A daily blog on architecture in Chicago, and other topics cultural, political and mineral.
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In the early days of Mies van der Rohe's Crown Hall, the jewel of the IIT campus, architect John Vinci, then a senior, convinced the school to let him use the new building for the annual dance. He managed to book Duke Ellington to provide the music, and students from IIT's Institute of Design were given responsibility for providing the decor. "They put blue and green spotlights on the grass outside," remembers Vinci, "and aimed them at the branches of the honey locust trees lining the building, so that inside you'd see the shadows of the branches moving behind the lower milk-glass windows like animated drawings on Japanese paper."
This Thursday, June 11th, from nine-ish to midnight, that idea will be turned outside in, as artist Jim Tichy and students from IIT, SAIC, Bauhaus-Universitat Weimar, and Bezalel Academy Tel Aviv will present Lighting Crown Hall, turning it into "a massive light box, sending video projections and elaborate time-base lighting sequences through the glass windows." The project is a collaborative venture with the School of the Art Institute and the Mies van der Rohe Society, and is the culmination of Bauhaus Labs' three week summer session "exploring the ideas of visionary artist and educator Laszlo Moholy-Nagy." Grab a lawn chair (and a jacket, and maybe an umbrella) and stake out your place. Crown Hall is at 3360 South State Street. There's public parking in lots D1 and D2 at the southeast corner of 33rd and State, entrance on 33rd.
In case you've ever wondered about the accommodations the Chicago Tribune aristocrats carved out for themselves below the soaring buttresses and behind the Gothic tracery atop Hood and Howells' Tribune Tower, wonder no more. Chicago caterers Food for Thought have announced they are the "exclusive representative" for the top of the tower and its "State-of-the-art conference facilities, old-world charm, and stunning views." Standing reception: 300; seated dinner: 100. The apoplectic spirit of Col. McCormick restlessly haunting the room: priceless.
Usually when you see some architectural firm's really pushing-the-envelope design, your first - and correct - reactions are: a. it's very nice and b. it will always remain in the unrealized perfection of the drawings.
Occasionally, however, such a design does get built. Case in point is New York-based reiser + umemoto's stunning office project O-14, which has actually just been topped out in the architectural fairyland of Dubai, and is projected to be completed next year. Like SOM's 1961 Hartford Building on Wacker Drive . . . . . . O-14 wears its structure as an exoskeleton. Unlike the more conventional Hartford, however, 0-14's exoskeleton creates a column-free interior. It also provides solar shading, and pairs up with the glazing set a meter within to create what is the equivalent to a double-skin facade, whose chimney effect channels hot air - of which I hear there's a lot in Dubai - up through the cavity, cooling the surface of the window wall.
The exoskeleton is of self-consolidating concrete cast around a "basket weave" of reinforcing steel, with the large circular openings created by inserting cut polystyrene voids in the "basket-weave" rebar matrix. You can see an illustration of the process in photographs accompanying this fine article on Arcspace, from which we've stolen borrowed the image below. reiser +umemoto's website also includes their interesting entry in a competition to design a new home for the Pittsburgh Children's Museum. Like everyone else in the world excepting the bunker-loving Gigi Pritzker Pucker, Mayor Daley and their minions, the architects recognize the importance of making a "building that is at once light and inviting." (Since it's designed with Flash, we can't provide a link to the project's page on their website - you just have to burrow to find it.) In an amazing coincidence, Lucien Lagrange, working independently, completely unaware of reiser + umemoto's design for O-14 , came up with a strikingly parallel concept to counter Mies van der Rohe 860-880 Lake Shore Drive apartments when the Chicago architect assumed he would get his hands on the Athletic Club site right across the street.* *important note to attorneys here.
