German Architects and Engineers, Design Excellence in Affordable Housing - two more events for March

Two more great events just added to the March calendar of Chicago Architectural Events:

Achieving Design Excellent in Affordable Housing - is a free, all-day conference on March 25 kicking off the three-day Structures for Inclusion Chicago event. The Affordable Housing symposium includes a number of panels with architects such as Patrick Tighe and Pete Landon, as well such other experts as Roberta Feldman and Dan Pitera.

On the evening of Wednesday, March 30th, the German American Chambers of Commerce will hold an opening reception for German Architects and Engineers Worldwide, a permanent exhibition which premiered at the EXPO Shanghai 2010.

That same night, Elizabeth Mossop will lecture on Landscape Agency in Urban Revitalization at IIT, and there will be a conversation with architects Fuensanta Nieto and Enrique Sobejano at the Instituto Cervantes, to mark the opening of another major exhibition, Young Architects of Spain (YAS): A Window to the Unknown, which will run through April 17.

This week, Blair Kamin lectures at the Oak Park Public Library on Tuesday, while on Wednesday, Wheeler Kearns principals discuss their firms recent work at a CAF lunchtime lecture, while in the evening designer and now architect Matali Crasset speaks at Fullerton Hall for the Architecture and Design Society of the Art Institute, while the Structures for Inclusion Chicago conference runs at SAIC from Friday through Sunday.

There are a lot more great events this week and nearly two dozen still to come in March. Check them all out on the calendar here.

Green River, St. Patrick: Chicago, the Emerald City, one March day every year.

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Chicago celebrates St. Patrick's Day in a big way.  Just not often on St. Patrick's Day.  To maximize our snake-chasing fun, we hold the festivities on the Saturday before, so all of us can get safely drunk without worrying about having to return to work.

In the slide show above, we give you our annual portrait of a great city on the day of one of it's great festivals.

And if you're looking for more, check our reports from past years:

Return of the Emerald City: Chicago dyes the river green for St. Patrick's Day, 2010.:

  

click here                                    click here

Constructions, Environments and Dreams, at the Auto Show

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When Gene Summers was designing the 1971 McCormick Place,  now known as the Lakeside Center, they fought him on using glass: they didn't want any.  They didn't want a glass box.  They wanted a sealed container.  That's the norm for the most halls, including the larger ones built later at McCormick Place, two of which were home to the massive 2011 Chicago Auto Show.

Inside the black boxes, it's a Vegas-like environment.  Natural light never makes it into the core.  It's an all-enveloping black gasket, under the bright sun of thousands of electrical lights, in which all sense of time suspends, an alternative universe in which exhibitors can create their own worlds.

Cars being a big-ticket item, while a few displays carried the look of an accountant's ledger book . . .

 . . . most didn't appear to lack for money. The more modest consisted of architectural flourishes  reminiscent of hood ornaments . . .

Stacking towers always command attention, whether we're talking about wheel covers . . .

or autos . . .

 

Like moths, we're attracted to the light, especially if it bears cool colors . . . 

. . . and it's even more mesmerizing, of course, if the light actually comprises a giant video screen.  We like to watch, even if its only talking heads.

And, by the way, if you were less drawn to the front of the video wall shown below . . . 

then to the back . . . 

You, too, might be a techno/construction geek.

The larger exhibitors carved out their own environments within the general clamor, with the Jeep taking the strategy of getting your attention, even at the far end of the hall,  by holding something above your head . . .

Ford probably had the most striking parti, latching onto shipping container chic, here done up in a striking Yves Klein blue . . .

. . . although the same company stumbled in its test drive installation, which in other places at the show offered up the most intense world-within-a-world constructions, but in Ford's case consisted of little more than a metal ramp, a desultory clump of dirt, and lots of bare floor . . .

. . . while Toyota Truck created an entire, full-scale construction site . . . 

. . . complete with porta-potties . . . 

Perhaps the most ambitious - and subliminally strange - was GM's very popular test drive installation for its new Chevy Volt electric vehicle, a small maze of tan roadway set within a perfectly manicured suburban environment, landscaped in an almost surreal hyper-cheerful style  . . .

inexplicably punctuated with dead trees . . . 

Was this some designers subversive commentary on the current state of the American dream?  Well, even if it was, this year's packed Auto Show demonstrated that it's a dream still very much alive.

