Bummer

There are world leaders and titans of industry, a football coach, a tennis player, sundry scientists, actors and actresses (in abundance), a director, a producer, an opera diva, a couple of supermodels, and Rosie, just before the exile, but the Time 100, the newsweekly's list of the "World's Most Influential People", includes not a single architect or builder, unless you include Brad Pitt. Parched times on the plain of regard, brother, parched times.

Chicago Streetscene2 - The Eclipsed

Eli Cohen Passes Away

We learned this morning of the passing yesterday of Eli Cohen, the structural engineer who served as President of Cohen-Barreto-Marchertas, founded in 1969, and remained a principal after it merged with Thornton-Tomasetti to become its Chicago office in 1993.

Described today by Robert Johnson of Bowman, Barrett as "one of the giants of Chicago structural engineering ", Cohen worked with such prominent architects and projects as Harry Weese (1100 Lake Shore Drive), Kenzo Tange, (the AMA Building), Phillip Johnson, (190 South LaSalle), DeStefano/Bofill (77 West Wacker), Cesar Pelli (181 West Madison), and Stanley Tigerman (The Chicago Bar Association Building), to name just a few. His work included over 70 high-rises and 350 major projects. He was recipient of numerous honors, and several lifetime achievement awards, including one from the Chicago Building Congress, from whose website we've borrowed the accompanying photo.

I met Mr. Cohen only once, last year, when we were both judges for the Annual Awards of the Structural Engineering Association of Illinois (SEAOI), of which he was a past president. I was bowled over by his history, his knowledge, and his generous, patrician grace. He will be missed.

Chicago Streetscene1 - Five Building Pileup

Docomomo Chicago Midwest meets to incorporate chapter

On Thursday, May 10, beginning at 5:30 P.M., DOCOMOMO Chicago Midwest, the local chapter of docomomo_US will be meeting at the new headquarters of AIA/Chicago, 35 East Wacker, Suite 250. DOCOMOMO (DOcumentation and COnservation of buildings, sites and neighborhoods of the MOdern MOvement.) is an international organization devoted to documenting and preserving modernist buildings and sites. Membership information is available here.

Michigan Avenue Through the Looking Glass

Nothing like a little camera obscura at the old shopping mall.

Protesters Still Want Their Fields Back

This Sunday, May 6th, from 1:00 to 2:30 P.M. protesters from Fields Fans Chicago will gather under the great clock at Washington and State as part of their ongoing efforts to get Federated Department Stores to reverse its renaming of Marshall Field's flagship Chicago store with the Macy's brand. While declining to provide specific details, Federated has admitted that after the name change the store has continued to perform far below expectations. Fields Fans Chicago claims it has distributed over 30,000 leaflets and 45,000 label pins reading "Keep It Marshall Field's" and "Marshall Field's Forever".

Jane Jacobs, Yves Behar, Yerkes, Mesker, Great Chicago Places and more on May calendar of Architectural Events

A daylong symposium on the legacy of Jane Jacobs, a conversation with Penny Pritzker, lectures by Yves Behar, IDEO's Fred Dust (on the importance of naps) at Frank Lloyd Wright's Unity Temple, an evening with Stanley Tigerman at the Highland Park Library, year-end student shows both at IIT and UIC (and on the same day - like a subway series, but with buildings!), Bruce Mau being honored at an Archeworks benefit, Nanako Umemoto at the MCA, Chicago's first Pecha Kucha Night, Samuel Assefa talking about the benefits of density, and of course, another jammed-pack selection of tours on this year's Great Chicago Places and Spaces - those are just a few of the over 40 items on the May calendar of architectural events. Check them all out here.

Last Day to Register for ULI's Conversation With Penny Pritzker

Penny Pritzker, President & CEO, Pritzker Realty Group, L.P., will appear at the last of Urban Land Institute Chicago's "a conversation with . . . " series this coming Thursday at the Mid-Day Club. However, today, Monday, April 30th is the last day to register, here. Strangely enough, the webpage says on-line registration is available through tomorrow, May 1st, but since I've just told you, why wait?

