architecture-buildingconstruction

Models of mailboxes

2011-01-23T21:45:00.001-08:00

There are many models of mailboxes by Whitehall Mailboxes. By the way, can be vertical or horizontal and are manufactured in both wood and in different types of metal: aluminum, steel, etc. Some have the clear plastic door that allows check your mail without opening it. For its part, the models designed for outdoor use are made of plastic or metal with anti-corrosion. These are Personalized Mailboxes often decorated with animal motif or a roof or setting for the garden if they presented in different shapes and colors. The post boxes are receptacles installed the post office on the street or in public places for citizens to deposit their letters and postcards. Public mailboxes are placed in busy areas and are often painted in bright colors for easy reference.

The boxes have played an important social work for centuries, but recently, with the rise of computers and the massive use of electronic mail mailbox has entered into decline. The most popular boxes are yellow cylindrical model, and a green rectangular model. In block of flats, there are grouped mailboxes installed in the courtyard of neighbors in an inconspicuous area. Mailboxes placed at the door of the house or the fence accesses, in the case of discouraging advertising that are placed on the outside of buildings to prevent the reception of propaganda in private mailboxes. Now, do you need to Custom Mailboxes?

There was an Old Lady who Lived in a Shoe

2010-12-17T01:23:00.000-08:00

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Not exactly an old, beat-up boot. More like a top-of-line Jimmy Choo. But what a foot! What tendons!

Actually, this is the Reiser + Umemoto design that's just won First Prize in an international competition "for a new Port and Cruise Service Center in the city of Kaohsiung in southern Taiwan, ROC," created in collaboration with the late structural engineer Ysrael A. Seinuk. Construction is to start in 2012, with a 2014 completion date.

We've written before of that team's O-14 Cheese Grater tower in Dubai which apparently is still "nearing completion." (We still have a soft spot in our heart for the idea of a Lucien Lagrange-inspired knockoff for Lake Shore Drive.*)

*important note to attorneys here.

The Kaohsiung project is another striking, form-shifting project.

You can see more images here.

For me, what's most shocking is not the avant garde design but that the press release says they expect to build it for $85,000,000. Ah, the glories of cheap labor.

Let's Get Small

2010-12-15T22:43:00.000-08:00

A house is just a pile of stuff with a cover on it.
George Carlin

photograph: Wikipedia, Maryland Pride. click images for larger view

What you buy is who you are. And the more you want to be - or at least be seen as being - the more stuff you need to have. You can't throw anything away; you can never be sure when you might need it again.

photograph: Wikipedia, Brendel

George Carlin used to say we keep accumulating stuff until we finally have no choice but to change houses: we need a bigger place for all our stuff. From 1,400 square feet in 1970, the average home size increased almost 70% by 2008, to 2,629 square feet. A similar trend took place commercially. We went from Ma and Pa food stores, to supermarkets, to superstores, to food superstores within mega-retailers that have so much to sell they need a warehouse to sell it in. Shopping carts have grown to the size of a wire frame freighter.

A major accompanying force in all this has been the emerging dominance of a global supply-chain economy, in which a relentless drive for lower prices and greater efficiency is dependent every step of the way on eliminating jobs, reducing wages, and increasing uniformity.

Wikipedia, Blues Brothers

The recent economic crisis has cut two ways. Macro, it's the supersize model. The focus on low prices has accelerated an increasing share of the economy falling under the control of an ever smaller handful of corporations, whose massive size makes competition from entities lacking their scale unsustainable.

Shopping malls shrink and die. Shedding departments until they're little more than clothing outlets, department stores cede universality to the superstores, cutting their reason for being out from under their own feet. Borders and Barnes & Noble drove the independent bookseller chains out of business; now they seek a last desperate mutual embrace as Amazon pushes them toward their final annihilation. The corporate behemoths now grow by scaling down, a final mop-up of urban streets with mini-Walmarts.

In our personal space, however, we're being downsized. Under pressure from the mortgage meltdown, the average home size dropped to 2,438 square feet, the first decline in three decades. In our workplaces, the reduction is even more dramatic. In the 1970's, businesses budgeted 500 to 700 square feet of space per employee. According to a L.A. Times report, it's now down to 200. One analyst predicts it will drop to just 50 square feet by 2015, as the average for cubicle workstations has declined from 64 to 49 square feet in just the past few years. Think thin.

So what happens to us? More importantly, what happens to all our stuff? Technology is taking care of a large part of a problem. CD's, DVD's, bulky books and the furniture needed to store them evaporate into thin air as on-line downloads come to dominance. Even as televisions get bigger, they get thinner - just a slight bump on your wall. We're having fewer children, and the ones we have now come in easily stackable configurations. Our pets are now being bred foldable so they can easily be stored when not in use.

photograph: wikipedia, Wiii

photo: : Chris 73 / Wikimedia Commons

Seriously, though, how can anyone live in a thousand square feet? Japan may be way ahead of us. Kisho Kurokawa's 1972 Nakagin Capsule Tower in Tokyo consists of thirteen floors of prefabricated 8 x 12 modules, each with appliances, cabinets, bathroom, and bed. The city's contemporary capsule hotels take it a step further. For just $30.00 a night, you get a bed, TV and radio in a stacked compartment about the size of a large dog kennel.

But again we ask: where's the room for your stuff? Is it possible that old scoundrel, Frank Lloyd Wright, may have gotten it right almost a century ago?

Mary Louise Schumacher, who's taken over the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel's architecture beat from the redoubtable Whitney Gould, has a a fascinating, first-rate article, Frank Lloyd Wright, big ideas for small homes, about the six Milwaukee houses that were prototypes for the American System-Built Homes, Wright's effort to create attractive affordable housing. All seven models were standardized to allow for precut lumber and reduced labor, keeping the price as low as $4,000.

photograph: Wikipedia, Freekee

Schumacher relates how a small hardy band of volunteers recently purchased three of the now endangered properties in what is now called the Burnham Street Historic District. They've restored one of the bungalows and are fighting to raise the funds necessary to save the rest.

Chicago has it's own System-Built Homes, two of them, both designated landmarks - including the Guy C. Smith house, pictured above - on South Hoyne Avenue in the Beverly neighborhood. According to the AIA Guide to Chicago, they were constructed without Wright's supervision. Like their Wisconsin counterparts, they were built by Milwaukee's Richard Bros., who went so far as to hire as their copywriter novelist Sherwood Anderson, who extolled them as an architecture "as brave and direct as the country." It didn't help. According to Schumacher, only 13 System-Built homes were ever constructed.

The homes are as small as 800 square feet, "A Small House with lots of room in it," according to a contemporary advertisement. "Walking through the restored spaces today," writes Schumacher, "it lives up to that promise."

