Rogers Talks! Piano crosses President! Seducer Stalks Millennium Park!

Hot on the heels of the opening of a smash revival of South Pacific on Broadway, 2007 Pritzker Prize-winning architect Richard Rogers will be coming to Chicago for a May 15th lecture at the Art Institute. Rogers gained fame with the Pompidou Centre in Paris, co-designed with Renzo Piano. His 71-story Three World Trade Center, currently under construction at the WTC site, is expected to achieve Gold LEED status. The lecture begins at 6:00 P.M. Tickets are $5.00 for students, $10.00 for members of the Architecture and Design Society of the Art Institute of Chicago, and $15.00 for the general public. You're urged to go to the A&DS website to make reservations, but I wouldn't recommend it, as the only thing you'll find when you click on "Events" or "News" is the same Microsoft "Server does not exist or access denied" error code that has appeared there for the better part of a year. How such a prestigious organization can allow its web presence to exist month after month in the internet equivalent of leaving your fly open is beyond me.

But I digress. You can also go all retro and call 312.443.3631 to make reservations.

This weekend, if you're patient and can stay awake long enough, you may get to see a key section of Renzo Piano's Nichols Bridgeway being put in place above Monroe Street. The street will be closed from 6:00 P.M. Friday through 5:00 A.M. Monday for both cars and pedestrians.

If you're planning to camp out, a good way to start your evening is to check out Chicago Opera Theater's sexy, well-reviewed production of Mozart's Don Giovanni, which will be simulcast live Friday evening, May 9th from the Harris Theater to a giant 18' x 32' foot screen above the Pritzker Pavilion stage. There's only room for 11,000 people, so get there early. Curtain rises at 7:30 P.M.

Elsewhere in news shorts:

Environmental activist Wendy Abrams, founder and president of Cool Globes, will be honored at an Honorary Diploma at Archeworks' 2008 Graduation ceremony this Sunday, May 11th. More information here.

ULI Chicago's breakfast program, The Credit Crunch - Nine Months Later: When Will it End and How is it Impacting Commercial Real Estate? has a new location at the Grand Ballroom of the Renaissance Chicago Hotel. More information here.

Buy Our Museum or (and?) We'll Bury This Child

When you listen to Mayor Richard M. Daley's increasingly desperate attempts to vilify opponents of his effort to force the Chicago Children's Museum into Grant Park, you hear the voice of the suave European exile who appears at the beginning of the film Casablanca, cautioning a middle-aged tourist . . .

I beg of you, Monsieur, watch yourself. Be on guard. This place is full of vultures, vultures everywhere, everywhere.

As he delivers this warning and departs, the suave European places a friendly hand on the shoulder of the tourist, who will soon discover that his wallet is missing.

Similarly, on Monday Daley was telling reporters the museum was going to be built in an underground parking garage because "the community didn’t want to see the children. " He knows, of course, this is a shameless lie. He knows that from the very beginning, the museum proposed building their new structure below ground as part of a calculated effort to evade and subvert the A. Montgomery Ward rulings that have protected Grant Park for over a century. But what's to be gained from honesty, when an angry rant guarantees prime placement on the evening news?

This is the same Mayor that tried to smear those wanting to protect Grant Park as racists. It didn't stick. He tried to portray them as child-haters. People laughed.

He said the only reason 42nd ward alderman Brendan Reilly opposed the museum was that he didn't have children. Anyone with children, the mayor said in an avuncular tone, knows the museum can't be built anywhere other than Grant Park. And when a coalition of opponents stepped forward to say no, as fathers and mothers of small children they, too, didn't want Gigi Pritzker's pet project in Grant Park, the Mayor seemed to be suggesting that their children would grow up to hate them. As quoted in the Sun-Times, he said of the museum opponents, "They'll go start petition drives. They're threatening everybody — your political life. They're gonna defeat all aldermen. They're gonna beat everybody in the world. But, one thing. Those children grow up and remember them," the mayor said.

And, of course, the Mayor said this knowing that his administration, from the start, has been strong-arming alderman to keep them in the pro-museum fold, pressuring them to commit political suicide by voting to override the long-standing principle of supporting each other's veto's of projects within their ward boundaries, a bedrock source of their power that the Mayor seeks to dilute and consolidate into his own hands.

