Thomas Beeby receives Driehaus Prize Today, The Invisible Hand documentary (and outtakes) now online

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As we wrote earlier this week, architect Thomas H. Beeby has received the 2013 Richard H. Driehaus Prize at the University of Notre Dame, “for his lifelong contribution to the human city and classical tradition.”  In the words of the Jury Citation, in the words of Demetri Porphyrios . . .

Tom Beeby has been a prolific architect and a much loved teacher.  As Dean of the Yale School of Architecture, between 1985 to 1991, Tom Beeby welcomed the study of history, propriety, character and style in architecture. Indeed, Beeby’s greatest contribution in the world of architecture has been his determination to work and think within the modernist and classical traditions at the same time. As such, he embarked on the journey of reconciling classical humanism with the industrial aesthetic of modernism. In awarding the Driehaus Prize to Tom Beeby, the jury celebrates the work of a dedicated architect and teacher for his lifelong commitment to the search for a common ground between the classical and the modern; the two most powerful architectural ideas of our century.

And while the award is about the classical, the ceremony is anything but elitist.  It is open to the public, and begins at 11:00 a.m. this morning (Saturday, March 23rd).  If last years ceremony, in which the award went to Michael Graves, is any indication, it will be a fascinating event, and an added bonus is the rare opportunity to get inside  Marshall and Fox's 1926 John B. Murphy Auditorium, 50 East Erie.  Architectural historian David Watkin will also be honored by receiving this year's Henry Hope Reed Award.

Michael Graves being presented the 2012 Richard H. Driehaus Prize

This Sunday, March 24th, you have one more chance to view the engaging documentary created in conjunction with the award, The Invisible Hand: Architect Thomas Beeby.  It airs at 10:30 p.m. on WTTW, Channel 11.

And if that doesn't work for, you can watch the documentary on-line here.  An added bonus of this page is that there's not just the documentary, but a series of shorter outtake videos from interviews with Beeby, Cynthia Weese, Stuart Cohen and Stanley Tigerman, who talks of the 70's group The Chicago Seven, whose stated - and realized - goal was to break that hammerlock of the heirs of Mies on Chicago architecture.  “It's interesting,” recalls Tigerman, ”the Chicago Seven is a group that has virtually nothing in common with each other.”

Read:
Master of Tradition:  Thomas Beeby receives Richard H. Driehaus award.

Chicago Streetscene: The Damned of Wrigley

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after Rodin's La Porte de l'Enfer . . .

The Shock of the New: 1/3 of Modern Wing Shuts Down in September, Picasso and Matisse head out for six month Texas excursion

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Update [September 12, 2013] .  The galleries have now closed until next April, leaving many disappointed patrons wondering what happened.  Sun-Times report by Madeline Nusser.

It's been less than four years since the Renzo Piano designed Modern Wing of the Art Institute opened to great fanfare.  After this coming Labor Day, to much less fanfare, the third floor galleries, covering Modern European Art from 1900 to 1950, will be shutting down for over six months, as nearly 100 works, including 10 Picasso's and 10 Matisse's, are packed up and shipped to Fort Worth for the Kimbell Art Museum's exhibition The Age of Picasso and Matisse: Modern Masters form the Art Institute of Chicago.   Running through next February, it's billed as “the largest loan of its kind from the Art Institute.”

While the e-mail exchange I had with the Art Institute's Director of Public Affairs Erin Hogan was nothing less than responsive and pleasant, I still get the impression that the closing isn't exactly the museum's favorite subject for discussion.  When the Art Institute last had such a major gallery closing and made a major loan - again to the Kimbell, for its 2009 The Impressionists: Master Paintings from the Art Institute of Chicago - it was heralded with a press release quoting then President James Cuno  as being “thrilled” about the whole thing.  In contrast, searching the Art Institute website, I can find absolutely nothing about the upcoming Modern Wing closing.

Museums have been known to make such loans as a way of raising cash, but when a 2008 article in The Art Newspaper claimed the Art Institute would receive $2 million from the Kimbell, Cuno, in a New York Times interview, scoffed. “It was said by some that we rented the pictures. That’s just not what we do. The Kimbell is covering costs associated with mounting the exhibition, with producing the catalog and with reframing the pictures.” He declined to disclose the amount involved, as does Erin Hogan about the latest loan, which she says is “really just to ensure that the works can be seen while we work on the third floor. It's not a major source of revenue.”  If the amounts are really negligible, you'd think they'd just disclose it and end the controversy, but that doesn't seem to be in cards.