At a time when architects are increasingly focused on smaller, more sober and green building, what is sometimes called micro architecture, Wright has some things to say.

Even the ventilation system, which invisibly breathes fresh air in and out, sounds an awful lot like the inventions of today’s green architects.

And, like many contemporary scaled-back designs, it challenges us. A question naturally arises: Could I live here?

. . . Clutter, too, would have to go. It would mar these spaces, which some believe are inspired by Japanese design and Wright's trips to Asia. Would the shower of interior light from clerestory-like windows be worth developing more tidy habits? It seems that it should be.

Schumacher's piece deftly balances scholarship, story-telling and analysis. Read it here.

While it's always possible future events will veer off into some unexpected direction, the current morning line is that America is in for some tough times, which could have some sober reflection as a positive by-product. The debate on sprawl rages on, but it won't be fully resolved until the final bill comes due. Most of suburbia is still coasting on the original build-out of infrastructure. We're still waiting for the reckoning when that hyper-extended network of roads, sewers and other utilities needs to be replaced. We may be seeing a glimpse of the future, however, in a recent Wall Street Journal report on how miles of asphalt-paved highway are reverting to gravel and dirt as cash-starved local governments are forced to cut expenses.

photograph: Wikipedia, New York Public Library

Cities have the benefit not only of density, but astringency. As anyone who's shopped for a condo or rental apartment in newer buildings has found, market conditions keep the average square footage way below even that 2,400 square-foot stand-alone average.

Nor is this new. A one bedroom in Marina City, minus the expansive balconies, is 650 square feet. Somehow that's enough room, however untidy, for all my stuff, but then it's just me and two cats, and they've already got a Self-Storage locker filled up with old spit-covered toys and various detritus from their previous lives. For normal people and complete families, could we ever even contemplate life in Wright's 800 square feet? Or will we all eventually wind up like the Collyer Brothers, our actuarial most-likely mortal end: being crushed in a cave-in of 130 or so tons of our stuff.

Chicago Streetscene: Infinity Walkway

2010-12-15T01:00:00.000-08:00

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the Graham's new mini-bookstore, Marshall Fields and Chicago Calamities, Zook, shopping for ICA, stuffing the ballot box for SAH - news notes from all over

2010-12-15T00:58:00.000-08:00

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In an increasingly virtual world, the Graham Foundation is taking on a contrarian tack with the opening this Thursday, December 16th from 5:00 to 8:00 p.m., of a new "mini-bookstore" in the library of its Madlener House home. Featured is the catalog for the Graham's excellent current exhibition, Las Vegas Studio: Images from the Archives of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, edited by Hilar Stadler and Martino Stierli. Among the other titles available is a new collection of ten essays by Denise Scott Brown, Having Words. You can RSVP for the opening reception here.

Elsewhere, author Gayle Soucek will be at Borders in Evanston this Saturday the 18th at 6:00 p.m. to sign copies of her two recent books. Marshall Field's: The Store That Helped Build Chicago takes the legendary store from it's beginnings before the Civil War through its 2006 conversion into the local outpost of Macy's. That event does not appear to be among those covered in her other book, Chicago Calamities: Disaster In The Windy City, but its does include the 1954 seiche that sent 10 foot waves over Montrose Beach, the 1903 Iroquois Theater fire, Randy Michaels, and other dolorous happenings. This is a good opportunity to pick up the Fields book for a holiday gift, especially since Amazon is currently listing it as out of stock.

Speaking of gift-giving, you can also support the Institute of Classical Architecture & Classical America by sending them a percentage of all sales from purchases made through this special link to Amazon.Com.

And a reminder about another new book by Chicago photographer and CAF docent, Zook: A Look at R. Harold Zook's Unique Architecture, whose career included co-design of Park Ridge's Pickwick Theatre and over forty homes throughout the Chicago suburbs in the 20's, 30's, and 40's.

Turning full circle back to our iOS world, the Society for Architectural Historians, which makes its home in the 1891 Louis Sullivan/Frank Lloyd Wright Charnley-Persky House, is enlisting your help in winning a contest where the prize is the free development of an iPhone app for the winner. SAH says you can vote once a day through January 28th. Do your part to uphold Chicago's reputation: vote early and often here.

Archeworks Fall Final Review tonight includes therapeutic garden for Washington Park

2010-12-14T04:48:00.000-08:00

Students of Archeworks, Chicago's alternative design school, will be discussing the current status of two research projects tonight, Tuesday, December 14th, including the Mobile Food Collective, and Washington Park Grows, a collaboration with the Chicago Botanic Garden and Rehabilitation Instittute to create a therapeutic garden in Washington Park. It begins at 6:00 at Archeworks, 625 N. Kingsbury at Ontario. The event is free, but space is limited. RSVP and info here.

Mies Tweets! (and he's got a great new website, too)

2010-12-12T21:52:00.000-08:00

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The Mies van der Rohe society has just launched a new website, designed by Scott Thomas, whose credits include serving as 2008 design director for Obama for America.

It's an impressive piece of work, and a major addition to Mies on the web. It's centered on a timeline of Mies' life and work, from his 1886 birth in Aachen, Germany; his years as an infant removing unnecessary parts from his high chair, and a comprehensive account of designs, from the 1907 Riehl House, his first project, to the legendary 1921 proposal for an all-glass Friedrichstrasse Office Building, the path-breaking 860-880 Lake Shore Apartments (many photographs), all the way through to the posthumous IBM Building.

Although the entry page is the usual black-and-white, there's also a generous sampling of color photographs that provide a less abstracted, more real feel of what the buildings are actually like. There's also a generous sampling of of models, as well as of Mies' own drawings.

There's also a related blog, which features such interesting stuff as this poster for a benefit from earlier this year. In addition to the 1958 Seagram Building being listed among the projects, there's also a link in the blog to a fascinating 1968 documentary created and narrated by urbanist William H. Whyte, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, centered on an intensive study of why the Seagram's plaza is one of the most popular in New York.

whyte styles from chris woebken on Vimeo.

The website is both an impressive work of scholarship and a valuable research tool. Perhaps most striking, however, even beyond the buildings, is the full text of various speeches made by Mies, including what he had to say at a 1938 banquet welcoming him to Chicago, after Frank Lloyd Wright introduced him by saying "I give you my Mies van der Rohe. You treat him well and love him as I do," and then left the room and retreated to the bar.

Mies was far from humourless, but you won't find any of those humanizing anecdotes on the website. It would be easy to have a bit of fun with Mies' portentousness, but in an age where it often seems that our core values are little more than to be entertained and diverted, and where our architecture frequently appears all too happy to cater to those attitudes just to escape the anonymity of a supply-chain economy whose relentless drive is to reduce everything to an interchangeable commodity, it's bracing to read what Mies had to say as he took on leadership of the IIT School of Architecture, at a time when seriousness was something, not to be deprecated, but embraced, however imperfectly:

Any education must be directed, first of all, towards the practical side of life. But if one may speak of real education, then it must go farther and reach the personal sphere and lead to a molding of the human being.

