will also include Patricia Saldana Natke and Henry L. English

Chicago Schedule

Architecture's Fall Season Begins With a Bang Next Week

Return of the Chicago Seven
This Tuesday, September 27th, at the Museum of Contemporary Art - a reunion of the Chicago architects who challenged and overthrew the hegemony of Mies's followers. Information.
New Orleans and the Netherlands: Living Below Sea Level
A special panel discussion added to the Sustainable Waterfronts conference at IIT. Panel includes Dico van Ooijen, senior advisor for dikes and dams of the Netherlands Ministry of Transport, Public Works and Water Management, Peter Torbijn, director of national spatial planning policy and advisor to the Dutch Minister of Housing, Spatial Planning and the Environment, Larry J. Prather, assistant director of civil works, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and Dave Sanford, director for navigation policy and legislation of the American Association of Port Authorities. Information.
Three Generations of Classical Architects: The Renewal of Modern Architecture
A three-day conclave of classicists at the School of Architecture at Notre Dame. The extensive roster of announced speakers and panelists includes Robert Adam, Thomas Beeby and Leon Krier. Information

The Death of Marshall Fields and the Dissolution of The Sense of Place

Finally, the deed is done. Yesterday, Federated Department Stores announced that all of the stores of Marshall Field's, a Chicago institution for over a century and, with Wanamaker's, one of the two creators of the concept of the department store in America, would be converted to Macy stores in 2006.

From their inception, department stores were like a museum, a riverfront, a memorial, or a stadium - something that defined the unique character of a city. Now they're just roadkill in Wal-Mart America. A look at Field's recent history helps explain just how this happened, and what it may mean for the future of America's cities. Read it here.

Dutch Symposium at IIT to add program on New Orleans and the Dutch experience at Holding Back the Sea

When hurricane-force winds broke through the barriers, the result was a catastrophic flood that killed over 1,800 people, destroyed over 3,000 homes, and left over 700 square miles under water. However, the place was not 2005 New Orleans, but The Netherlands, circa 1953. Like New Orleans, large amounts of its territory is below sea level, and the country's survival down through the centuries is a direct result of what it's learned about keeping out the sea. (Read more here.)

Now, the organizers of Sustainable Waterfronts, Learning from the Dutch Experience, a symposium to be held at IIT on September 29th and 30th, have added a panel discussion for September 29th - time still to be announced - considering the Dutch experience and the challenges facing New Orleans as it rebuilds.

Participants will include:
- Dico van Ooijen from the Netherlands Ministry of Public Works and Water Management who will show the efforts of the Dutch since the flooding in 1953 to protect their country from a recurrence.
- An official from the Dutch Ministry for the Environment and Spatial Planning who will talk about the planning and environmental impacts in the Netherlands where a large part of the country is below sea level.
Two American participants are expected to be added shortly.

More information on the symposium and registration here.

Venturi Lecture Tops Architecture Events at 2005 Chicago Humanities Fest

Mies is More - Learning from Mies is name of a lecture to be given by Robert Venturi at IIT on Wednesday, November 9th as part of the 2005 Chicago Humanities Fest. Coming from the guy who coined the immortal retort, "Less is a bore", and who, along with partner Denise Scott Brown continues to confound and expand conventional architectural thinking, this event stands to be one of the highlights of the season. Tickets are free, but reservations have to be made through the festival here. Today, Monday, September 19th, marks the first day the general public can register for Humanities Fest events and buy tickets.

Unfortunately, the appearance by Shigeru Ban appears to have been cancelled, but other events include:

Saturday November 5th -
The Avant-garde Interiors of Francis Elkins, a lecture by Stephen M. Salny. Author of Frances Elkins: Interior Design, discusses the work of Elkins, who was also the sister of architect David Adler.

Sunday, November 6th
The Perfect Houses of Andrea Palladio, lecture by Witold Rybczynski. There will also be an event offering a discussion of Rybczynski's work.

Saturday, November 12th
Public Housing Beyond the Walls is a panel discussing "the importance of stable, affordable housing for low-income families."

Sunday, November 13th
Re-Placing Home is a lecture by Roberta Feldman, co-director of the City Design Center at UIC on the "meaning of home and its diverse physical representation in our mobile society." Feldman is also curator of the Out of the Box exhibition on pre-fab housing currently at Chicago's Field Museum.

The Festival includes over 180 events across all art forms, most either free or no more than $5.00. It includes scheduled appearances by Salman Rushdie (already sold out), Joan Didion, Adam Gopnik, Charlayne Hunter-Gault, Susan Orleans, Mia Farrow, Martin E. Marty, Rachel Barton-Pine, Elizabeth Futral, and Timuel D. Black, Jr., to name just a few. View all programs here.

Zoka Zola profile in this week's Chicago Reader

There's a great profile in this week's Reader by Dennis Rodkin on Chicago architect Zoka Zola: her life, work, philosophy, and the origins of her highly alliterative name. Pick up a copy or download it in Adobe Acrobat form here.