Similarly, Hogan paints the six month closing as no big deal.  “On the third floor there were a number of things we wanted to adjust and it just seemed to make more sense to do them all in one fell swoop rather than piece by piece.”

Two years ago, the museum filed a $10 million complaint in U.S. District Court against Arup, the structural engineers for the project, citing work that was “woefully inadequate”, including cracked concrete flooring and faulty humidity controls that resulted in condensation that fogged the glass of the facades.  The blades of Piano's “magic carpet” roof, designed to bring natural light into the third floor galleries in a way that was safe for the paintings, were said to whistle in high winds.  Hogan says that all the problems were fixed by the time of the May, 2009 opening.  The lawsuit against Arup was resolved about a year after it was filed.

When asked what this years renovations would consist of, Hogan responded “Many things! Repainting/refinishing all walls, podiums, pedestals; recalibrating lighting systems by moving light sensors and adjusting light filters; reweighting and adjusting motion detectors for doors; etc.  The lighting system in particular isn't problematic; it's just that the larger galleries ‘harvest’ more daylight than the smaller galleries, so that there can sometimes be inconsistent light levels as you move throughout the third floor. So we definitely wanted to make that adjustment to even out the light levels.”

I've always wondered if there wasn't a simpler, more cost-efficient way to get safe, natural light into the galleries than the complex ‘magic carpet’ Piano designed, which seems to exist in no small part to be an architectural billboard for the new building.   Piano has attacked the problem in parallel ways at his numerous other museum commissions.  At Atlanta's High Museum of Art, there are a hundred rooftop ‘sails’, mini-skylights that twist to defuse and focus the light.  Back at the Kimbell, Piano is constructing a new addition to Louis Kahn's iconic original building.  At $1470 per square feet, it makes the Modern Wing's $1114 look like a bargain.  Here, Piano deploys aluminum louvers that also incorporate photovoltaic cells to provide the building with power.  Kahn's design is famous for bringing natural light into galleries, but it does so more modestly, with aluminum reflectors hanging from the ceiling rather than the ornate sculpted Piano rooflines that Wall Street Journal critic Lee Rosenbaum says have become the “must-have fashion accessories of museum expansions around the country.”

In the final analysis, no one can begrudge the Art Institute taking the time to ‘fine tune’ the Modern Wing.  And yes, everything should be back in place by this time next year.  Move on; nothing to see here - I get it.  Still, I can't quite shake the nagging feeling that something's not quite right, that we should be expecting more from a $294 million building only four years old than having a huge chunk of it shut down for six months while the priceless treasures it was built to display are exiled out of view.

From Dead People to Hardware: Restoration at the Three Arts Club?

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When last we visited the 1914 Holabird and Roche Three Arts Club on Dearborn Parkway. we saw dead people.  Now we see drawer pulls.

The four-story building on North Dearborn Parkway was completed in 1914 to “provide a safe, supporting, and economical residence for young women to study the arts . . . ”  According to Robert Bruegman's invaluable monograph on Holabird and Roche, The Architects and the City, it was the first real work of 27-year-old John A. Holabird, freshly returned from an education at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and a grand European tour.

Despite its upscale neighborhood, the Three Arts Club was not a lavish structure.  It was pretty much a large sorority house, completed at a modest cost of $200,000.  Its frame was not of steel, but reinforced concrete, with 110 rooms placed around a central courtyard.

According to Architectural Forum, ”Each studio is provided with running water, so that with a general bath and toilet they may be occupied as bedrooms.  The interior treatment is of the simplest.  The walls are of sand finished plaster with no tint or further treatment and the ceilings are calamined.”

No contemporary artist was burdened in creating the series of reliefs that grace the main facade.  They're actually castings of figures created by sculptor Jean Goujon for the 16th century Fontaine des Innocents in Paris.

photograph: Dada, Wikipedia

Down through the decades, over 13,000 residents passed through the Three Arts Club's doors, until 2003, when financial strains caused the club to evict the last tenants, sell off the building, and convert itself into a grant-making charity.  In the years since, the building has gone through multiple owners and proposals.  It was going to be a 48-root boutique hotel.  It was going to condos.  In 2009, a group of investors wanted to turn the it into a columbarian for up to 15,000 urns.  That idea awakened, not the dead, but the neighbors.  The building remained empty.

Now Curbed Chicago and Crain's Chicago Business are reporting that current owner, DRW Holdings LLC, wants to make the Three Arts Club a showroom outpost for the Restoration Hardware chain, complete with cafe.  The proposal would also encompass restoring windows and terra cotta and making mechanical upgrades to the building, which was designated an official Chicago landmark in 1981.