Two stories this week in Crain's Chicago Business underscored how the current slump in hotel fortunes is affecting the city's architecture. On Wednesday, Crain's reported that it's now official: there will be no Mondrian Hotel on State Street. The plan of the buyers of the former Cedar Hotel at 1112-18 North State, shuttered since 2007, was to strip off its terra cotta facade, demolish the hotel behind it, construct a new 200 room building in its place, and then slap the old facade onto it, in still another instance of a practice that's becoming so common in this city that it should probably be renamed a "Chicagectomy". (It will interesting to see what happens to another property, the historic Esquire Theater on Oak Street, which the same developer acquired with the idea of knocking it down for a new development.)
No one knows what to do with the hotel, but the ground level space that was formally the long-time home of Melvin B's Truck Stop and the adjacent bar my co-workers used to affectionately refer to as "Man vs. Margarita" will soon be the home to a new pub to be named, ironically enough, Cedar Hotel. Let's hope it will bring back the outdoor terraces teeming with imbibers that were a more democratic counterpoint to its more pretentious Viagra Triangle neighbors. The news in Shangri-La - the hotel version - is even worse. Crain's also reported this week that the Bank of America has foreclosed on the hotel's intended home, Waterview, the projected 90-story tower that has remained an empty, 26-story stump since the money ran out last year, constructed halted, and the innkeepers fled. It seems no one has a good word to say about Waterview now. One lawyer for one of the other lien holders calls it "worthless"; a second attorney is quoted by Crain's as saying “The property is worth less than it would be if it was vacant." Forget the Burnham Memorial. Let's do something useful and have a architectural competition to come up with ideas of what to do with the massive, abandoned concrete abortion on West Wacker.
Meanwhile, the Joseph P. Kennedy award for smart investing in an economic meltdown has to go to Kimpton Hotels. I named this award after the booze peddler who in 1945 paid $11,500,000 to buy the Merchandise Mart from a desperate Marshall Field & Company that had built it at a cost between $32 and $38 million, only to see the Great Depression transform it into an "Chicago's #1 real estate white elephant." The Mart became the cornerstone of the Kennedy family fortune (in 1998 it would be sold for over half a billion dollars), eventually supporting Joseph P. Kennedy's prodigious bankrolling of the successful 1960 presidential campaign of his eldest son Jack.
Strategic Hotels, sent to the ropes by the deepening recession, pulled out of a deal to build an annex to their Fairmont Hotel in Jeanne Gang's new Aqua Tower. While other chains are overleveraged and reeling, Crain's reports that Kimpton Group Holding, which last year end created a quarter billion fund specifically to pick up the bargains that a crashing market presents, is close to sealing a deal to take over the 15 hotel floors at Aqua for $56 million, a third less than Strategic was going to pay, with that $28 million difference matching the $28 million in earnest money that Strategic left in the developers pockets as they walked away from their deal. Analysts are calling the deal a major risk for Kimpton, but to me it looks like a masterstroke. Aqua has a great location, equidistant between Millennium Park and the Mag Mile, and its completely unique profile of sculpted balcony slabs offers both a distinctive branding vehicle and, at 80 stories, a kind of architectural GPS device, with the tower visible in the skyline all across central Chicago, allowing travelers to easily get their bearings and find their way safely back to their rooms. POSTSCRIPT: The new edition of Crain's is reporting that the Kimpton deal may not have been the lock they originally indicated, and that negotiations are continuing with the final results as yet far from certain.
Here's a show you shouldn't miss: The Cartoons of John T. McCutcheon: Chronicles of A Changing World, at the Chicago Cultural Center through September 27th. The Pulitzer-Prize-winning artist, whose career ran from 1889 through 1946, mostly at the Chicago Tribune, was most of the celebrated artists of his time, and a walk through the exhibition makes it easy to see why.
And today, June 4th, at 12:15 p.m., you can hear exhibition curator - and one of our city's best storytellers - Chicago Cultural Historian Tim Samuelson give a gallery talk. (They'll be one more, on Thursday, July 9th, also at 12:15) The exhibition - and Tim - are in the Chicago Rooms, 2nd floor, Washington Street side.