The first aim should be to qualify the person to maintain himself in everyday life. It is to equip him with the necessary knowledge and ability for this purpose. The second aim is directed towards a formation of the personality. It should qualify him to make the right use of his knowledge and ability.

Genuine education is aimed not only towards specific ends but also towards an appreciation of values. Our aims are bound up with the special structure of our epoch. Values, on the contrary, are anchored in the spiritual destination of mankind. The ends, towards which we strive, determine the character of our civilization, while the values we set determine our cultural level.

. . . If education has any sense whatever, then it is to form character and develop insight. It must lead us out of the irresponsibility of opinion, into the responsibility of insight, judgment, and understanding; it must lead us out of the realm of chance and arbitrariness into the clear light of intellectual order. Therefore we guide our students over the disciplinary road from material through function to form.

. . . Here the problem of technology will come within the student’s compass. We will try to propound genuine questions: questions on the value and meaning of technology. We will demonstrate that it not only offers us power, and magnitude, but that it also embraces dangers, that it contains good and evil, and that here mankind must decide aright.

. . We will make the organic principle of order clear as a scale for establishing the significance and proportion of the parts and their relation to the whole.

We will adopt this last principle as the basis of our work.

The long road from the material through function to form has only one goal: to create order out of the unholy confusion of today. We want, however, an order which gives everything its proper place. We want to give to everything that which is its due, in accordance with its nature.

We are determined to do that in such a perfect way, that the world of our creation begins to flower from within. We want no more – nor can we do more.

Nothing will express the aim and meaning of our work better than the profound words of Thomas Aquinas:

"Beauty is the Radiance of the Truth."

You can read the entire speech here, and visit the Mies van der Rohe Society website here.

How to Quickly Disassemble a Bus Shelter

2010-12-10T01:25:00.000-08:00

Before:

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After:

One Year: 85 Tours - Chicago Architecture Foundation's Jennifer Lucente nears end of her odyssey; plus a unique oportunity to tour the works of Bertrand Goldberg this Saturday

2010-12-10T01:24:00.000-08:00

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It's as if Odysseus was the one who had stayed home, and instead Penelope went on Homer's grand adventure.

Chicago native Jennifer Lucente, the Chicago Architecture Foundation's Social Media Manager, took it upon herself to take every one of CAF's enormous roster of 85 tours over the course of a single year. It began this past January 13th at the Chicago Board of Trade, and it will end this coming Thursday with the "Razzle Dazzle" walking tour of the city's theatre district, finishing at the Chicago Theater, where there will be a special reception marking the end of the project later that afternoon.

The tours have taken Lucente to every part of the city, from Pilsen to Kenwood, Uptown to Jackson Park and beyond, to Evanston, Kenilworth, and Frank Lloyd Wright's Oak Park - including the cemeteries - high and low, in all kinds of weather. She's documented her journey on a blog, Around Chicago in 85 Tours, tour-by-tour, with a wealth of great photographs.

It's been a clever and effective promotion of one of Chicago's greatest resources - the dedicated team of almost shockingly knowledgeable docents (believe me, I would never make the cut) who lead those 85 tours. If you've ever taken one, you know they're not just for tourists. Chicago's architectural heritage is so rich that (unless you're Tim Samuelson) you can never learn it all, but the informative and entertaining CAF tours give you not only a deeper knowledge of the buildings you thought you knew about, but introduce you to wonders you may never have imagined existed.

A case in point takes place this Saturday, December 11th, with a repeat of CAF's popular Architecture in the Round: Bertrand Goldberg tour. If Mies was all about the box, Goldberg was all around breaking it, and Saturday's bus tour

takes you to his most famous Chicago creations: the recently restored Hilliard Homes on the south side, River City, Marina City and the stunning Prentice Hospital, which everyone is fearing that its new owners, Northwestern University, will be working to demolish. (You can find more information on the battle to save Prentice here.)

It's looking like Saturday will offer a welcome break from the recent frigid cold, so it's a great opportunity to spend a few hours seeing and learning more about some of the Chicago's greatest works of architecture and one of its most creative minds. Architecture in the Round is only $38.00 ($33.00 for CAF and Docomomo members and students) and you can get more info and reserve your space here.

Post Modern Peel: Chiclets and Stripper Poles at Helmut Jahn's Thompson Center

2010-12-08T22:22:00.000-08:00

`Back in 1985, this is how it started . . .

photograph: Mary Ann Sullivan (click images for larger view)

Helmut Jahn's post-modernist State of Illinois Building, now the James R. Thompson Center, took up most of a full city block, with pedestrian arcades along three sides. Shielding the arcades from the street was an applique of granite panels mounted on perimeter columns, which continued past where the building ended, in a series of free-standing shafts supporting the same granite panels that diminished in height as they moved to the corner of Clark and Randolph, where a column was missing, providing both an abstracted sense of enclosure and inferred entrance to the large plaza fronting the building.

Flash forward a quarter century. As we reported, in September of 2009, metallic grids of steel strapping began to bind the pole-mounted granite panels into place. It was the prelude to stripping away every last granite panel, which officials feared were coming loose from their moorings, threatening to smash passersby into personal injury lawyer dust.

At the time, the talk was about working with the Illinois History Preservation Agency, "investigating replacement materials (foreign granite vs. domestic granite vs. artificial stone) to determine the best match with original, while considering green footprint, budget, historic preservation regulations, etc.", with the plan being to begin installing replacement panels this past June.

That didn't quite work out. Instead, along the sides of the building, itself, we were left with only the jagged metal support structure for the granite, never intended for public display. It was like looking into a mouthful of metal spikes waiting in vain for their crowns.

Now, just in time for Christmas, we have our solution. The metal supports, as promised, have been removed, and in their place, we have a support structure covered in what looks like a kind of wallboard . . . .

. . . over which a white, vinyl-like material has been stretched.

The materials may be abject, irregular and not especially durable, but from the distance of the sidewalk, the result is not entirely displeasing. The new white, chiclet-like hem almost seem to relate from the original white panes of glass.

It's really as if the layer of Post Modernism has been peeled away from the Thompson Center - along with the protection for the arcades - with the removal of that vaguely classical faux wall of stone. What's left is a much more straightforward expression of a steel and glass skyscraper.

It works best, I think, at the LaSalle Street entrance. With the previous accretion of stone gone (there was a small transparent breach at the keystone, which you can see here) and the horizontal top beam exposed, it becomes a much clearer cutout of the curtain wall above, The flagpoles coming through the now open stubs, however, look a bit like toothpicks jammed into cubes of port wine cheese.