Architectural Exhibition at Oak Park Public Library

An exhibition organized by the Oak Park Architectural League is on display at the village's Public Library through September 30th. The show highlights the work of 23 Oak Park architects, and includes Annuradha and Arun Gandhi's entry, pictured to the left, to the Chicago Architectural Club's 2004 Burnham Prize competition for a series of three water taxi stations along the Chicago river.

The Return of the Chicago Seven

In 1976, just as Mayor Richard J. Daley controlled Chicago, the legacy of Mies van der Rohe was seen as controlling new architecture in the city, even though the master had died in 1969. When the Musuem of Contemporary Art's exhibition One Hundred Years of Architecture in Chicago squeezed the history of the preceding century through a forced Miesian and monumentalist perspective, provocateur Stanley Tigerman led a group of younger architects in mounting a counter-exhibition, Chicago Architects, where the work displayed a creativity and freedom that directly challenged the orthodoxy and dominance of Mies's followers. The group, expanded to include Tom Beebe, Larry Booth, Stuart Cohen, Jim Freed, Jim Nagle, and Ben Weese, became known as the Chicago Seven, an homage to the radicalism of the anti-war activists put on trial in the city in 1970. Several other historic shows followed, and many of the same crowd were instrumental in reviving the long dormant Chicago Architectural Club.

On September 27th, the Museum of Contemporary Art is hosting a panel, Celebrating 25 Years of the Chicago Seven, that hopes to reunite those seven architects. It beats still another Stones reunion hands down. Information here.

Great Blair Kamin reporting from New Orleans - what the city could learn form Chicago

There's a splendid extended article in today's Chicago Tribune by architectural critic Blair Kamin on the present state and potential future of New Orleans. His first hand report talks about what it's like to be a solitary tourist in a largely abandoned city, and talks about how much more of the city endured than reports have indicated. He makes a strong case for the rebuilding of New Orleans, both its feasibility and its necessity. Kamin talks about how reversing the flow of the Chicago river, to avoid the contamination of the lake and its drinking water, is just one concrete example of how a city triumphed over nature. If you can, pick up a copy of the paper so you can also see Chris Walker's great photos. If you can't, you can reader Kamin's account, free for the next seven days, here.

An even more cogent example, and one which I've yet to hear anyone discuss, is that in its early history Chicago almost drowned in its own muck and filfth, with regular and vicious outbreaks of cholera until the decision was made in 1850's to raise the level of the entire city six to ten feet. You can still see it clearly in the old neighborhood houses where stairs lead down to what used to be the entrance, and especially along the riveredge of the Loop, where you can clearly see how the current level of the streets are over a full story over ground level. Lower Wacker Drive is where Chicago's "natural" level lies.

As New Orleans is rebuilt, why can't we do something similar to raise its lower districts back above sea level?

Chicago streetscene - September 10th, 2005

Children's Fountain Back - in Black?

The Children's Fountain, a project of former Chicago mayor Jane Byrne, has been restored and reconstructed in front of the Chicago Historical Society, at the northeast corner of Clark and North. Dedicated in 1982, it had stood in a traffic island at Wacker and Wabash until it was dismantled, along with the same mayor's Vietnam Veterans Memorial (reportedly the first to honor that conflict's servicemen) for the 2001 rebuilding of Wacker Drive. According to the Building Blocks, Inc. website, the fountain was crated up by the reconstruction's contractor and stored under the Roosevelt Road Bridge, where it stayed for four years.

The restored fountain sits on a graceful new granite base, just across the street from the Latin School and Moody Church. The one glaring defect in the restoration is that the current finish, described on Building Blocks as "Antique Green 'Verde Grie' appears much darker than the original, which was a much lighter green both in memory and in photographs here, here, and here. Now, it's so dark that, even on a sunny day, it seems to suck in all the light, making it extremely difficult to see the ornate detailing, and giving what was a very playful fountain a heavy, funereal air.

Smash the Birdie

Migratory bird season is here again in Chicago, sometimes described as the "O'Hare of migratory birds." It's not a happy time for countless birds who meet their end smashing into Chicago's glass-walled buildings, so we're going into the vault for a story on an April, 2004 symposium where activists and experts like architect Jeanne Gang, Robbie Hunsinger of Chicago Bird Collision Monitors and David Baker of IIT talked about the problem and what they were doing about it. With September, 2005 updates. Read all about it here.

A Bit of low rent Blade Runner comes to Marina City

September 9, 2005 - a projected billboard on the Dearborn Street elevation of Bertrand Goldberg's Marina City office building, now the House of Blues Hotel.

Can the Children's Winery be Far Behind?

The grape vines have wasted no time in claiming their place along the facade of Chicago's elegant new Lincoln Park Pritzker Family Children's Zoo, designed by Marc L'Italien of EHDD.