Architectural Where Am I - Step Right up And Try Your Luck

Answers tomorrow

Chicago Symphony hits the I spot, and a Farewell to Slava

In the last leg of a trifecta that's seen the resumption of concert broadcasts and the creation of Resource, its in-house record label, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra is now hawking its wares for on-line download from Apple I-Tunes. The sole initial offering is a live recording of last fall's splendid performance of the Mahler 3rd, led by newly named Principal Conductor Bernard Haitink. The two-disk CD version, due in stores (what's left of 'em) on May 8th carries a list price of $19.99. The I-Tunes download costs $15.99 for the full work, including downloadable booklet, although, in typically endearing I-Tunes fashion, you can also buy the shorter second, fourth and fifth movements as individual "songs" at 99 cents each.

It's an engaging start for the CSO, which has lagged far behind other major orchestras in taking the plunge into the rapidly changing landscape of classical music distribution. We can only hope the CSO sees the wisdom, economic, promotional and just plain humanitarian, in dipping into its vast recorded storehouse of often amazing historic live performances to offer new temptations for filling up the old I-Pod.

Rostropovich Remembered. Currently, the I-Tunes classical music store is also featuring the music-making of cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich, who died this week one month after celebrating his 80th birthday. Allan Kozinn in today's New York Times has a wonderful appreciation of the several lifetimes that Rostropovich managed to squeeze into his scant 29,000 days on earth - think thirty-works-in-eight-concerts marathons, and his essential role as a courageous dissident laying the groundwork for a free and democratic Russia, at one point providing a home to "non-person" novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn for four years.

The obituary includes a moving Reuters photograph of Rostropovich from 1989 Berlin. In December of that year Leonard Bernstein would conduct ecstatic celebratory concerts of the Beethoven 9th on both sides of the now undivided city, but here Rostropovich is pictured a month earlier at Checkpoint Charlie, alone, sitting on a simple wireframe chair, playing his cello, as if to himself, before a small group of onlookers. A couple of reporters, cameramen, a distracted girl staring off in another direction, two small boys trying to decide what to make of it all, a young man in a sports jacket, cigarette in hand, leaning against the graffiti-splattered Wall, his head slightly bowed as he listens.

Bernstein had his chorus substitute Freheit - freedom - for Freude - Joy - as he fashioned Beethovens's great ode into a mass explosion of communal feeling, an extraordinary sense of brotherhood, of belonging, of oneness and, however faintly, the dark echo of an increasingly distant time.

Yet it was perhaps Rostropovich's own celebratory offering that proved the more eloquent - that impromptu sidewalk recital, the tiny, random audience that fell in to gawk, then to watch and to listen, revealing the true soul of freedom in the sanctity of the individual, uncollectivized, brought together in quiet congress through the poetry of music.

The New Spertus Lightens Up (Genesis 1-3)

Photos and quotes from a press preview of Krueck and Sexton's spectacular new Spertus Institute, which brings Chicago's Michigan Avenue historic district into the 21st Century. Read and see it all here.

The Entombment of the Plug Bug

For a decade and a half the Plug Bug has looked down at Block 37 and laughed. The creature that resembles the love child of a marriage between the Hindu God Vishnu and an L. Ron Hubbard alien, painted against the pepto-bismal background of a three-story high, open-air mural, has never been able to contain its amusement at the city's impotence to make Block 37 anything more than a square-block dirtpile since it rushed to demolish every structure on the block - save the ComEd substation on which the Plug Bug is painted - in 1989.

Finally, however, the last laugh may be dawning on the Plug Bug, itself. As you can see from the photo below, construction is actually progressing on Block 37, including both a new tower that will be home to CBS/2's street-level studio and a block-long retail complex along State Street across from the Marshall Field's/Macy's flagship store.

Like Aida and Radames, the Plug Bug has been condemned for its insolence, and is now being entombed within the newer structures going up around it. Thousands of years from now, when future archeologists pull down the last steel beams of the buildings currently rising, the Plug Bug will again be revealed, and future peoples will be amazed and perplexed as they create their own stories of what it must have meant to we lost-in-time primitives of today.