You can see a few snippets of his opening night tour from last Friday below, which also also illustrate the striking way curator/designer Nathan Mason uses walls of different bright colors to make the rich, mostly black and white drawings pop. Instead of your eyes growing tired as you move row after row, they're refreshed each time you move to a new panel. SPOILER ALERT: stop watching the video after the background goes orange-yellow to avoid learning the secret of the McCutcheon's "Mysterious Stranger" drawings before you see the show.
The Mysterious Stranger is just one of a wide universe of characters populating McCutcheons's series A Chronicle of Social Happenings at Bird Center, from 1903 and 1904, a melodrama in pictures of the goings on in a mythical small town that drew on McCutcheon's own upbringing in Lafayette, Indiana. It was, in the words of a current writer, The Simpsons of its time, immensely popular. So popular, in fact, that it inspired a play written by Chicago novelist George Ade, Captain Fry's Birthday Party, that was performed by members of the fine arts club The Little Room. As documented below, the members happily assuming the identities of various Bird Center characters included Poetry editor and John Wellborn Root biographer Harriet Monroe, and such prominent architects as the Pond brothers, Hugh Garden, and Howard van Doren Shaw, McCutcheon's father-in-law. (click to see larger version.) Much of McCutcheon's style falls within a fairly conventional center, but there's no shortage of engaging, eccentric accents. One drawing of the cartoonist, shown from behind, sweat shooting out of his head like a nimbus as he struggles against deadline to come up with ideas, could have been drawn by Robert Crumb. Extras filling up a street in another cityscape, by Saul Bass. And then there's the architecture, depicted, mostly in witty caricature, but sometimes also in sharp detail, not just in the operatically scaled scenes of the rising of the city's skyscrapers, but in the smaller snapshots of its brutal, unsentimental dynamism - an abandoned church turned into a storage warehouse, a closed synagogue a cigar store. Politics and corruption (or should it be politicscorruption?) are also explicated with a satiric acuteness not even Mike Royko could better. Walking through this exhibition, you really feel you've stepped back in time, immersed in the huckster exuberance of Chicago at its boom town peak, all vividly captured byMcCutcheon.
Our roving correspondent, architect Iker Gil of MAS Studio, brings to our attention this striking building in Madrid . . . which, of course, puts us in mind of a slightly taller Chicago variant, Studio/Gang Architect's Aqua tower. The Madrid building, Edificio en la M-30, is actually a retrofit, by the firm of Jerónimo Junquera-Liliana Obal, of an existing 1.2 million square foot, curtain-walled office tower for the headquarters of Gamesa, a company specializing in sustainable energy technologies and one of the world's largest wind turbine manufacturers.
The Spanish architects share a common vision with Aqua's Jeanne Gang in using the built environment as a reflection of the structures of nature. Gang drew inspiration from stone outcroppings in Michigan; Junquera and Obal see the mountains reflected in urban buildings and the rivers in the city's highways.
The balconies at Aqua and the eaves at M-30 were both designed to provide shading and reduce solar height gain, as well as to set their respective buildings, in Junquera's words, "vibrating with light" in variation day to day and season to season. At M-30, there's also atmospheric lighting at night. In Madrid, the continuous eaves, made of pre-cast fiber-reinforced concrete, also buffer the offices from street noise - the site is along two major thoroughfares (the M-30 is one of them) which together bring 100,000 cars rushing past the building each day. In Chicago, the poured-in-place concrete slab balconies, scraped away in places to create sculptural voids of curtain wall, provide views into the city's dense urban forest that would not be available from a rigidly rectangular perimeter. Isn't it an enormous relief to have Aqua finally wash the sour taste of the once-dominant bunker of the Park Millennium out of the skyline?
Birth and death portrayed in two photographs from CAF docent Kathleen Carpenter.