Power isn't pretty, and you'll find no better portrait of it than in Al Podgorski's page 18 photo in Tuesday's (May 6th) Chicago Sun-Times. Understand, everyone can take a bad picture - I'm proof of that. But Podgorski's portrait of the Mayor isn't a gotcha moment; it's a remarkable Picture of Dorian Gray-like reveal of the mayor, his face contorted into a snarl, a sneering mask of contempt towards anyone who would dare to dissent from his judgment. This is the face that strikes terror into the hearts of alderman, commissioners and staff. This is the face that says, I own this city - get on board or you're less than nothing. (You have to pick up a hard copy of Tuesday's Sun-Times; the web version of the story uses a more conventional photo.)

Museum proponents, taking their cue from the mayor, have become firm adherents to the idea that any statement, however ludicrous, can be put over if you just say it with deadpan conviction. Children's Museum President Jennifer Farrington apparently believes she can make 100,000 square feet of construction disappear by telling ABC7, "We are not talking about bringing a new building, we are talking about a new resource to the park." Or, as Jimmy Durante once said, "What elephant?"

At a Tuesday morning debate with Alderman Reilly at the Union League Club, as reported by Medill Reports, Farrington again said that the Grant Park site was the only place for her museum. “No other location met our four requirements: A central downtown location, easy access to public transportation from all corners of the city, access to green space, and plentiful adjacent covered parking.” I can think of a lot of places that meet the first three requirements - I'll talk about my own choice later this week, but the fourth - covered parking - is simply bizarre. The Field Museum - no covered parking. Adler Planetarium, Shedd Aquarium - no covered parking. Altogether, they attract millions of parents and children each year. Do all those children somehow become enfeebled mutants when they visit the CCM? At Grant Park, won't many, if not most, disembark from buses on covered lower Randolph? No matter. Devise your clout-empowered whims in haste, come up with rationalizations at leisure.


Last week, the museum issued still another revision of its design, which again claims to reduce the structure's presence in the park. It doesn't really. The high sculptural skylights of the previous proposal aren't really gone; they're just stuffed underneath a maze-like series of ramps and terraces stepping down from Upper Randolph. As you can see in the rendering below, the glass is still several times human height. A landscaped terrace off of Upper Randolph would become a narrow strip leading to the ramp entrance. Current ramps leading down to the park from Upper Randolph in both the east and west corners of the site would be replaced with a single entrance. The easternmost ramp is eliminated entirely. In the latest design, you can see the shadow of still another structure just north of the current tennis courts nearest Columbus Drive. To get from Upper Randolph down to the park, you have to keep doubling-back on ramp segments that are almost all about a half a block or more long. The museum's Randolph Street entrance has been cut in size by 3/4, and moved off the site and onto the sidewalk, the better to evade the A. Montgomery Ward protections. The latest revision is less a design than a legal stratagem.

Check it out for yourself. Chicago Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin has posted six drawings here.

Hearing of its Impending Ban, a Plastic Bag takes Flight, plots Escape

News You Can Use

Camel demand soars as oil price makes tractors too costly to run.

Renzo Piano Art Institute Bridge Begins to Take Flight

Courtesy of Bob Johnson, we offer you these photos of the current state of the work on the Nichols Bridgeway, the Renzo Piano designed, 615-long incline designed to suck visitors from Millennium Park up into the Art Institute of Chicago's new Modern Wing, scheduled to open, along with the bridge, early next year. Piano may have missed a prime opportunity. Judging from these pictures, his structure, bent to the west, would have made a great water slide, depositing delighted passengers directly on the shallow sea of Jaume Plensa's Crown Fountain.

We'll have a photoessay with lots of our own pictures of both the Modern Wing and the Nichols Bridgeway soon, but for now here's a couple of samples.