, , , No, not the small army of attractive spokespersons, beckoning us to their wares, but the enduring allure of the chariot of dreams of modern life, our personalized armor, our body ornament, protective shell, hermetic seal against the cruelties surrounding us without, our perpetual means of escape to that better world we can always see in our mind's eye, just around the next bend.

Spicing up a stale McCormick: Today is last day to register for CAC's 2011 Burnham Prize McCormick Place REDUX competition

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Reminder: today, March 15th, is your last day to register for the Chicago Architectural Club's 2011 Burnham Competition, McCormick Place REDUX.  See the details here.

Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass was a big, big act when I was very, very small - microscopic, actually.  They are perhaps remembered best today not only for their mariachi-inspired pop mega-hits, but for an album cover featuring the come-hither gaze of a buxom brunette who appeared to be clad solely in billowing clouds of whipped cream. (Ummmmmmm, whipped cream.)

On a cold January night in 1967, I went with my parents to hear the trumpeter and his band in concert in the graceless, cavernous barn of the Arie Crown Theater at McCormick Place.   Later that night, after we had left, McCormick Place burned down.  Yeah, go ahead.  Try to pin it on me.  As if I were some Drew Barrymore Firestarter wannabe.  But believe me, there was no shortage of suspects.  If Arie Crown was a blimp of an auditorium, McCormick Place I, muscled onto the city's lakefront by the Trib's Col. Robert McCormick and Mayor Richard J. Daley, was a beached whale of a concrete bunker, widely reviled.

It lasted barely seven years before its 1967 self-immolation, and rather than rectifying the mistake of the facility's original siting, Daley had it built at exactly the same place.  The difference was the architecture.

In the 1950's, Mies van der Rohe had proposed a spectacular 700-feet-square, 85 foot high steel and glass, clear-span convention hall, to be built, not on the lake, but at Cermak and Michigan.  It was never to be, but it's legacy was felt when it came time to rebuild McCormick Place.  Mies alumni Gene Summers, working at C.F. Murphy, made the new building a stunning expression of Chicago-style modern.  Blank-walled concrete was replaced by sleek steel and glass, and a spectacular roof with a seventy-five-foot cantilever at the perimeter.  Near the end of his life, Mies had a friend drive him past the new building, and afterwards, through a third party, the master communicated his approval to his student and former associate Summers.

At the time of its 1971 opening, the new McCormick Place was a convention powerhouse, offering over half a million feet of exhibition space, much of it in a single room devoid of internal columns.  As time went on, however, exhibitions, like pretty everything else, just kept bulking up.  Massive new additions in 1986, 1997 and 2007, brought the complex to over two and a half million square feet of space.

In that context, the original McCormick Place, now known as Lakeside Center, is the shrimp of the family, dwarfed by the newer halls to the west, and used left often.  The recent Chicago Auto Show, for example, didn't use it at all.

The cost of needed repairs and upgrades for the Lakeside Center have been estimated by the beleaguered McPier to be as high as $150 million, and that's just their opening bid.  In the 1990's, Mayor Richard M. Daley likened it to the Berlin Wall and talked about tearing it down.  No estimates on the cost of that.

McCormick Place REDUX seeks to address the challenges facing the aging conventional hall.  It's the subject of this year's Burnham Architectural Prize Competition from the Chicago Architectural Club, in partnership with AIA/Chicago and Landmarks Illinois.

The “McCormick Place REDUX” competition seeks to launch a debate about the future of this significant piece of architecture, this lakefront site that was effectively removed from the public realm, and the powerful pull of a collective and public claim on the lakefront. This iconic building is caught in the crossfire of a strong, principled, and stirring debate. So the question posed by the competition is quite simple: what would you do with this massive facility? What alternate role might the building play in Chicago should it be decommissioned as a convention hall? And if the building were to go away, how might the site be utilized? What might you do with a million square feet of space on Chicago’s lakefront (along with 4,200 seat Arie Crown theatre)?

Clearly outmoded for its original use, sited on a spectacular stretch of lake-front, and undoubtedly of very significant architectural quality - what visions are there for a resolution?

As I mentioned, today, March 15th, is the closing day for registrations to the competition, which has a first prize of $3,000.00, second prize of $1,500.00 and third prize of $750.00.  The registration fee is $90.00, with a reduced rate for students and CAC members.  Final submissions are due April 4th, with judging and announcement of winners on April 16th. You can find more information on the competition website here.  Just make sure to register today.