What doesn't work as well are the now free-standing columns in the plaza. On the plus side, it's more open and porous, leaving unimpeded the visual backdrop of the buildings around it. The columns themselves, however have become almost a surreal collection of random poles.

Things change.

Holiday Shopping for the Archiphile: Computer Part cities; photography books up to 50% off, 3D Chicago, and something for someone who has everything

2010-12-08T14:11:00.000-08:00

Still shopping for the holidays? (I usually wait to start until the 26th)

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Via Rib Bone Production's Andy Spyrison, we bring you the work of Italian artist Franco Recchia, which scavenges the innards of computers to create abstracted cityscape sculptures, named after New York's Manhattan, Fifth Avenue and Central Park, Tokyo's Pechino District, Boston and Pitsburgh. No Chicago yet. It looks like you can actually buy them on-line. Prices range from $2400 to $8100. Maybe there's some Chicago computer geek with a lot of old boxes to tear apart who might want to test the market with their own more popularly priced creations. If you're out there, let me know.

If your heart is set on Chicago, and you're comfortable with "some assembly required" taken to the max, there's the 4D Cityscape Chicago 831-piece jigsaw puzzle, complete with 127 plastic buildings, now on sale at the shop at the Chicago Architecture Foundation. To me, the great temptation would be to redesign the city, jamming selected buildings into alternative locations, or just be able to contemplate a Chicago skyline cleansed of its worst structures. (Maybe you could resell them on eBay as the "Chicago bad buildings collection".)

And if Chicago's not your cup of tea, there are also 4D Cityscape puzzles for London, Toronto, Las Vegas, New York and Washington DC. No Pittsburgh. I've already written that for the month of December, the CAF shop is offering free shipping on orders of $50.00 or over, but it gets better. CAF members get 25% all purchases during Members Month in December. If you're buying a lot of gifts, getting a membership could pay for itself. (Which reminds me, I still have to redeem that coupon for membership that I got on Groupon a few weeks back.)

Elsewhere, we've also written on giving the gift of art from the ArchiTech gallery. I'm pretty sure every Chicago area museum has its own array of great gifts, but the book store at the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College is upping the ante with a Holiday Book Sale offering "up to 50% off nearly all books! Some books are just $5! (Exclamation points from the original!) It runs through Friday the 10th, 10 a.m., to 5:00 p.m., at 600 South Michigan. "cash or checks only please."

And one, last Neiman Marcus-sized idea*

You can actually get a little plastic version of Santiago Calatrava's Chicago Spire in CAF's 4D puzzle, but for that special someone for whom only the best will do, how about . . . a hole . . .

photograph: Bob Johnson

No, we're not talking about sex reassignment surgery for your significant other, but the only surviving trace of Great Gatsby Garrett Kelleher's insanely ambitious dream for an 2,000-foot-high, Santiago Calatrava designed Chicago Spire. As the Trib's Mary Ellen Podmolik reported yesterday, the Irish developer has now officially lost control of the property, as a Circuit Court judge has allowed the project's lender, Ango Irish Bank, also in deep doo-doo, to appoint CB Richard Ellis to oversee the property as it goes through foreclosure.

What says "I Love You" better than a 76-foot-deep hole at the side of a rushing expressway? You might even considering licensing one of the winning ideas in the Chicago Architectural Club's Mine the Gap competition from earlier this year to gussy it up.

Alexander Lehnerer and team - The Second Sun

But I'm warning you now: it's going to be a royal pain to wrap.

*taken from an ad placed by Warner Brothers to begin selling tickets to the Palace Theater's 1964 run of the film version of My Fair Lady, nearly a year before the opening. Image-starved and text heavy, it concluded with the "Neiman Marcus-sized" suggestion of simply buying out the theatre for a personal showing for yourself and your closest friends.

Two Cats Ponder the Tax Cut Deal

2010-12-06T20:52:00.000-08:00

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. . . there's all kinds of great things to write about, and I'm so lazy and disgusted that, yes, I've fallen to the level of posting a photo of my cats. They're looking at me like that because they know I should be working. Hope to have my ass back in gear and doing more substantive posts tomorrow. (If I do, they've promised me tuna treats.)

Last week for Looking After Louis Sullivan, plus a fish tricycle - exhibitions return to Repeat

2010-12-05T22:08:00.000-08:00

We've put back the listing of current exhibitions and moved it to the Repeat Calendar. Here's a quick overview.

This is the last week to catch the Art Institute's exhibition, Looking after Louis Sullivan: Photographs, Drawings and Fragments, centered on the photographs of Adler & Sullivan's

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architecture that range from striking to stunning. Included is work from Aaron Siskind and the iconic Richard Nickel, but what blew me away was the work of John Szarkowski, which had a way of moving the architecture past the realm of abstraction to capture the intersection of the buildings and the passage of day-to-day life through and around them. Sunday, December 12th is the last day for this show, and it's definitely worth catching.

The good news is that its companion show, Tim Samuelson and Chris Ware's Louis Sullivan's Idea, at the Chicago Cultural Center, has actually been extended, through May

2nd of next year. But don't wait. As I've written before, it's a don't-miss-it show, beautifully designed and mounted, an epic journey of the life and work of one of America's greatest architects. I've heard one visitor comment they found the layout confusing, but it really is pretty chronological: the earliest years as you enter, and at the far end, the final ones, ending on a very sad and diminished note - the last designs of a facade, a stove mat and a Christmas card, the final days in a tiny room at the Warner Hotel, even a pack of the bargain brand Home Run cigarettes that a friend would buy Sullivan when the architect didn't have the money to get them himself. It's a downer, for sure, but then to exit you have to retrace your steps, past all the brilliant designs from the peak of his career, and you leave not disheartened by how it ended but exhilarated by Sullivan's stunning achievements and indomitable spirit.

Elsewhere, the MCA has Urban China: Informal Cities, an idea-packed retrospective of China's only publication devoted to the issues of urbanism, and the Chicago Tourism Center Gallery on Randolph across the Cultural Center has History Coming Home, revealing "public policies, oral histories, and artifacts from public housing from Chicago to Boston and New Orleans to Sacramento . . . including a 1950's-style public housing apartment that visitors can walk through."

The above drawing, a "Design for a child's tricycle" by R.G. Martelet, really hasn't anything to do with the ArchiTech Gallery's current show, The House:

Drawings for Residential Architecture, but it's so redolent of a holiday spirit where the gift giving transcends consumerism to the realm of actual delight that I wanted to pass it on. (It can be yours for $250.00, and there are other drawings of Martelet's vehicle designs from that price up to $1,200). Running through December 25, The House features drawings, blueprints and sketches from designers Barry Byrne and Alfonso Iannelli, D.H. Burnham & Co., Richard Neutra, Frank Gehry and many others.