In addition to getting changes past the Landmarks Commission, hurdles include rezoning and getting necessary support from the community and area's new alderman, Robert Fioretti.  This is an overwhelmingly, if not exclusively, a residential district, so it will be interesting to watch how this plays out.

Read:
Evicted Three Arts Club members may get to return - but only if they're very, very quiet.
Three Arts Club Won't See Dead People

Architecture and Mozart: A Sublime Glyndebourne Moment

That's the thing about art, you never know when the moment of epiphany will strike.  It has a way of catching you when you least expect.  And then it is something.

It wasn't until yesterday that I finally came across the production of Mozart/Da Ponte's Le Nozze di Figaro that opened the new theater at Glyndebourne back in 1994, but it's one of the most enthralling opera performances I've ever encountered.

With Bernard Haitink in the pit, and singers like a young Renee Fleming as the Countess, Andreas Schmidt as the Count, and a boyishly handsome Gerald Finley as Figaro, it's beautifully sung and, under Derek Bailey's direction, skillfully acted.  Too often in opera, you get the sense that the singers are just going the motion of establishing characters, but here the acting is natural and unforced.  Rather than a series of disconnected moments within long periods of just standing and singing, here the performers register what appears to be a continuous stream of thought and emotion.  Beyond the beautiful music, you get the sense that something is really at stake dramatically.  Truth be told, I've fallen hopelessly in love with Alison Hagley and her radiant Susanna.

The production, on the surface, could be classified as conservative.  It's not updated - sets and costumes are of the period indicated in the libretto - but it's absolutely modern in its clarity of expression.  There is no clutter.  The sets, by John Gunter, are simple, representational and flexible.  The conclusion of the opera is set in a blue night forest consisting entirely of black shafts bent like the columns of a Koolhaas/Balmond interior (or, alternatively, you could think of them as lingering hair follicles on a balding skull.)(Or not.)

The sequence that took my breath away, however, was the brief transition between scenes in the third act, which you can view at about the 38:00 minute mark in the video below.  (I'm betting it'll convince you to buy the DVD.)


The great march - one of my favorite bits of Mozart -  begins to play, the stage empties except for the seriously conflicted countess and count as they prepare to greet their guests for a double wedding.

As they take their seats, the back wall, consisting of tall bookbases, splits apart and retreats into the wings, revealing an abstracted facade centered by a classical tripartite portico of three tall, arched openings, covered in screens.

The lighting suddenly cuts to a minimum, cast forward from the back of the stage.

Everything is now in silhouette. Louvers in the arches form a kind of scrim, a play on transparency, a symbol of the storyline's multiple deceptions. From the inside, servant girls walk to each of the outer arches, bow to their masters, and turn to open the set of louvers, revealing a second set of louvers, which they also open.  From the outside, Figaro himself then opens the central louver, at the head of the line of guests as they enter in measured step to the beat of the music, towards shadows cast against a stage floor etched with a grid of thin red diagonal lines, on which count and countess sit in their chairs like points of a triangle.  A play within a play is about to begin.  Confounding their intentions, the players and those they play to are about to become one.

Before and after, the very human characters of this production, principals and extras alike, create a world of conflict, confusion and desire, but in this brief scene, they move with stately formality through a setting of Miesian geometric perfection, softened within the benedicting ether of Mozart's wondrous music, and, for a moment, the abject human condition is elevated into sublime ritual.

The silhouettes emerge into the light to be revealed again as flesh.  The players disperse from  formation.  The action resumes, back into a comedy of bitter pain and desperate longing, on its way to ultimate reconciliation in deepest emotion.

Parishioners, Preservationists hold Vigil to Save St. James Church as Developer offers to do Rehab for $5 million Archdiocese has earmarked for new church

 On Sunday, a hardy bunch of parishioners and preservationists held a vigil in the morning chill, calling on Cardinal George and the Chicago Archdiocese not to go through with their plans to wreck the 130-year-old St. James Church at 2942 South Wabash, one of the few surviving buildings by architect Patrick C. Keely, who also designed Holy Name Cathedral.

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There was no indication of a response from the Archdiocese.  A published schedule beginning with the removal of asbestos of from the building as early as today would begin a process concluding with full demolition by mid-June.

Update:  here's a great interview the great Rick Kogan did on his WBEZ Afternoon Shift with Dave Samber  (who you hear singing in our video clip) of Polo Cafe, where there are weekly meetings of Friends of Historic St. James every Tuesday at 7:00, and novelist Mary Pat Kelly 

An interesting part of Kogan's interview is Samber talking about an offer from developer Joseph Cacciatore . . .