Classicists and the Dutch descend to save us

Two big conferences are coming up at the end of September. The Dutch Consulate and a number of other sponsors are hosting Sustainable Waterfronts, Learning from the Dutch Experience at IIT September 29-30. At the same time, for all of us who want to crawl back into the womb (and considering the way things have been going, who wouldn't?) the School of Architecture at Notre Dame is sponsoring a three-day conference Three Generations of Classical Architects, which will feature such luminaries as Robert Adam and Leon Krier.

Art Deco jewelbox Veseman Building gets preliminary landmark designation

The Veseman Building, a 1930 art deco gem with polychromatic terra cotta in floral motifs, has just received preliminary Chicago landmark designation. Read more here.

Mies Resurrected

Mies van der Rohe's modernist masterpiece Crown Hall, on the Chicago IIT campus that he also designed, has just reopened after the most radical restoration in its 50 year history. Read all about it here. (This story originally appeared in the Chicago Reader in different and more manageable form under the title, Sweet Nothing, September 2nd, 2005.)

The Legacy of Crown Hall

Crown Hall and Mies van der Rohe, a shining beacon on the road to modernism or, as Tom Wolfe would suggest, a vampiric infestation of dead European values into the pristine American midwest. Some initial thoughts. Be sure to add your own here.

"Who Cares?" Sundays continue at WFMT

On this Sunday's Chicago Symphony Retrospective, the final announced work was Brahm's Fourth Symphony, which, run through WFMT's automated mixmaster, began with the final movement of the Bruckner 9th, followed by the final three movements of the Brahm's. No one caught the error, or fixed the error, or even acknowledged it. The announcers-in-a-can remained blissfully oblivious, a perfect mirror of the attitudes of current management.

Katrina

Chicago Helps

The American Red Cross

The Salvation Army

Archinect has set up a disaster relief/adopt an architect web page here. Tulane University in New Orleans has cancelled its fall semester and is working to help its students to enroll as temporary students at other institutions.

Locally, IIT also has a web page up for support, and with information for students displaced by Katrina who are "interested in transferring to IIT" The University of Illinois at Champaign Urbana is also working to assist displaced students. Contact the Office of Admissions and Records at 217/333-0302.

And if you are as outraged by the complacency, misplaced economies and lack of preparation of our leaders as you are blown away by the bravery and selflessness of the rescue workers, medical personnel, and guardsmen, record exactly how you feel today in a note, and paste it into your calendar for the dates of November 6th, 2006, and November 3rd, 2008.

NY Crix Nix MvdR Hootch Licks

New York City's Skyscraper Museum has published the results of a survey it made asking 100 architects, engineers, developers, critics, planners and others of their ilk to name their favorite New York skyscrapers. The clear first place winner was the Chrysler Building, with 90 votes, but silver and bronze were taken by buildings designed by Chicago firms. Mies van der Rohe's 1958 Seagram Building claimed 76 votes, and Daniel Burnham's 1903 Flatiron got 73, placing it in a tie with Cass Gilbert's Woolworth tower.

Although World Trade Center Kapellmeister David Childs scratched Mies completely off his list, the Seagram scored strongly across all categories, except for the critics. Four out of six turned up their noses and didn't include the Seagram anywhere in their top ten, and the New Yorker's Paul Goldberger make a point of listing it sixth. (To be fair, Goldberger's iconoclastic top choice was the frequently overlooked 70 Pine Street, a sleek Art Deco masterpiece from 1932, the last major skyscraper to be built in the financial district until 1961, that is again, after September 11th, the third tallest building in Manhattan.)

In early public voting, the Chrysler is again the overwhelming favorite, while the Seagram is dead last. You can vote your own choice here.

The website has posted a complete table of all of the 100 professional responses, which includes the picks of local architects Helmut Jahn and Adrian Smith, former native Mike Wallace, and adopted son The Donald, who remains in character by ignoring all 25 official nominees and picking only four buildings, which coincidentally turn out to all be Trump projects.

Last 4 Days to See Peter Behrens Dining Room

I finally got up to Milwaukee to see Santiago Calatrava's spectacular Milwaukee Art Museum. More of that later. However, a quick heads up on two exceptional exhibitions, both in their last days, that are definitely your while. The Arts and Crafts Movement in Europe and America, 1880-1920: Design for the Modern World runs only through September 5th. It's a country-by-country assembling of objects that include a George Maher fireplace and an entire dining room, from wallcoverings and carpet down to furniture, linens, cutlery and glassware, designed by Peter Behrens for the Wertheim Department store. Beginning October 16th, the show will move to The Cleveland Museum of Art, where it'll run until January 8th of next year. You have only a bit more time to catch another extraordinary show at MAM, Cut/Film as Found Object, in which 14 artists take existing films and transform them into their own artworks. I'll be writing later on the architectural aspects of Pierre Huyghe's "L'Ellipse" which depicts what takes place between two cuts in Wim Wenders 1977 movie, The American Friend, using the same actor, Bruno Ganz, twenty years later. The show will be up through September 11th.

Chicago street scene - August 31, 2005