First, this spectacular shot of the new, billion dollar Children's Memorial Hospital, now fast rising on Chicago Avenue just west of the recently completed Prentice Women's Hospital. Second is this final portrait of the clock perch that stood above the entrance to the recently evicted Talbott's in Chicago Place, the pall mall now in the process of largely being converted into office space. For a brief optimistic moment at the time of the mall's 1990 opening, it was the roost of the proud, shimmering metallic bird that personified the space's first tenant, legendary Chicago jeweler, C.D. Peacock. In brutally short order, the store went bust, the bird disappeared, and it's pretty much been downhill from there. And if you have any doubts about the whole tempus fugit thing, consider the buildings depicted in one of the murals (I wonder what will happen to them) at Chicago Place's entrance. Wrigley Building: owned by Mars. Tribune Tower: bankruptcy central. Sears Towers? Oh, you must be referring to the mighty Willis. For those of you suffering withdrawal from being able to immerse yourself in the unsettling emptiness and disquieting silence of Chicago Place, may I offer up for your next Dead Mall fix, the Century? With its Landmark Cinemas at the top, it's like a tree house built upon the branches of a dead oak. Ramps descend past a succession of nowheres, all the way down to the basement, where abandoned metal bones are all that's left of the subterranean Eatzie's, done in by a witches' brew of overambition, bad location, mediocre food and fatal cuteness.
By the end of the month, people will be heading out to the beach and events get scarce, but until then, we've got 60 - 60! - architecture related events on the June calendar.
It starts out with the Grant Park Advisory Council considering the new Burnham Memorial, then there's Pecha Kucha 9 on Tuesday, a three day symposium on the legacy of Jens Jensen, Preservation Chicago's Pilsen fundraiser, SEAOI's annual banquet honoring the best engineered buildings of the year, Chris Lee talking about plans for restoring Adler & Sullivan's Pilgrim Baptist, at CAF. where on another date Dirk Denison will also be speaking. Also at CAF, Donald L. Miller discusses Daniel Burnham, while Arthur Miller discusses Edward Bennett and Uncle Dan's shadow for Landmarks Illinois at the Cultural Center.
There are receptions for new exhibitions: Model City, at CAF, David Woodhouse Architects, at I Space, and Daniel Burnham's Vision of an American Metropolis, at the Newberry Library. Again at CAF, Grahm Balkany talks about the Walter Gropius legacy at the Michael Reese Hospital that the city's hot to destroy. (The campus has now been sealed off so people can no longer see what they'll be missing: surprise, surprise.) And then there's this year Canstruction at the locale formerly known as the Apparel Center. Could this be the year we'll see Trump Tower realized in tuna and sardines?
Check it all out - and decide for yourself what you can't miss before you bundle the family and its pets into the Rambler American . . . here.
Crain's is reporting that the Illinois Supreme Court has declined without comment the Daley administration's appeal of the ruling of a lower court led by a hack political judge that decimated the law that protects Chicago's landmarks. The case is now remanded for retrial but the original ruling is expected to provide the Cook County Court no other option but to affirm the original finding that the landmarks ordinance is unconstitutional. Read Crain's report here. Our original report here.
Today, the Chicago Tribune has been without a primary editorial cartoonist for years, another sign of the decline of print journalism. But for over almost sixty years, from 1889 through 1946, most of them at the Trib, cartoonist John T. McCutcheon created, in the words of the subtitle of a new exhibition opening tonight, Friday, May 29th, at the Chicago Cultural Center, Chronicles of a Changing World that documented the evolving story of America, often reflected in the light of the Trib's conservative outlook.
The Pulitizer-Prize winning McCutcheon was known as the "Dean of American Cartoonists." His take ranged from the whimsical, as in this portrait of a whirlwind visit to Chicago by President Theodore Roosevelt . . . to this bitter commentary on the aftermath to World War I, reproduced courtesy of the Smithsonian. The new exhibition shows the wide range of McCutcheon's beautifully drawn work, both as a political commentator and as an acute observer of the everyday life of his times.