Shortly after the competition was announced, McPier's James Reilly sent an email to the Trib's Blair Kamin, stating that,  "While we would certainly appreciate any thoughts about the building because it does need some work . . . "  Some work?  Only a true bureaucrat can describe $150 million as a touch-up,  "Unless someone wants to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to replicate that space somewhere else on the campus, we will have to keep the building, at least the top part of it, in the trade show business."

So, let's see - hundreds of millions of dollars to save the building; hundreds of millions to replicate its somewhere else.  Not much of a choice, is it?  Or is that the point?  It will be interesting to see how the entrants to McCormick Place REDUX negotiate between a rock and a hard place.

A Brigadoon Moment at Adler & Sullivan's Auditorium

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When our indefatigable correspondent Bob Johnson sent us the above photograph of the progress of VOA's stunning new 32-story. 469-feet-tall, glass walled "Vertical Campus" (naming rights still available) for Roosevelt University, we were reminded that a minor bit of history has just been rediscovered.  And it's already living on borrowed time.

For the last forty years, the Vertical Campus site was taken up by the late, unlamented Herman Crown Center, an infelicitous 19-story high design by Mittelbusher & Tourtelot, a firm perhaps best known locally for their work on the Krannert Art Museum at the U of I, Champaign/Urbana.  The Crown Center completely covered the north wall of Adler & Sullivan's 1889 Auditorium Building.

Over eight decades earlier, however, on Bastille Day, 1887, developer William Giles entered into an agreement with the fledgling Chicago Auditorium Association working out the details for the party wall that his 1875  Giles Building, a six-story, mansard-roofed structure designed by architect Otis L. Wheelock, would soon be sharing with the Association's massive new, Adler & Sullivan designed home.

With the Crown Center demolished, we're now able to see - for a brief period of time - a bit of architectural archeology.  The Auditorium's north wall is now exposed.  Most of it, that part butting up against the Giles, is alley brick.  At the top however, above what was then the roofline of the Giles, a section of the Auditorium's north wall has a full finish, topped by a mini-loggia which mirrored that of the Auditorium tower,  from which Adler, Sullivan, and Frank Lloyd Wright in their offices could look down - probably on multiple levels - on the Giles.

Soon this facing will again disappear, this time behind the new VOA Vertical Campus, which has its own, pre-made party wall.  While the renderings of the new structure almost all emphasize the shimmering glass walls on three of its elevations . . .

. . . the northern elevation is quite different, and far more utilitarian, with what appears to be a shear, blank concrete wall rising for half the structure's height.

Obviously, this is anticipating future development to the north, on what is now a surface parking lot.  Let's hope that the economy revs up fast enough so that we won't have to be staring at that towering mass of bare concrete for the next few decades.

I won't claim it merits a special trip, but if you happen to be in vicinity of Wabash and Van Buren, it might be worth looking up to grab a time travel glance at a Adler & Sullivan remnant that's again about to vanish into the steel and glass mists.

Blair Kamin at Unity Temple, Matali Crasset at the Art Institute - still more events for March

The March Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events never closes.  We've added several more great events:

Real Estate Capital Market Update - Mortgage Markets Back in Full Swing - will be the subject of of a panel experts at ULI Chicago's breakfast session the morning of March 24th at the Union League.

Blair Kamin : Terror and Wonder: Architecture in a Tumultuous Age - the Tribune architecture critic will lecture on his new book at Unity Temple Oak, at 7:30 p.m., Tuesday, the March 22nd.

Matali Crasset - the designer - and now architect - lectures for the Architecture and Design Society at Fullerton Hall at the Art Institute at 6:30 p.m., Wednesday, March 23rd.

There are still nearly three dozen events to come in March.  Check out the entire calendar here.

How a Building Becomes a Raised Middle Finger: Stephen Vaughn Shipman's Presbyterian Hospital, in 1888 and today

We've written before about the high quality of research produced by the staff of the Commission on Chicago Landmarks, specifically Terry Tatum, Susan Perry,  Matt Crawford, and Heidi Sperry, with Brian Goeken as editor.  It can be seen again in their latest batch of reports on buildings currently undergoing review for landmark designation.

Lee Bey has recently written about the now beautifully restored White Castle #16 building at 43 E. Cermak, including a couple of handsome nighttime photo's. The Landmarks Commission's 40 page report, however, not only covers the history of the building, and of the White Castle chain, but of the history of working class dining and buildings that served them.  We learn, for example, that while today's entrepreneurs battle both city bureaucracy and bricks-and-mortar restaurants to get food trucks back on Chicago's streets, horse-drawn lunch wagons were a Chicago mainstay in the 19th century and beyond.  The report covers the trend setting Fred Harvey Restaurants, and includes the 1907 cartoon you see here, warning of the dangers of diner food, which could easily be repurposed as a commentary on how our own fast food culture is leading us to obesity and disease.