César Portela DOESN'T lecture at Instituto Cervantes Wednesday, April 25

We've just been informed by the Graham Foundation that, due to illness, the lecture by César Portela scheduled for this Wednesday, April 25th at the Instituto Cervantes has been postponed until further notice. Here's wishing Mr. Portela a speedy recovery.

News notes from all over - John and Jeanne Rowe, Donna Robertson, Vladimir Putin, Jane Jacobs

IIT - Exelon's John Rowe and his wife Jeanne, have established the John and Jeanne Rowe Endowed Chair for the College of Architecture at IIT. The first holder of the chair will be College of Architecture Dean Donna Robertson, in recognition of "her leadership of the college and celebrates how she has bridged the gap between IIT’s strong Miesean tradition and contemporary architectural ideas. "

The Closing of the Russian Mind (let's hope Karl Rove isn't listening) - this Sunday New York Times had two fairly frightening articles on Russia's march away from freedom under the leadership of President Vladimir Putin. The first reports that the new owners of the Russia News Service, closely aligned to the Kremlin, have issued an edict that at least fifty per cent of the news must be "positive", opposition leaders can't be mentioned, and the US is always to portrayed as an enemy. All but a handful of media outlets are now controlled by Gazprom, the state-run oil company. Think NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN all run by Exxon - has Roger Ailes been hired as a consultant? The second talks of how Russian historical archives, opened by Boris Yeltsin, are again slamming shut, with "re-secretization" the order of the day. President Bush was heard to comment, "Hey, we're way ahead of ya."

Books - Who Needs 'em? - The Chicago Tribune has announced that, effective May 19th, its books section is being moved to the ghetto of the Saturday edition, where the circulation is not much more than half of Sunday's. In Trib PRspeak, Books has to be exiled because Sunday is "bursting at the seams with essential reading" - largely section after section of real estate ads - now that's essential reading.

The more the CTA changes, the worse it gets - Little more than a month after Mayor Richard M. Daley, with his usual inimitable charm, called reports that he was about to dump controversial CTA President Frank Kruesi “the biggest lie”, he this week dumped Frank Kruesi and replaced him with the mayor's chief of staff Ron Huberman. Huberman's reign began inauspiciously this weekend when north side Red Line riders were left stranded as northbound trains were diverted to the Brown Line tracks. While the CTA currently can't find the funds for even the most basic of repairs, not to mention meeting its pension obligations, the mayor was waxing rhapsodic about creating a new north-south line in time for the 2016 Olympics. Does Huberman have the will - or even the interest - to change the CTA's current unofficial slogan: "The CTA - what other choice do you have?"

Moses May Not Get the Last Word, After All - even as New Yorkers are stumbling over themselves to raise disgraced master builder/power freak Robert Moses back up onto his pedestal, the CAF will be hosting a May 5th symposium on the legacy of Moses arch-nemesis Jane Jacobs, "with a focus on the application of her work in present-day Chicago." Panelists will include. among others, Northwestern's Henry C. Binford and CNU's inescapable John Norquist.

César Portela lectures at Instituto Cervantes Wednesday, April 25 - EVENT POSTPONED

In an event supported by the Graham Foundation, which appears to have suspended its own lecture series even as it's reformulating its grant-making process, Spanish Architect César Portela will lecture this Wednesday, April 25th at 6:00 P.M at the Instituto Cervantes, suite 2940 in the John Hancock Center."In his lectures and through his projects," says the Instituto Cervantes' description, "Portela demonstrates his theory as the city as architecture for the citizens, interpreting one of the conditions that distinguish human beings from their surroundings."

The free lecture (no reservations required) will be given in Spanish with simultaneous English translation. Information on-line or call 312/335.1996.

IMPORTANT NOTE, due to illness, this event has been postponed.

Earth Day to be Marked by Green Festival at McCormick, Mulchmania at Grant Park

Earth Day is Sunday, April 22nd, and it will be marked by two additions to the April calendar of architectural events.

First up, Global Exchange and Co-op America are sponsoring the Chicago Green Festival, a two day event at McCormick Place this Saturday and Sunday that will feature over 300 exhibitors and 150 speakers, including Chicago Department of Environment Commissioner Sadhu Johnston discussing efforts to make Chicago the greenest city in the nation, 4th ward alderman Toni Preckwinkle discussing affordable housing, and Jacky Grimshaw of the Center for Neighborhood Technology taking on The Crisis in Transit Funding. See the full list of speakers and exhibitions and other information here.