At the Chicago Architecture Foundation, the popular Chicago Model City, featuring a spectacular model of Chicago's center city, continues, with a second exhibition, Neighborhoods Go Green! Scaling up Sustainability on display in the Lecture Hall.

Opening this week: Hyperlinks: Architecture and Design at the Art Institution, which "presents more than 30 projects that span from architecture and furniture to multimedia and conceptual design from an international group of architects and designers . . . Not always intended as ends in themselves, these multidisciplinary practices are often experiments that motivate reflection on the values, mores, and practices often overlooked in society."

Check out the full December calendar - now with Exhibitions! - here.

Housing after Katrina, Restoring St. John Cantius, Lee Bey judges Gingerbread - 3 Great New Events

2010-12-02T22:40:00.000-08:00

ArchitectureChicago PLUS apologies to those of you who have been experiencing problems viewing our calendar in - if you'll excuse the expression - Internet Explorer. We believe we've fixed the problem. If not, let us know.

Just added to the December calendar:

On Friday, December 10th, to observe Human Rights Day, marking the date in 1948 when the United Nations issued the first global Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the National Public Housing Museum will be sponsoring a screening at Roosevelt University of the documentary Coming Home: The Dry Storm, about the housing crisis in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

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On Monday the 13th at the Harold L. Washington Library, Brother Joshua Caswell SJC will present Restoring a Landmark: The Story of St. John Cantius Church, the north side landmark designed in 1893-98 by architect Adolphus Druiding, covering the major interior and exterior restorations that have been undertaken beginning in the 1980's.

Then for a good time for a good cause - the restoration of Frank Lloyd Wright's iconic Unity Temple, on the evening of December 9th, the Unity Temple Restoration Foundation will be offering up Edible Edifice: Reinterpreting the Classic Gingerbread House, at Room & Board, 55 E. Ohio.

Attendees will be enjoy hot cider, holiday trees from Bleeding Heart Bakery and live music, and be able to review the designer gingerbread houses entered into a competition to be judged by Bleeding Heart's Michelle and Vinny Garcia, Smith+Gill's Jeff Stafford and Michelle Dumont, and architecture critic and Chicago Central Area Committee Executive Director Lee Bey.

Projects will be judged on six criteria: originality, use of materials, craftsmanship, site design, use of lighting, and that special "je ne sais quoi . . . The works will then be auctioned off to the highest bidders with proceeds benefiting that other convention-defying edifice, Unity Temple.

There are over two dozen events still to come this month. Check out the complete December Calendar here.

Winter's Bleakness Lost in Memories of a Japanese Garden

2010-12-01T21:59:00.000-08:00

Freezing should be for microwave dinners, not people. As it wears on, I'm sure I'll rediscover the satisfactions of winter, but as the first chill blasts descend, I find the prospect as depressing as the ever-earlier sunsets.

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It's the unexpected discovery that makes the unpalatable endurable. Although there are good buildings, I find much of the Medical Center campus a fairly depressing environment. And then there's the unexpected. . .

In a district where the architecture often seems to be in a style called 1984 bureaucratic, it's refreshing to discover this building on Polk Street - currently an outpost facility for corporate behemoth United Health Care - steeped in an amiable modernist eccentricity. (Anyone have any information on the structure's history and architect?)

What's really unexpected, however, is coming across a serenely elegant Japanese garden.

To encounter the carefully sculpted foliage and lovingly tended flowers, humanizing the hard-edged architecture, is to be revitalized with delight. To remember that it was there for the finding little more than a month ago, and will return again if we just hang in for a few months more, makes phrases like "highs in the single digits", "gale force winds", and "blinding icestorms" almost bearable.

Richard Sennett's December 2nd lecture cancelled

2010-12-01T04:44:00.000-08:00

Urban Habitat Chicago and the Graham Foundation regret . . .

. . . to announce the cancellation of the lecture this Thursday, December 2nd. Due to unforeseen circumstances, Richard Sennett is unable to come to Chicago at this time. UHC is working to reschedule the lecture, and those who were signed up to attend will be contacted and given the first opportunity to reserve their place at that time.

No confirmation yet if Sennett's December 6th appearance for SAIC has also been affected. Stay tuned.

Chicago Streetscene: Trump's Christmas Spiral

2010-11-29T22:04:00.000-08:00

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Blair Kamin at Friends of Downtown Annual Meeting, Thursday, December 2nd

2010-11-29T22:02:00.000-08:00

As if five events for the evening of Thursday, December 2nd - including Richard Sennett, Barry Bergdoll, the story of the Nickerson Mansion, and the unveiling of plans for Northerly Island - weren't enough of a logjam, we've just been reminded of a sixth: Chicago Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin will be the keynote speaker at Friends of Downtown's annual meeting at the Sullivan Center. If you haven't already, you can check out all the great events on the December architectural calendar here.

Richard Sennett, Antonio Gaudi, Barry Bergdohl, The Malling of Chicago, Pecha Kucha 16, Northerly Island and more - the December Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events

2010-11-28T20:27:00.000-08:00

It was the week before Christmas, and all through the city, the only thing stirring was the Gene Siskel Film Center's holiday tradition - Hiroshi Teshigahara's hypnotic documentary, Antonio Gaudi, whose masterpiece, Barcelona's Sagrada Família, begins to enter the home stretch to completion eight decades after its architect's death.

After the 24th, everything shuts down for the year-end holidays. Before the 24th, there's still nearly three dozen great events for you to check out on the December Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.

There's still several great events coming up this Tuesday, the 30th, including on Empathy, Storytelling, & Prototyping: 3 stories + 1 conversation at Archeworks and John Vinci and Ward Miller talking about their new book, The Complete Architecture of Adler and Sullivan at AIA/Chicago. If you can't make to AIA/Chicago, the authors will also be at the Glessner House Museum on December 8th.

December starts off with a bang on Wednesday, with the first of the Chicago Architecture Foundation's Chicago Debates: The Malling of Chicago, with a panel of heavyweights including Linda Searl, John Lahey, the Reader's Ben Joravsky, Chris Robling, Jonathan Fine and Edward Lifson.

That same evening, Belinda Tato of Ecosistema Urbano lectures of Urban Social Design in Madrid at the Institute Cervantes. On Thursday, December 2nd the proposed plans for Northerly Island will be unveiled at CAF by the Chicago Park District and Studio/Gang Architects, while MOMA's Barry Bergdoll will be lecturing on New Research Projects in French Architecture at the Block Museum in Evanston, the kick-off to a day-long conference on the same topic with another blue ribbon panel on Friday, the 3rd.