Tonight's opening reception, running from 5:00 to 7:00 p.m., features a 5:30 p.m. gallery talk by exhibition curator and Chicago cultural historian Tim Samuelson, who not only has no equal in his knowledge of the city and its history, but draws on a seemingly inexhaustible wealth of great stories to tell, as well. Samuelson will also be giving gallery talks at 12:15 p.m. on June 4th and July 9th, both Thursdays.
The exhibition runs through September 27th in the second floor Chicago Rooms of the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington. Did I mention it's all free?
High hopes are meant to be dashed, but what's going on at Holabird and Roche's landmark 1894 Old Colony building is close to a revelation. We've written previously about reports the tragically derelict building had been acquired by Joseph Cacciatore & Company, and now it's official: they have a leasing poster in a prominent second story corner window.
The firm, I'm told, has a mixed record on issues of restoration, but as the cleaning of the Dearborn Street facade continues, the Old Colony increasingly escapes from its Stygian Blade Runner-like gloom to reveal a light-colored building with an astonishingly beautiful classically styled arcade at the top.
And as I walked by again this past weekend, I discovered something else amazing.
For time immemorial, the Old Colony's original Van Buren entrance, shown in this Harry Weese before and after sketch . . .
has been converted into a storefront, its facade obliterated with a thoughtlessly uncontextual coverup. Today, however, for the first time in probably at least half a century, you can see the original columns and pilasters of the Van Buren entrance.I'm sure it's too much to hope that the Old Colony's main entrance might be restored to its orginal glory, especially given that Harry Weese in his 1970's study said all documentation for the lobby had been lost, although he offered up this possible reconstruction. Still, for a moment at least, we get to think of what might be.
We'll be starting on the June calendar in another few weeks, but we've just added still another two Burnham-related events to the May calendar.
New Visions for Global Cities - Wednesday, May 27th, beginning with a 5:30 p.m. reception, here's a program with globalization author Saskia Sassen and Simon Menner, the German photographer whose series Metacity, "recording the informal structures of the homeless in the cities of Bombay, Chicago, and Paris" is part of a new exhibition, Edge of Intent at Columbia's College Museum of Contemporary Photography. This is perhaps the best Burnham-related show I've seen so far, and I hope to be writing more about it soon, but if you attend this Wednesday's event, co-sponsored by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and the Goethe Institute of Chicago, you can check it out for yourself, as it's taking place at the museum, 600 South Michigan. $20.00 for members, $30.00 non-members, info and registration here.
Admitted, Unadmitted and Unnoticed - or, as the Burnham Plan Centennial subtitles it, Paris at the time of the Burnham Plan - 6:15 - 8:00 p.m., in the Library Forum Room on the Northwestern University campus in Evanston. Professors Christian Topalov and Isabelle Backouche, Urban History, Centre de Recherches Historiques, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, will be presenting their recent work on the shaping of Paris around the year 1900. Info here. There's also a 10:00 to 1:00 p.m. seminar on the same topic.
This week is something of a Burnham Bender, with a Tuesday event on Burnham's recruitment of Edward Bennett, Kristen Schaffer's lunchtime lecture at CAF on Wednesday, and a two-day conference Burnham, Chicago, and Beyond: Politics, Planning, and the Progressive Era City, at CAF and DePaul, Friday and Saturday. And in the line of other current obsession, Lori Healey talks with Lee Bey on The Chicago 2016 Olympic and Paralympic Bid, at AIA on Wednesday. Check out all of this week's events here.
A press story from the University of Michigan is currently circulating on a bendable new engineered cement composite (EEC) with the capacity of healing its own fractures using only air and water.