Joseph Cacciatore, real estate developer, prominent family, and in indeed in this case a Catholic family, has come up with an idea, and he's made a proposal that I understand has been presented to Cardinal George before the conclave even started. 

And the proposal is to allow him as a general contractor with his great expertise and resources to come in and for a total price tag, a turnkey, full contract price of $5 million, he will deliver the keys to the church at the end that would be fully acceptable to the city and to the building codes and to the wishes of the congregation in terms of ventilation and air conditioning and he will then, at the time he turns over the keys, write a check for a half million dollars back to the church.

This has just come up.  We are now in the process of trying to figure out how do we raise the four and a half million dollars.  We think it's very doable. 

Reports are that the Archdiocese has already pledged $5 to $7 million for construction of a new church on a site on Michigan Avenue a block to the east.

Read:
Will 130 years of history and faith be destroyed? Friends of History St. James rally to forestall wrecking ball.

Master of Tradition: Thomas Beeby receives Driehaus Award Saturday; documentary The Invisible Hand debuts on WTTW Thursday

Harris Theater, Millennium Park, Chicago (click images for larger view)

Update: photographs from the award ceremony here.

It was announced all the way back in December, but on Saturday, March 23rd, architect Thomas Beeby will be finally be presented with the 2013 Richard H. Driehaus Prize at the University of Notre Dame,  which honors “lifetime contributions to traditional, classical, and sustainable architecture and urbanism in the modern world.”  The award comes with $200,000 and a classically-styled trophy that looks a bit like a Monopoly token on steroids, but is actually a bronze miniature of the Choregic Monument of Lysikrates.

Beeby, born in 1941, is chairman emeritus of HBRA Architects.  He was educated at Cornell, and later at Yale where he eventually became Dean of Architecture.  Beeby was one of the founding members of the Chicago Seven, named after a notorious group of 60's activists indicted and tried for their tactics in opposing the war in Vietnam.  The architect's Chicago Seven, which also included Stanley Tigerman, Larry Booth, Stuart Cohen, James Freed, James Nagle and Ben Weese, rebelled against the constraints of Miesian modernism as it ossified after the master's death.

United States Federal Building and Courthouse, Tuscaloosa - photo: driehausprize.org

Although united in their opposition to the straightjacket of Mies, the rebellion took a number of different forms, from trendy Post-Modernism to a more serious commitment to neo-classicism on the part of architects like Beeby.  In 2011, the opening of his Federal Courthouse in Tuscaloosa was seen as a major victory in the war on modernism in that Beeby's Greek Temple design replaced what was originally supposed to be a more contemporary building by Carol Ross Barney, architect of the Federal Building that replaced the Alfred P. Murrah office building in Oklahoma City bombed by Timothy McVeigh.  Barney's design was deep-sixed by Alabama Republican Senator Richard Shelby, who wanted something more traditionally imperial for a structure that's rumored will eventually take on his name.  (Truth be told, the sheer awfulness of Charles H McCauley Associates' 1964 Tuscaloosa County Courthouse is almost enough to put anyone off not just modernism, but architecture, period.)

Harold L. Washington Library, Chicago

Beeby may be a classicist, but the variety of his designs indicates he's no ideologue.  His solutions are varied and lovingly detailed.  His most famous building in Chicago is undoubtedly the Harold L. Washington Library, on State between Van Buren and Congress.  As we wrote in 2004 in The Road to Chicago's Harold L. Washington Library, Beeby beat out entries from design/build teams that included Canadian architect Arthur Erikson, Dirk Lohan, Skidmore Owning  and Merrill, and a typically daring proposal from Helmut Jahn.  Last time I checked, the models were still on exhibit on the library's 8th floor, and you can also see them all here.

Back in 2004, I wrote of Beeby's design as “Settling for Less”, but my most strident objections were actually more about program.  Although there are now functioning spaces at street level, for years after the library opened, it would take several escalators and the better part of five minutes before you got to anywhere in the building where you would actually find books.

The graceful, sun-filled Winter Garden at the top seems more like a machine for producing rental revenue than a public amenity.  The first floor atrium, complete with round opening into the basement space,  has always struck me as knowing all the notes but not the tune.  Generously proportioned, with mezzanine balconies, it's always seemed to be so four-square that it conveys an uncomfortable, cramped experience.  From the start, however, I've always loved the graceful, naturally-lit reading alcoves lining the outer perimeter of the large floorplates.  To me, this kind of specificity is the real response to the chilly generic quality universal-space modernism often falls preys to.