On Wednesday the 8th, another day-long event, the Global Metro Summit: How Metros are Delivering the Next Economy: Lessons from the U.S. and Abroad, takes place at UIC, with Saskia Sassen, Ricky Burdett, the Brookings' Strobe Talcott, and Mayor Richard M. Daley among the scheduled participants. Renowned sociologist Richard Sennett makes not one, but two December appearances, at the Graham on the 2nd, and at SAIC's Columbus Auditorium on the 6th.

Katerina Rüedi Ray and Igor Marjanovic will be discussing their book, Marina City: Bertrand Goldberg's Urban Vision, at a CAF lunchtime lecture on the 15th, where Larry Bennett will be talking about his new book, The Third city: Chicago and American Urbanism and Why Chicago Isn't and Is Important on the 1st.

Did I mention Pecha Kucha Volume 16, at Martyrs on the 7th with a roster of at least ten presenters, including. Jacqueline Edelberg, Hal Chaffee and the legendary Ken Nordine?

And there's more. Experience the joy of discovery for yourself. Check out all the great events on the December calendar here.

Tiny bubbles in the wreath, complete with wishes, adorn Art Institute Lions for the holidays

2010-11-26T21:12:00.000-08:00

Last year, the lions at the Art Institute went slightly mod for the holidays, donning wreaths designed by Yves Behar of multi-colored aluminum leaves. A week before Christmas, as scheduled, the traditional evergreen wreaths returned.

This year, there was one word for the lions' wreaths: plastic.

Drawing their inspiration from traditional cranberry wreaths, U of I professors Bruce and Stephanie Tharp fabricated wreathes out of 2,011 separate cranberry-colored plastic bubbles, each containing a wish from a Chicago area child. Kara Spak of the Sun-Times has a great story on the wreathes and their creators, including a sampling of wishes, here.

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The Tharp's design firm, Materious have brought to manufacture such designs as their easy-grip Samurai handled Umbrella, and their Piggy bank, sold out for the holidays in white, still available in pink - what does that say about us as a society? Also available is the super-sized Morgan Stanley version with the image of a golden parking meter inscribed on its side.

During the day, the wreathes look a bit hard and synthetic, a big concord-grapey.

They really come into their own at night.

The bubbles actually include solar-power lights to provide a subtle glow, although this is somewhat minimized by the high ambient lighting levels around the museum.

And evergreen is apparently not forever green. This year, the Tharp wreathes will adorn the lions - Attitude of Defiance and On the Prowl, or Atti and Pro for short - throughout the holiday season.

Black Friday edition: 4D Chicago with 127 individual plastic landmarks, free shipping at CAF, Richard Neutra dollhouse, Kamin, Weese, Adler & Sullivan

2010-11-26T06:35:00.000-08:00

Let the gift buying frenzy begin.

Through November and December, the Chicago Architecture Foundation is offering free shipping on orders of $50.00 or more to locations in the continental U.S.

The on-line bookshop still offers only a small fraction of the titles available in CAF's great Michigan Avenue store, but it does include such items as the new Blair Kamin compilation, Terror & Wonder, and two of the season's "must-have" titles for any architecture buff: Robert Bruegmann and Kathleen Murphy Skolnick's The Architecture of Harry Weese, and the landmark The Complete Architecture of Alder and Sullivan. You can also get your copy of the just released DVD of Mark Richard Smith's documentary Louis Sullivan: the Struggle for American Architecture.

Among the many special items is the Emerson House, a "modern dollhouse" which "draws inspiration from Richard Neutra's Desert House and A. Quincy Jones' house for Gary Cooper"

The Emerson House modern dollhouse is the perfect home for the modern family. The modern home has six rooms including a living room, kitchen, library/office, master bedroom, bathroom and child's bedroom. With its large, open floor plan and floor-to-ceiling windows, the Emerson House enjoys year-round sunlight. The modern dollhouse features many extras including mitered-glass corners, two fireplaces, sliding glass doors, solar panels, and recessed LED lights. Finally, the dollhouse is easy on the environment with only non-toxic and lead-free wood stains and paints.

It's $329.00 ($296.10 for CAF members - Coop doll not included), but think how much those solar panels will save you on batteries.

And if that price is a bit too rich for your blood . . . I'm not sure the actual product will be able to live up to the hype, and we won't know until it's released December 3rd, but you could have your own version of CAF's terrific Chicago Model City exhibition with the 831-piece jigsaw puzzle 4D Cityscape Chicago.

The kicker on this one is that once you've figured out the puzzle, you'll find pre-cut holes for 127 plastic models (included) of buildings "that depict the city as it appeared as far back as 1873 through to 2015 Including icons such as the Willis Tower, John Hancock, and Navy Pier." You could borrow your favorite building to use as your personal Monopoly piece. Among the pieces are a couple of key unbuilt projects, and at $44.95 ($40.46 for CAF members) it may turn out to be the only version of the Santiago Calatrava designed Chicago Spire that developer Garrett Kelleher will ever be able to afford. Did I mention the streets are claimed to glow in the dark? Unless this thing is a complete dud, this could be the Chicago architectural toy to have this year.

No word yet whether The Frank Lloyd Wright Illustrated Guide to Matrimony will be in stock in time for Christmas. Check out all the great stuff at the CAF store here.

A Holiday Tradition: The Short, Brutal Life of a Parade Balloon

2010-11-25T00:23:00.000-08:00

Read the story and see all the pictures (parental supervision advised) here.

Happy Thanksgiving!

2010-11-25T00:16:00.000-08:00

"I can't believe you cut the turkey!" - Gabriel Krichinsky, as played by the great, late Lou Jacobi.

May your family gathering be bereft of such schisms, and may you take a turkey out for a tofu dinner. Have a great holiday, Pilgrim!

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a horrified onlooker reacts to the pummeled remains of Yogi Bear

One more for November: Empathy, Storytelling and Prototyping at Archeworks, plus for December: Northerly Island plans unveiled; max Sennett

2010-11-23T23:01:00.000-08:00

In what I predict with some confidence will be the last addition to the November calendar of Chicago Architectural events, next Tuesday, November 30th, Archeworks will be presenting a program, on Empathy, Storytelling, and Prototyping: 3 stories + 1 conversation, with the storytellers including Adam Goss of Spirit of Space, Chris Force of Design Bureau/ALARM Press and Martin Thaler from the IIT Institute of Design. Earlier in the day, AIA Chicago will be sponsoring a talk by John Vinci and Ward Miller about their new book, The Complete Architecture of Adler and Sullivan. There are three events - count 'em: three! - still to come in November. Check them out here.

Meanwhile, on Thursday, December the 2nd, The Chicago Park District, Gia Biagi, Jeanne Gang from Studio/Gang/Architects and JJR will present plans for Northerly Island. At noontime that same day, Lawrence Okrent will be presenting The History of Grant Park at the Chicago Architecture Foundation. And the very same famed sociologist Richard Sennett who will be speaking at the Graham on the 2nd becomes a recidivist lecturer with a second event sponsored by the School of the Art Institute at Columbus Auditorium on the 6th.