UIC's At the Edge adds Architects to the mix for 2009 Innovative Art in Chicago Series

For the first time this year, Gallery 400 at the University of Illinois at Chicago is adding architecture, design and new media to their at the edge: innovative art in chicago program, an annual series of commissioned projects that began with gallery installations, public performance, websites, and more. May 31st at 6:00 P.M. (postmark or drop-off time) is the deadline this time out. According to the competition flyer:

Inquiry, experimentation and ingenuity are the basis of At the Edge. As Chicago’s artistic, architectural and design scene continues to be an expansive, resourceful and energetic creative arena, Gallery 400 at the University of Illinois at Chicago encourages the most innovative aspects of that dynamism. We are looking to work with individuals ready to take a conceptual, political, speculative or aesthetic risk. Propose a project you might not be able to realize elsewhere, one you never thought could get made. . . . Four individuals or group collaborations will be chosen to present projects lasting from one night to two months (possibly longer for public projects; gallery exhibitions typically last six weeks) that will be supported by Gallery 400’s professional resources, an honorarium and a moderate production budget.

Combined honorariums/production budgets range from $500 to $6,000. Finalists will be chosen by a jury of artists, architects, designers, curators and art administrators. An "executive group" of that jury, headed by Gallery 400's director, will make studio visits and conduct interviews to arrive at the four winners, who will be notified in late June, with the actual mounting of the projects scheduled from January to October of next year.

You have to be from the Chicago region to be eligible, but you can't be current UIC faculty or staff, or a student enrolled in classes this summer or fall. More information, including application forms and complete rules, can be found here.

Looptopia, Great Chicago Places, Goldberger, Dongtan and Darwin - It's the May Calendar of Architectural Events

OK, there better not be any complaints now. What with Friday's allnighter Looptopia scattering theatre, music, art and spectacle all throughout the Loop, and this year's Great Chicago Places and Spaces in mid-month, there are literally hundreds of architectural events to choose from this May. Paul Golberger. Lee Bey. Leon Depres. Anthony Alofsin (Saturday night at Unity Temple). David Bahlman. Pearl River Tower. Asymptote's Lise Anne Couture. Design in the Age of Darwinism. Archeworks annual gala. The History of 'L'. The history of the Parking Garage. Restoring the world's largest Tiffany Dome. Garfield Park Conservatory. Presentations for SEOIA's excellence in engineering award. Cher. You get the idea. And there's lot more. Check it all out here.

Fish Liberation Army Strikes Today at Noon

I'm still putting the finishing touches on the May calendar. Posting Friday, I hope.

In the interim, here's an interesting event for today, Thursday, May 1st. Friends of the Chicago River will celebrate this season's opening of the McCormick Tribune Bridgehouse and Chicago River Museum by releasing 200 baby bluegills into the Chicago River at noon. For just 5 bucks, you can actually adopt a baby bluegill, name it and release it. Just don't expect any thank you letters. (Fish can't write, and if they can't find a job upstream, be prepared they may come back to live with you for a while . . . just until things work themselves out.)

The Museum will also keep its doors open afterhours this Friday evening, as part of the second Looptopia extravaganza, which will offer 14 hours of programing - music, theater, art and spectacle - into the wee hours of Saturday.

And here, courtesy of Bob Johnson, is a photo of the actual event, as a bluegill wins its freedom.

I've Been Tagged - And We All Know How Painful That Can Be

Andrew Patner tagged me.

I never respond to chain letters, both because I don't want to encourage them and because I've been much too busy corresponding with Madame DeNuovo, who has $50,000,000 she needs my help getting out of her native country.

However, when you're "tagged", as I have just have been by cultural critic and blogger Andrew Patner, I can't really decline. I'm just upholding the law. It's a federal law, actually.

So here, apparently, are the rules:

1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you.

OK:

1. The nearest book is one I've been meaning to finish for the past fifteen years. (I'm basically illiterate, and this book has no pictures.)
2. I found page 123 by locating pages 122 and 124 and rummaging about in between them.
3. Here's carrots for lunch
At tuppence a bunch.
(I think that's one sentence; the author's style of punctuation veers toward the idiosyncratic)
4. "Oh!" exclaimed Albertine, "cabbages, carrots, oranges. All the things I want to eat. Do make Françoise go out and buy some.
5. Unfortunately, AP has already taken my own most likely choices, and since I lead a hermetic existence that generally shuns contact with other human beings, I have to stretch a bit to come up with:
a. John Hill, who left Chicago for the corrupt Eastern seaboard and has seen his blog's readership numbers soar ever since, damn him.
b. Blair Kamin, because he has a Pulitzer and I can't even get a prize when I buy a box of Cracker Jack.
c. Toronto's Terry Murray, because I've already quoted Bill Murray elsewhere in this post, and because she has a great blog tracking down interesting gargoyles.
d. Donald Trump, because he was just in Chicago to dedicate his new Trump Tower, and never stopped by to say, "Hi!"
e. Mark Cuban, because he's probably going to buy the Chicago Cubs and because I believe that, now that Fidel is gone, we should all try to get along better with the Cubans.