Hole in the Wall Gang Camp, Ashford, CT - photograph: driehausprize.org

As seems to have become the tradition, the Driehaus is again underwriting a 30-minute documentary on this year's Prize laureate.  Less evaluative than celebratory, they're still entertaining and informative, including extended interviews with the architect being honored.  (It's a bit of a mystery why the Pritzker doesn't do something like it. )  The Invisible Hand: Architect Thomas Beeby, produced by Dan Andries and hosted by Geoffrey Baer, will premiere this Thursday, March 21st at 8:00 p.m. on WTTW, Channel 11, with rebroadcasts Friday at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at  10:30 p.m..

Daniel and Ada L. Rice Building, Art Institute of Chicago

In addition to the award to Beeby, architectural historian David Watkin will be presented this year's Henry Hope Reed Award, which comes with $50,000 and recognizes “an individual outside the practice of architecture who has supported the cultivation of the traditional city, its architecture and art through writing, planning or promotion . . . ”

Another great thing about the Driehaus is that this Saturday's ceremony, which takes place at 11:00 a.m., March 23rd, is free and open to the public - no reservations required.    It's a rare opportunity to see inside the uber-classical Marshall and Fox John B. Murphy Memorial Auditorium, 50 East Erie. If it's anything like last year's event, which honored architect Michael Graves, it should be a fascinating morning.

Read:
Of timelessness and kitchen timers: Michael Graves in Chicago.
Michael Graves 2012 Driehaus Award

[from 2004)  The Road to the Harold L. Washington Library
[from 2005] Classicists at the Gate

Thomas Beeby: Art Institute oral history with Betty J. Blum.

Architectural Healing: Toyo Ito Wins 2013 Pritzker Prize

Toyo Ito - photograph, Yoshiaki Tsutsui (click images for larger view)

71-year-old Japanese architect Toyo Ito was named Sunday as the 2013 recipient of the prestigious Pritzker  Architecture Prize.  This year's jury was again chaired by former Farnsworth House owner Lord Peter Palumbo, as well Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena, U.S. Supreme Court Justicer Stephen Breyer, architect and MIT professor Yung Ho Change, 2002 Pritzker winner Glenn Murcutt, Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa (who will be lecturing at IIT April 2nd) and Pritzker Architecture Prize Executive Director Martha Thorne.  The award will formally be presented at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston on May 29th.

Museum of Architecture, Omishima, photograph: Daici Ano

The Jury citation concludes  . . . 

Toyo Ito is a creator of timeless buildings, who at the same time boldly charts new paths. His architecture projects an air of optimism, lightness and joy, and is infused with both a sense of uniqueness and universality. For these reasons and for his synthesis of structure, space and form that creates inviting places, for his sensitivity to landscape, for infusing his designs with a spiritual dimension and for the poetics that transcend all his works, Toyo Ito is awarded the 2013 Pritzker Architecture Prize.

Ito began his career in the offices of Kiyonori Kikutake & Associates, one of the founders of the  Metabolist movement, which sought to rebuild post-war Japan by drawing on the principles of biological growth  to create an extensible cellular system of design and construction.  Ito founded his own firm in 1971, beginning with residences like the Aluminum House in the Kanagawa Prefecture.

Sendai Mediatheque, photograph: Nacasa and Partners Inc.

This led to more complex and ambitious projects such as the 2001 Sendai Mediatheque, supported on a series of open steel tubes.

Sendai Mediatheque, photograph: Tomio Ohashi

 On the exterior, each floor was its own unique finish.  Read Ada Louis Huxtable's eloquent take on the building here.

The next year, Ito collaborated with engineer/architect Cecil Balmond to create the target="_blank" 2002 Serpentine Gallery in London's Kensington Park as a structured made from an algorithm of multiple interlocking iterations of a rotated cube.

Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, 2002,

Ito's entry in the luxury brand bling building was a store for TOD's in Tokyo, whose intricate concrete cross-bracing was said to emulate the form of the elm trees along the street. 

TOD's Omotoesando Building, photograph: Nacasa and Partners Inc.

In July of 2011, in the wake of the devastating Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, Ito, in a  postscript in the Rem Koolhaas/Hans Ulrich Obrist book  Project Japan: Metabolists Talks wrote  . .  .

Since around the time I set up my own office in 1971, urban proposals such as those made by the Metabolists are rarely seen.  We are still in the mode of introversion and abstraction.  I think now is a good moment for us architects to break away from this mode and regain a viable relationship with nature.

Ito led the "Home for All" project to create a communal space for people who had lost their homes during the tsunami.   The concept won the Golden Lion for Best National Participation at the  2012 Venice Biennale.