Also on Saturday, from 9:00 to 11:00 A.M. in Grant Park, the Grant Park Advisory Council/Grant Park Conservancy with be hosting an Earth Day Celebration with ComEd and Exelon, which is seeking volunteers to help with mulching trees and pitching in for a general cleanup. See the details here.

Calatrava Spire goes before Plan Commission Today

To the Chicago Plan Commission, it may be "Residential-Business Planned Development No.368", but to the rest of us, it's Santiago Calatrava's Chicago Spire. It comes before the commission for approval today, Thursday, April 19th, during their regular monthly meeting beginning at 1:00 P.M. at 121 North LaSalle, probably in the City Council Chambers. The project's developer, Garrett Kelleher is seeking approval to:

amend the Bulk Regulations and Data Table to reduce the maximum permitted amount of commercial space and the maximum permitted number of hotel rooms, . . . the maximum permitted number of residential units would increase from 300 to 1,350 and the maximum Floor Area Ratio would increase from 10.0 to 32.0. The proposed changes would permit construction of a residential tower approximately 2,000 feet high, containing up to 1,350 residential units, and approximately 1,350 off-street parking spaces. (42nd Ward)

The smart money has the proposal, which has the blessing of Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, easily winning the Plan Commission's approval. Still in question is whether or not Kelleher actually has the resources to bring the project to reality.

As part of the marketing push for the Spire, last January Santiago Calatrava also came up with a new design for the proposed DuSable Park, which is on the other side of Lake Shore Drive just east of the Spire site. No funding mechanisms were offered for the proposal, however, although Kelleher appeared to have pledged $500,000 towards an estimated final cost of $12,000,000.

In March, Kelleher and Calatrava made another pitch for the project before a special meeting sponsored by the Grant Park Advisory Council, at which Kelleher's contribution was announced as rising to $6,000,000, although the ever-evasive developer has managed not to be pinned down on a final commitment.

The city's inability to bring DuSable Park into being has been an enduring civic disgrace, exposing the lethargic underbelly of the City That Works - Sometimes, and for the Right People. The DuSable park proposal, for a three acre patch of land just south of the Ogden Slip, goes all the way back to 1987, when then-mayor Harold Washington, announced it as a way to honor Jean-Baptiste DuSable, a native of Haiti who built Chicago's first permanent settlement at what was then the mouth of the Chicago river just east of present-day Michigan Avenue.

Even as the city was spending over $200,000,000 on Millennium Park, matched by an even larger amount of corporate support, DuSable Park, despite its prime location just west of Navy Pier and relatively meager $12,000,000 budget, has been left to twist slowly in the wind, used for as a dumping ground for soil excavated for nearby high-rise projects.

For two decades, the city and the Park District have left the site, adjacent to Chicago's most popular tourist attraction and adjoining a new prime upscale neighborhood, a forlorn dump, with earth piled high into picturesque, but garbage strewn moors contaminated by radioactive Thorium, a remnant of the lakefront's former industrial history when the Lindsey Light Company used it in its gaslights to impregnate the filament-like mantles that burned to provide the light.

Everyone and his brother is weighing in on the Spire, and I'll be joining them shortly. For now, I have just one piece of advice to the city:

Get the check.

If Kelleher can come up with a billion or more to finance the Spire, he should have no trouble sorting through his pocket change to come up with a $6,000,000 good-faith commitment to fund DuSable. The city should put the screws to Kelleher to get this money, now, before they allow him to turn a single spade of soil for his gargantuan project. That way, even in the worst case scenario - Kelleher goes bust and the Spire goes unfinished - we at least get the park and DuSable finally gets his fitting memorial.

Tree Studio rehab honored by Friends of Downtown

Friends of Downtown held their annual Awards Dinner Monday night, recognizing ten specific projects ranging from the new McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum, the McCormick Tribune Bridgehouse and Chicago River Museum, and Joe Valerio's Michigan Avenue store for Garmin. Best new building was Booth/Hansen's 30 West Oak , Best New Public Art Madgalena Abakanowicz's Agora, Best Adapative Reuse: Hartshorne Plunkard's rehab of the Chicago and Northwestern Power Station.