OK, can I go to bed now?

Impressionists: the End is Near! (For Now)

Chai Lee of the Art Institute recently sent us an email reminding us that this is the last week to view the museum's incomparable collection of Impressionist masterworks in the setting to which we've grown accustomed to seeing them for the past thirty years. After this Sunday, May 4th, a more benign local version of Colonel von Waldheim will be crating up all the canvasses and shipping them to Texas, where they'll be on display in the Kimball Museum's blockbuster exhibition, The Impressionists: Master Paintings From the Art Institute of Chicago, which will run from June 29th through November 2nd. A few old favorites, such as Seurat's La Grande Jette and Cezanne's Chiens Jouer au Poker will continue to hold down the fort awaiting their companions' return.

Other gallery renovations are already nearing completion. Some time in June, we'll see the new galleries for the museum's Department of Prints and Drawings, designed by wHY's Kulapat Yantrasast. (Check out the strange animation, which depicts what must be an architect's wet dream: perfect, white-walled galleries almost entirely unsullied by actual art.) Then in July, Renzo Piano's revamp of Gunsaulus Hall, aka "the bridge to the other side", is scheduled to be unveiled. Windows along the north side which had been bricked over since the 1930's will once again bring natural light into the galleries and provide "stunning views of Millennium Park", and of the urban theater of the Metra trainings passing below.

The AIC promises that all our old friends will be home for Christmas, - December 22nd, to be exact - but stop in by Sunday to wish them a bon voyage for their excursion into the realm of Louis Kahn.

The Wrigley Company is Dead! Long Live the Wrigley Building!

Contrasting local presences: Left, Global Headquarters, William Wrigley Jr. Company, Michigan Avenue; Right, Metra Station serving Mars candy plant, west side of Chicago [Metra photo]

It may shock some people to learn that the 1921 Wrigley Building, arguably one of Chicago's half-dozen most recognizable buildings, has never been afforded official landmark protection. The argument has always been made that the Wrigley family, throughout the decades, has been a responsible steward for a structure that, like Marina City, has become a symbol for Chicago throughout the world.

And they have. Just as, for over a century, the William Wrigley Jr. Company has been a bedrock component of Chicago's economy and culture. But in today's hyper-volatile, hyper-scaled, aggressively globalized world, all that can change in a snap of the fingers.

And it just did. Only six years ago, in a failed attempt to acquire much larger Hershey Foods, Wrigley muffed its chance to be the fish that swallows, and on Monday became the fish that gets inhaled, agreeing to be acquired for $23 billion by Mars Inc.

As always in these things, all parties are insisting nothing much will change. Wrigley will retain a major autonomy in its operations and a strong Chicago presence. And that may be true. Less than three years ago, the company opened it news $45,000,000 Global Innovation Center on Goose Island, designed by Hellmuth, Obata and Kassabaum. Yet the lesson of corporate history is that companies seldom pay $23 billion for an asset without succumbing to the itch to tinker and streamline in search for the best possible return on its sizable investment.

So, while continuing to ascribe to Wrigley/Mars nothing but the best of intentions, the time has come to ask for a small token of good faith.

Even though, as a private company, Mars is insulated from the stock market's ruthless appetite for uninterrupted good news not just quarter to quarter by seemingly moment by moment, no corporation is immune to an economic ethos in which a beloved building, considered a prime asset for nearly ninety years, can devolve, almost overnight, into a redundant white elephant, suitable only for cashing out the value and purging it from the books.

The time to begin the landmarking process is now.