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The report on the Riviera Motor Sales Company Building at 5948-60 North Broadway not only chronicles the handsome building and its spectacular showrooms, but provides a history of how cars have been sold throughout Chicago's history, and provides a richly illustrated account of a time when they were displayed, not in garishly lit car lots, but in surroundings that mirrored the richness of the movie palaces of the era.

The report on the Ebenezer Missionary Baptist Church at 4501 S. Vincennes Avenue, originally Isiah Temple, Dankmar Adler's last major commission, provides a rich history of the building and its time, both in its early years as a synagogue, and in its much longer service as a house of worship for Chicago's Afro-American community.  There's a biography of Dankmar Adler, floor plans, copious photographs, and a history of the music of the church, which hosted such singers as Mahalia Jackson and Dinah Washington.

The report on the Italianate 1872 Holden Block at 1027 West Madison, to which Granacki Historic Consultants also contributed, is just as exhaustive.  One of the great things about the Commission's reports is how they'll include biographies of once prominent, but now forgotten Chicago architects.  In the case of the Holden Block, it was Stephen Vaughn Shipman, who moved to Chicago after the Great 1871 fire and remained here until his death in 1905.  His surviving work includes the Hubbard Street lofts that Harry Weese renovated to be the home of his firm, now the offices of Ross Barney Architects.  He also designed this:

Recognize it?  Probably not.  How about this:

Even if you've seen it, it's the kind of building your mind has probably done you the favor of keeping you from remembering.  And it is, of course, the same building.  It's the 1888 Presbyterian Hospital, at Congress and Wood.  Shipman's original design, while no timeless masterpiece, was a work of care and quality.  What's happened to it since is the opposite.

Sometime in the new century, Shipman's original castellated roofline was removed and three additional stories added.  Postcards often offer an idealized version of the buildings they depict, but this postcard would seem to indicate that the addition, at the time it was added, worked to integrate with the older building beneath.

Decades later - I'm betting 1960's or 70's - we got the abomination which still stands today.

It's a key contributor to making the west side medical center, dominated by the boarded up hulk of old County Hospital, a decrepit and forlorn presence.  The new Northwestern Medical Campus is little better.  Why do medical institutions feel so comfortable in slumming up the city?  It's a good thing that the desperately ill are brought to hospitals lying face up, looking at the ceiling of the ambulance.  If they actually caught sight of the architectural pallor all around them, they'd probably die of depression before they even had a chance to be treated.

The carelessness of the hack job rehab of Shipman's Presbyterian Hospital is truly astonishing.  It's like a giant  Rahmian middle finger held up to everyone who has to look at this building on a daily basis.  Not only are the windows bricked up, making it look like a prison, there was no effort to clean the brick or make the slightest effort to match the appearance of the new to that of the old.  The new brick where old windows were ripped out looks like it was jammed in almost at random, in some places leaving the string course alone, in other cases dismembering them into fragments.  It reads as a series of ugly blotches set in the dirty brick of the original facades.

Former New York mayor Rudy Guliani was famous for his "Broken Glass" theory of administration - just a handful of broken windows can slum up a neighborhood and accelerate its decline.  The massive damage incurred by cities in the 1960's and 70's was accelerated by the kind of "who gives a _____" attitude that deliberately made the Presbyterian Hospital Building into a civic eyesore.  If hospitals were as culpable for architectural malpractice as they are for the medical variety, they would have been run out of business soon after "rehabs" like these were completed.

Fortunately, I think we've come a long way since then.  Just a few blocks from the Presbyterian, a new, spectacular, billion dollar (including $75 million of your tax money in TIF subsidies) Rush Presbyterian, designed by Perkins + Will, is nearing completion.  My bet would be is that not long after it opens, all those sad, once grand buildings to the west will disappear into the placeholders of surface parking lots and temporary lawns.  For the moment, however, if you look closely, you can still see remnant elements of what once made buildings like the Presbyterian Hospital the pride of the city.

Some of the best, and most entertaining, Chicago history being published today - not just architectural, but social and commercial, as well - can be found in the Commission on Chicago Landmarks Designation Reports.  Check them out here