Check out all the events on the rapidly evolving December calendar here.

Chicago Streetscene: Tree on Root

2010-11-23T21:30:00.000-08:00

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Geoffrey Goldberg on the 50th anniversary of Marina City groundbreaking

2010-11-22T22:35:00.000-08:00

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On November 22, 1960, in a ceremony attended by Mayor Richard J. Daley, ground was broken on Chicago's Block 1, on north bank of the river between State and Dearborn, for what would become an icon famous throughout the world: architect Bertrand Goldberg's Marina City, a pioneering mixed used complex that brought residential living back to the center city, and coupled it with an office building, a theatre, shops, restaurants and a skating rink. There had been nothing quite like it before - or since.

Monday, the Portland Cement Associationn marked the 50th anniversary of that event with a press conference featuring Geoffrey Goldberg, an architect, critic and educator in his own right, talking about his father's achievement in creating Marina City, "a place where everyday folks could have fancy architecture."

The design, of course, created a sensation, including a 1962 Jim Beam gift decanter modeled after the Marina City's twin towers, united with a single roof with easy-pour spout.

Afterwards, Goldberg also discussed photographs of much of his father's other work, including the gravely endangered Prentice Hospital. Especially poignant was a final group photo of the employees of Bertrand Goldberg's Marina City office just before the firm was evicted by a landlord would soon leave the commercial part of the complex as, essentially, an abandoned building. "We were asked to leave."

That office building is now the Hotel Sax, where as a part of the Monday press conference, a restored version of a fascinating 1965 Portland Cement Association documentary about the building of Marina City was unveiled. We've written about this before. The current restoration is far from pristine - the images still a bit unfocused, the colors subdued - but its still a visible improvement from the previous version.

More importantly, it's a spectacular photographic record of Chicago in the early 1960's, when River North, still described as a derelict district, was dominated by surface parking lots, massive cold storage warehouses along the river, and one of the city's Skid Rows to the north. It is, to a large degree, a lost world, a forgotten interstitial link between Chicago's legendary industrial past and uncertain post-industrial future.

Steven Dahlman's indispensable Marina City Online website has the entire documentary, in two parts, along with an encyclopedic collection of information, drawings and photographs on the origins, creation, and history of Marina City. We include part two below.

Even after fifty years, Marina City has not lost its capacity to thrill. As Geoffrey Goldberg said on Monday, "When built it was an inspiration, and it remains one today. It was then, and still is, essentially, an optimistic place." In this day of strip malls and big box warehouses, of cheap and dispiriting condo towers, would that there would be a few more of its kind today.

Adopt an Orange: $1

2010-11-22T18:57:00.000-08:00

The latest newsletter from Preservation Chicago brings us the tale of this 1870's wood-frame Italianate cottage in Chicago's Bronzeville neighborhood. It's owner, the Illinois College of Optometry, apparently can't see much in it, because they're going to tear it down if someone doesn't come forward to acquire and move it. However, the house is rated "Orange" in Chicago's Historic Resources Survey, classifying it as having features that could qualify it as historically significant.

This house is distinguished due to its age, and that the basic form and decorative elements such as window hoods and bracketed gable still exist. There is a two-story brick addition at the rear that was constructed in 1902.

Interested parties may request access to the house through Historic Preservation staff at the City of Chicago, who will coordinate entry with the Illinois College of Optometry. Please contact Eleanor Gorski at 312-744-9143 or via email.

The demolition delay that's protecting the house expires in December, so if you have a yen for historic houses and a dollar burning a hole in your pocket - plus a few more to move it and bring it up to snuff - this is your big chance to correct an optometrist's vision.

Instituto Cervantes Eduard Bru lecture tomorrow cancelled

2010-11-22T10:22:00.000-08:00

The lecture by Eduard Bru, Barcelona, Finally Free of Icons! Architecture as an Interface for Private/Public, scheduled for tomorrow evening at the Instituto Cervantes, has been cancelled.

The final lecture in the series, Madrid - Urban Social Design, by Belinda Tato of Ecosistema Urbano, will still take place December 1st. More information here.

Chicago Debates: The Malling of Chicago, Barry Bergdoll, Percier, Labrouste and Hittorffs, Richard Sennett, Pecha Kucha 16 with Ken Nordine - early notices on the December calendar

2010-11-21T21:31:00.000-08:00

Because of the year-end holidays, the December Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events is looking to be intensely front-loaded, so we wanted to give you a heads-up on some great items taking place in the first few days of December.

On Wednesday, December 1st, at Goose Island Wrigleyville, the Chicago Architecture Foundation will be launching a series of Chicago Debates - "leading voices from architecture, design, business and politics as they debate the changing face of Chicago" with The Malling of Chicago, with a spectacular panel including Ben Joravsky, staff writer, Chicago Reader; Jonathan Fine, Executive Director, Preservation Chicago, Linda Searl, Chair, Chicago Plan Commission, John Lahey, Chairman and President, Solomon Cordwell Buenz, Christopher Robling, Principal, Jayne Thompson and Associates, and, as moderator Edward Lifson, cultural critic and blogger.

Then on Thursday, December 2nd, the Northwestern University Department of Art History kicks off two days on New Research Projects in French Architecture: Percier . Labrouste . Hittorffs with a keynote lecture, Exhibiting Architecture, by MOMA Chief Curator of Architecture and Design Barry Bergdoll.

Half an hour later on the evening of the 2nd, famed sociologist Richard Sennett, in an event co-sponsored by Urban Habitat Chicago and the Graham Foundation, will be delivering a lecture, Edges: How People Are Separated in Cities and What Can Be Done About It.

On Friday the 3rd, New Research Projects in French Architecture continues and concludes with an all-day symposium on "understanding the nineteenth-century foundation of modern architecture" with participants including Barry Bergdoll, Andreas Beyer, Director, Deutsches Forum für Kunstgeschichte (Centre Allemand), Paris; Marc Le Coeur, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris; Neil Levine, Harvard University; Martin Bressani, McGill University in morning, and an afternoon session, moderated by Jesús Escobar, Northwestern University, with a round table of presenters including Robert Bruegmann, University of Illinois at Chicago; Harry Mallgrave, Illinois Institute of Technology; Katherine Fischer Taylor, University of Chicago; and Alexander Eisenschmidt, University of Illinois at Chicago. And it's free.

Tuesday December 7th brings Volume 16 of Pecha Kucha Chicago where a dozen of so presenters are get 20 slides for 20 seconds each to "reveal their passions, work and inspirations." Among those on this month's roster are Kevin Lynch, Jon Langford and the legendary Ken Nordine.