Four from Artropolis 2008

Artropolis is on the scale of the kind of things Chicago used to do just to prove it could. The art show, which closes on Monday, takes up more than half a million square feet in the gigantic Merchandise Mart, and includes thousands of works from thousands of artists from all over globe, in no fewer than five different shows, from insider artists, to outsiders, to the undiscovered, and the antique. You could camp out at the Mart for every one of the 28 hours the show is open and still not do it justice. (But you wouldn't starve - there's a wide selection of often high-end food and drink.)

There were a large number of works that grabbed my attention, but I'll concentrate on just four with an architecture tie-in that caught my eye.

The Robert Koch Gallery is exhibiting the work of photographer Michael Wolf, whose work on exhibition at Artropolis includes the hyper-realist shot, shown above, of Marina City, which contrasts the rigid form of Bertrand Goldberg's towers with the intimations of humanity - visible clearly in the supersharp photo, reproduced in large scale - within the lighted units.

The Linda Durham Gallery of Contemporary Art of Santa Fe includes this photograph by Michael Eastman. Titled Fidel's Stairway, it's part of a series depicting architecture in Cuba. In contrasting one of dictator's proclamations with the decaying grandeur of the colonial-era staircase on whose wall it is inscribed, the photo manages to combine history, reportage, architecture and poetry all in one shot. Eastman's own website offers up a very generous gallery of his strikingly evocative work capturing architecture, from the monumental to the mundane, from both the U.S. and across the world.

The Priska C. Juschka Fine Art Gallery in New York City's Chelsea district is showing the work of Dana Melamed, the Israeli born artist, now living in New Jersey, who creates dense, three-dimensional surfaces "by dipping printing waste and film into acrylic and glue, torching and melting them, then drawing and scratching into the layers with a razor." Melamed says the destructive techniques reflect urban life, and especially on a day when I'm slightly overwhelmed by it, I'm not one to argue. The portfolio of her work, which you can sample here, has a hypnotic Piranesi-like complexity that reads city life through its decay and destruction. The detail shown here is from a 2007 work titled, When The Sky Turned Grey. What shows up here as flat is actually an intricately layered assemblage of materials. You can see a sequence of photographs of Melamed at work here.

Finally, at the Next show section of Artropolis (at the south end, right next to the food), Galerie Vernon is showing the mesmerizing work of Jakub Nepraš, a Czech artist who makes boldly colored, fantastical videos, such as his Babylon Plant, in which corpuscles that are actually - if I understand it correctly, moving vehicles and people - pulsate throughout the arteries of large, amorphous organisms.

Atropolis is open on Sunday from 11 A.M. to 6 P.M. If you can find a way to play hooky from the office on Monday, April 28th, it's open from 11:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M. (3:00 P.M. for The Merchandise Mart International Antiques Fair, The Artist Project and the Intuit Show of Outsider and Folk Art.)

Sally Kitt Chappell reads from Chicago's Urban Nature (twice) on Wednesday

In what will undoubtedly be the last late listing to the April calendar of architectural events, author Sally Kitt Chappell will read from her book, Chicago’s Urban Nature: A Guide to the City’s Architecture and Landscape, twice, this coming Wednesday, April 30th. The first event will be at 12:00 P.M. in the Millennium Room of the Chicago Cultural Center, the second at Access Living's award-winning new headquarters at 115 West Chicago, designed by LCM Architects.

Chappell's book provides an "illustrated guide to Chicago's stunning blend of nature and architecture. At the heart of the city's urban concept is the idea of connection, bringing buildings and landscapes, culture and nature, commerce and leisure into an energetic harmony. Packed with maps and recommended tours, and bursting with splendid photos, this is an essential guidebook for day-trippers, lifelong Chicago residents, and professionals in landscape architecture, urbanism, and design."

The lecture is the third in a series of Five Weeks of Conversations Within Communities, a series sponsored by the University of Chicago Press and Chicago's Mayor's Office of Special Events that has as its goal "fostering dialogue between Chicago citizens and Chicago writers. The series continues with a May 7th lecture by Louise W. Knight, author of Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy, and concludes on May 14th with Stuart Dybek, author of Childhood and Other Neighborhoods, as a final lead up to Chicago's annual Great Chicago Places and Spaces, which will be offering up over 200 tours May 17th and 18th.