Best Restoration went to Friedman Properties, for their work on the landmark 1894 Lambert Tree studios a $70,000,000 upgrading that saw a century old tradition come to an end. A trust set up by Tree reserved the Studio's for the use of artists, keeping rents low. Over the decades, residents included artists as diverse as author Edgar Rice Burroughs, sculptor John Storrs, whose Ceres gazes down LaSalle Street from the top of the Chicago Board of Trade Building, and actors Burgess Meredith and Peter Falk.

With the rehab, there are no more residents at Lambert Tree. They've been replaced by such upscale retailers as Thomas Moser, Aveda, a couple of antique stores, and Pops for Champagne, transplanted from its long-time home on Sheffield Avenue. What was once artists' studios and apartments in the 1912 annex is now the headquarters for Metropolitan Capital Bank, bankers to the "emerging affluent" with millions of dollars in personal assets. Starving artists no longer need apply.

Tree's own visage can be seen in the building's ornament. A silk-stocking Democrat, he was a friend and supporter of progressive Illinois governor John P. Altgeld, and was among those pleading for clemency for the men convicted, in a highly suspect trial, of inciting the 1886 Haymarket bombing. As a Circuit Court Judge, he did his part in keeping one of Chicago's most enduring traditions alive by presiding over trials that found a number of the city's aldermen guilty of corruption. An unsuccessful candidate for both the U.S. House and Senate, he served as ambassador to Belgium, and, for a period of only one month, Russia.

Tree and his wife Anna were among Chicago's most prominent patrons of the arts. He made his fortune as a connected attorney. In a period of 18 months ending in 1867, when consumer prices, by one indicator, were less than a tenth of what they are today, his law firm had an income of $28,000. The Tree Studios were built opposite Tree's broad-lawned mansion at 620 North Wabash, replaced in 1912 by the twin onion-domed Medinah Temple, today a Bloomingdale's furniture store.

Art Institute Bertrand Goldberg Catalog completed

The Art Institute of Chicago's Department of Architecture and Design announced last week that the guide to their extensive collection revolving around the work of architect Bertrand Goldberg has now been completed. The archive, acquired through a 2002 gift from the Goldberg family, includes over 30,000 documents - over 270 linear feet of photos, drawings, sketches and the like from across the fifty-five year career of the architect of Marina City, which alone accounts for 279 entries in the catalogue. You can view information about the collection here. There's a bibliography of the speeches given by Goldberg from 1958 on, concluding with a series of four talks, including a lecture titled "Modernism: The Ghost Walks" given at IIT just months before his death in October of 1997 at the age of 84. There's also eight pages of listings of articles on his work.

Perhaps most importantly, for all those who are unlikely to be treking down to the Ryerson Library to ask for the boxes to brought down from the shelf for a quick peek, there's a link to an impressive, still-in-progress website by designer Justin Braem devoted to Goldberg's life and work. Its introduction page includes this quote:

“My message, I think, is much more important either than myself personally, or than the quick identification as the round-building architect. I am talking about the performance of people in a social system, about the performance of people in the city. I have spent a great deal of time not only studying what I have been able to discover, but to demonstrate it. I only wish there were more people who shared with me this interest in the role of architecture in society.”

The website includes a detailed description and copious photographs and illustrations on each of 42 major projects.

The Art Institute is planning a major retrospective of Goldberg's work for 2010. Ironically, by that time, one of his important buildings, Prentice Hospital in Chicago, may well no longer exist. This fall, the hospital, itself, moves to a much larger facility. Northwestern University, which controls the Goldberg property, has yet to announce plans for the stunning building, but if history is any indication, the clout-heavy institution will not be shy about using its muscle to shunt aside any obstacles to a decision to demolish, including a move for landmark designation, which Prentice does not currently have. Neither, astonishingly enough, does Marina City, which continues to undergo a series of mutilations at the hands of a new owner who is converting the House of Blues Hotel, carved out of what was originally the complex's office building - long-time home to Goldberg's practice - into a Hotel Sax.