In this video, U of M professor of Materials Science and Engineering Victor Li explains his new material. “Self-healing of crack damage," he says, "recovers any stiffness lost when the material was damaged and returns it to its pristine state. The material can be damaged and still remain safe to load.” The average crack, about half the width of a human hair, reacts with water and carbon dioxide from just "a handful of drizzly days" to form a compensatory scar of calcium carbonate, the stuff of sea shells and, after a few million years, limestone.
Li's material requires no rebar and so is impervious to corrosion. The expectation is that the material will dramatically extend the useful life of bridges and roads (Bill Cellini must be sweating bullets), which is a good thing, as it currently costs about three times that of current material (OK, now he's feeling better again.) It's also designed to offer substantially enhanced protection from concussive blasts. The hope is a chunk of the stimulus jackpot will be devoted to rebuilding bridges with the new EEC
Professor Li now turns his attention to his ultimate obsession, the development of an EEC trampoline.
The condemned on the way to gallows (photograph: Edward Lifson)
My friend Edward Lifson has been fighting a lonely one-man crusade opposing the demolition of the building you see pictured above, the Test Cell building and adjacent walls at Federal and 35th at IIT, designed by the master architect of the school's campus, Mies van der Rohe, to be replaced by a new Metra station. Pretty trivial stuff, right?
No less than Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin quickly dismissed the ensemble as "utterly dispensable." In the imperial words of his headline writer, "One Mies building on the IIT campus can go."
I was initially persuaded by Kamin's arguments - it was "a clunky brick box", "mediocre." Kamin buttressed his case by quoting Anne Haaker, the Illinois preservation officer who signed the building's death warrant, who based her decision on the fact that the structure was not built precisely to Mies' original specifications and had been altered over time.
All true. All completely beside the point. The third judgement of Haaker, that the building and wall "didn't contribute to the National Register district" is shockingly obtuse. I actually took the time to go down and look at the Test Cell, and here's what I saw: Now erase what's on the Test Cell corner and replace it with this: The view down Federal Street is the only one that puts the industrial aesthetic of Mies's IIT buildings, not in a park-like landscape to help the medicine go down, but directly within the industrial context of a gritty city street running parallel to a set of railroad tracks. If you don't care much for Mies, you probably don't see much beyond ugly. But if you appreciate what he accomplished, you can't miss the incredible, rough beauty.
The abject Test Cell, a far more accomplished conception than the critics would lead you to believe, is indispensable to that view, a variant of the Miesian corner in the way it mediates the turn from 35th street into the classic assembly of steel, glass and brick industrial buildings on Federal. In the Metra design, it's replaced with a generically prettified plaza, an empty, characterless void that has absolutely no relationship to the IIT complex, and that thoughtlessly trashes any idea of context.
That view down Federal isn't just another generic city street. It's modernism alley, the place where Chicago architecture was reborn. And that homely sentry station on the corner is its perfect pivot point.
There are certainly good arguments for a Metra station at 35th, now made possible by a $6.8 million infusion of stimulus money towards its nearly $12 million cost. You can, without strain, argue the merits of the Test Cell as built and modified. You can even, as did Blair, buy hook, line and sinker into the bureaucrat's injunction that public discussion must be quickly silenced lest it risk a delay in the completion of a station we've somehow done without for over 50 years. You can sit back with a mournful sigh and acquiesce to the idea that this is way power works in Chicago (the station is a pet project of district Congressman Bobby Rush), and it's a trifle compared to the loss to the Walter Gropius buildings on the Michael Reese campus.
But to idly declare that it won't inflict irreparable violence on one of the most seminal streetviews in Chicago architecture is a willful act of blindness.
John Vinci, then a senior, convinced the school to let him use the new building for the annual dance. He managed to book Duke Ellington to provide the music, and students from IIT's Institute of Design were given responsibility for providing the decor. "They put blue and green spotlights on the grass outside," remembers Vinci, "and aimed them at the branches of the honey locust trees lining the building, so that inside you'd see the shadows of the branches moving behind the lower milk-glass windows like animated drawings on Japanese paper."