Staggered Truss: Not as Painful as it Sounds

A new hotel brings an innovative engineering technique, pioneered by the American Institute of Steel Construction, to Chicago for the first time. Iconic architecture, via Valerio Dewalt Train, to follow. Read all about it, and see how the thing will look when it's finished, and a lot more images. here.

Chicago Streetscene - 343 North Dearborn

Prince of the High C's

I'm as much a sucker for Wagnerian gloom and blood-and-lust Puccini as the next guy, but sometimes its ok to settle back and realize that, as Harry Carey might have said had he chosen a radically different career path, there's nothing like fun at the old Opera House.

And that's apparently just the kind of giddy delirium overtaking denizens of the Met in New York as they take in the new production of Donizetti's La Fille du Régiment with Natalie Dessay and tenor of the moment Juan Diego Flórez. The role of Tonio is the one Luciano Pavarotti, in a production with Joan Sutherland, rode to superstardom in the 1960's, and now Flórez appears to be following in his footsteps, firing off a succession of nine high C's in the aria "Ah! Mes Amis", like a string of firecrackers, not just once but, at the roaringly appreciative audience's command (and Met impresario Peter Gelb's collusion), in an encore, as well. In the New York Times, Bernard Holland's review includes links to recordings not only of Flórez' "Mes Amis" (with encore) from Monday night's performance, but a video, as well, plus Dessay's sparkling account of "Salut à la France'. For a more irreverent take on the spectacle, check out Opera Chic's reports, including mid-performance posts from her Blackberry, here, here, and here.

This coming Saturday, April 26th, you'll be able to hear the performance at 12:30 P.M on WFMT, 98.7, and see the whole thing in HD at over half a dozen Chicago area theaters, with an encore performance for Sunday, April 27th at 2 P.M.

Here's the whole Flórez Mes, with ovation, from the Vienna Staatsoper, April of 2007.



And finally, to top even that, here's a performance (forgive the buzz) from the incomparable Alfredo Kraus, whose appearances at Lyric I was too much of a dunderhead to seek out. Even in his mid sixties, Kraus nails the high C's and sings with the same clarion, crystalline beauty that was the hallmark of his art. He was the real thing.

Kamin Joins the Chorus: CCM - Stop Hiding Your Museum!

Blair gets it. Months after we began talking about how the Chicago Children's Museum is deliberately withholding all but the most deceptive images of the large structure they want to muscle into Grant Park, the Chicago Tribune's Pulitzer-Prize winning architecture critic Blair Kamin blasted the museum and its architects, Krueck and Sexton, for withholding all but the most abstracted images on the proposed structure from the public.

In a demonstration of just how much K&S has allowed itself to be co-opted by the museum's cynicism, project manager Tom Jacobs posted a comment to Kamin's article, which reads:

The Chicago Tribune has been in possession of many presentation plans, sections, and elevations for the proposed Children’s Museum since April 4, 2008 including several views of the sculptural glass entrance and skylights. The choice of illustrations that tell an incomplete and one-sided architectural story was made solely by the Tribune. We would like to encourage all media to contribute to fair, complete and accurate reporting to facilitate the needed debate.

Yeah, right. In fact Kamin posted 12 of the 14 images on his blog, and you can see them all here. (Missing were - still another! - meaningless cross-section, and a photograph of the current garage entrance, for which we include our own photograph below.)
And what exactly are these images Jacobs would have you believe provide you the real story? Let's start at the beginning, with the first image, of the current Daley Bicentennial Plaza, which we've cribbed from Blair's Skyline blog:
Wow, how objective. Taken in what looks to be the dead of winter, all parched brown earth. The desert in Lawrence of Arabia was more inviting.

Now here's what Daley Bi really looks like, in a similar, if less wide angle shot, taken this past Sunday.
The next two images are birds-eye view of about six square blocks around the museum drawn from about half a mile up. Four is a cutaway drawn from about two blocks away. The next four are floor plans. The last four are cutaways. In three of them the museum - all levels - takes up about a sixth of the vertical space of the rendering; about two-thirds is given over to empty sky. Every one of these drawings deliberately seeks to obscure the scale of Krueck and Sexton's proposed buildings both to the existing park and to the human form.

And I will repeat a point that Kamin does not mention. There have been no images released - as in zero, none - of what the interiors of the 100,000 square foot museum will be like. This would be unacceptable for any project of this size, but for a proposal for a subterranean design to be occupied by children, to be built on public ground, and its operations subsidized by taxpayer funds, it is unconscionable.

And what is most disconcerting is how many sterling reputations are being voluntarily trashed in service of the Museum's desperate campaign to force its way into the Park. A great Chicago family of philanthropists, the Pritzkers, have descended into the gutter to smear opponents of Gigi Pritzker's pet project as racist. There's some solace, I suppose, in the fact I can no longer find on the Krueck and Sexton website a "press section" on the CCM project that consisted in its entirety of two news articles playing up that race-baiting theme, but its supremely depressing that Tom Jacobs has decided to transform himself from a talented architect to a snake-oil salesman. When he says that the 14 images released to Tribune give a true picture of the CCM design, he knows he's lying, and when he concludes with, "We would like to encourage all media to contribute to fair, complete and accurate reporting to facilitate the needed debate," he knows he's doing everything in his power to ensure exactly the opposite.

Does This Make My Butt Look Fat?

All of us have body parts that, while fully functional and probably essential, don't always show us in our best light. Seen from the south, the bustle building pictured here forms a perfectly proportioned element of the composition of 1955's Prudential Building. Seen from the southeast, however, the complex appears to be packing a big trunk. (Originally there was supposed to be a twin bustle along the west side of the building.) Probably back in 1955, when the Prudential marked the easterly point where building ended, no one envisioned how new construction would push further and further east, putting the Prudential in the shadow of newer, larger, taller towers, and the bustle on more conspicuous display.

Recently, the indispensable Lee Bey ran a post on his The Urban Observer blog on Naess and Murphy's Prudential Building, built over railroad air rights, and the first skyscraper to be completed in the city after the onset of the Great Depression. Adding a visual marker to the north end of Grant Park, the 42-story structure immediately became the Chicago's premiere office address, and its tallest building. You could see the whole of Chicago from its observation deck, which you accessed from the world's fastest elevators and what were then said to be the world's highest escalators. Within a year, the observation deck had attracted a million visitors. Long before Windows to the World, Stouffer's Top of the Rock restaurant was the place for special occasions and the expense account crowd. And just in case you missed the branding, Prudential, according to Bey, also paid famed sculptor Alfonso Iannelli $7,500 to create the massive relief of the Rock of Gibraltar on the building's western facade.

The restaurant and observatory are long gone. It's not even the Prudential Building anymore, just One Prudential Plaza, to demarcate it from its bigger, but not necessarily better, offspring to the North. From the Chase Promenade of what is now Millennium Park, however, The Prudential still offers up a beautifully scaled landmark that remains one of the most iconic and graceful visual anchors in Chicago.

Sunday April 20th - Spring Comes to Gehry's BP Bridge

Kamin: Children's Museum a "Bad Marriage"

Less than a week after my own analysis of the Krueck and Sexton design the Chicago Children's Museum is working overtime to ram into Grant Park, Pulitzer Prize winning Chicago Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin weighed in Thursday with his own blistering evaluation, which calls the proposal, which would burrow visiting children 48 feet below ground, "as bad for the museum as it would be for Grant Park." In a very detailed analysis, Kamin considers the design, the politics, the precedents it would set, and the long-standing legal protections that the Museum seeks to destroy.

As important as Kamin's prose is an accompanying graphic that takes the Museum's cynically deceptive drawings of the project, all made from a far distant perspective intended to mask any sense of the construction's scale, and blows up one cross section to where you can actually see how the purportedly unobtrusive skylights tower over the human figures standing beside them.

When reading through Blair Kamin's piece, I was reminded again of an extraordinary fact. I have never seen -not on the museum's website, or that of its architects, Krueck and Sexton, or anywhere else - a single image of the museum's interior. Think about it. The public, the City Council, Park District and Plan Commission are being asked to pass judgment on a subterranean grotto that will stuffed with children without ever seeing a single image of what it will be like. Has there ever been any major structure, commercial or cultural, marketed to the public that kept the character of its interiors completely hidden?