Elsewhere in December, John Vinci and Ward Miller talk about their spectacular new book, The Complete Architecture of Adler and Sullivan at the Glessner House Museum on December 8th.

Igor Marjanovic and Katerina Rüedi Ray discuss and sign copies of their book, Marina City: Bertrand Goldberg's Urban Vision, at a lunchtime lecture at the Chicago Architecture Foundation December 15th. Today, November 22nd, is the 50th anniversary of the ground-breaking for the pathbreaking city-within-a-city project.

Lawrence Okrent talks about The History of Grant Park for Friends of Downtown at the Chicago Cultural Center Thursday, the 2nd.

And on the 1st at 6:00 p.m., at Instituto Cervantes, Belinda Tato of Ecosistema Urbano delivers the third and final lecture in the series Restoring, Regenerating, Rethinking: The Urban Transformation of Madrid, Barcelona and Bilbao.

We're just getting started and we've already got two dozen items on the December calendar. Check them all out here.

Chicago's Mag Mile Lights Festival: Distant Parade and Bubble Fireworks

2010-11-20T21:49:00.000-08:00

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On the ground, it was the usual great crush of people for the 2010 edition of Chicago's Magnificent Mile Lights Festival, the Disneyfied, rodent-infused kick-off of the Christmas shopping season.

The view from the top of my home was a bit distant, but far less crowded - me sharing the rooftop with a small handful of others braving the bitter chill.

Greenwashing at the Greenway Self Park - Blair Kamin finally notices what was clear to everyone else last February

2010-11-19T14:53:00.000-08:00

November 19, 2010, Blair Kamin: Is it absurd to call a garage 'green'?

September 10, 2010, ArchitectureChicago Plus: Greenwashing at the old "Green" parking behemoth

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February 5, 2010, ArchitectureChicago Plus: Twirling Rotini and Green Indulgences in a River North parking garage.

Preservationists seek to protect Chicago Theological Seminary buildings as complex converts to a different religion

2010-11-18T22:05:00.000-08:00

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The url of the new Chicago Theological Seminary Documentation website, www.CTSthreatened.org, reflects concerns that the 1920's buildings designed by Herbert Riddle on the University of Chicago campus in Hyde Park will undergo major alterations when they are renovated as the new home for the recently formed Milton Friedman Institute for Research in Economics. Ann Beha Architects is partnering with Gensler on the project. The University of Chicago paid $44 million to purchase the buildings from the 153-year--old CTS, which is constructing a new four-story, 75,000-square-foot facility, designed by Nagle, Hatray, Danker, Kagan, McKay Penney, across the Midway Plaisance at Dorchester and 60th.

According to a report on the Hyde Park-Kenwood Community Conference website,

The crux is that by pre-agreement between the University and CTS a goodly proportion of stained glass windows and some other artifacts will move to the new seminary or otherwise be taken out (future undetermined) and not used in the totally repurposed chapels. Historic areas will be respected, other parts will be redone within old masonry and some new construction for mechanicals, circulation, or a lecture hall will be created (not going outside the CTS footprint). Seminary Co-op Bookstore goes into new ample space (including reading space and a student-run cafe) in McGiffert Hall on Woodlawn. 58th Street will become more a connector, perhaps entirely pedestrian. Cost has not been determined and will not be until Beha architects are further into the design-- they have been researching and considering, including the real and size needs of the new uses. Some glass removal will start soon, full construction in 2012. the next public meeting will be after design process.

The Chicago Theological Seminary was also the entity that acquired Frank Lloyd Wright's Robie House and eventually announced their intention to tear it down "We are in the business to educate ministers, not to support a national shrine", was the comment of the seminary's business manager, as quoted in Jay Pridmore's excellent, The University of Chicago: An Architectural Tour. Robie House became the focus of one the earliest Chicago preservation battles, with Wright, himself, branding the proposed demolition a "special species of vandalism . . . a religious organization has no sense of beauty. You can't expect much from them."

The 180-foot high, 160-square-foot carillon tower was named after Chicago Daily News publisher Victor Lawson, who left the CTS $3.3 million at his death. According to Pridmore,

The design is reminiscent of the parish church tower of Boston Stump (1520) in Esssex County, England. Closer to the ground, a graceful cloister has stones from religious sites around the world embedded in the wall. The chapel's windows are patterned after the stained glass in Chartres Cathedral.

Reports that the emptied chapel windows will be replaced by new stained glass depicting more contemporarily observant religious events, such as Milton Friedman bestowing "The Miracle of Chile" and F.A. Hayek freeing the serfs from their Social Security checks, remain unconfirmed.

Millennium Park Paperweight and Sketch Pad, red leafy border

2010-11-16T21:08:00.000-08:00

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The skating rink at Millennium Park opens for its tenth season this Friday, November 19th. It's claimed to attract 100,000 skaters a year, and it's free, with skate rentals for $10.00. In related news, the John G. Shedd Aquarium has discontinued its skate rental program as certain unscrupulous renters were taking them out and getting them drunk. (Thanks, as always, to our indefatigable correspondent Bob Johnson for the spectacular photo.)

Chicago Viaduct Scene: Hollywood on Hubbard

2010-11-16T20:54:00.000-08:00

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Future of Grant Park Postponed, Nicholson's Aliens, Ghosts and Spirits invade, Lumenhaus to MP, Nickel archives to AIC

2010-11-15T21:31:00.000-08:00

Apparently, the future is not yet here. We received word today that an unveiling of the plans by Michael van Valkenburg and Associates for North Grant Park, aka Daley Bicentennial Plaza, aka Children's Museum battlefield, scheduled for this Wednesday the 17th has been cancelled. "The team is not fully ready to present and other timing issues have arisen," wrote the Grant Park Advisory Council's Bob O'Neill, who said the session will be rescheduled at an unspecified date in the future.

Stepping into the void, the always provocative Ben Nicholson will be kicking off the Chicago Architectural Club's fall schedule with a talk on "aliens, ghosts and spirits" 7:00 p.m., at Archeworks, 625 N. Kingsbury, at Ontario.

Also on Wednesday, Lumenhaus, Virginia Tech's entry to the DOE's 2009 Solar Decathlon competition comes to the north-south promenade of Millennium Park for a five day residency during this years Greenbuild Conference and Expo.

Inspired by the glass pavilion style Farnsworth house designed by Bauhaus architect Mies Van Der Rohe, Lumenhaus is a structure with open, flowing space that connects inside living with the outside world and is completely powered by the sun. The north and south walls are all glass, maximizing the owner’s exposure to bright, natural daylight. The fully automated Eclipsis System, comprising independent sliding layers, permits a revolutionary design in a solar-powered house, while filtering light in beautiful, flowing patterns throughout the day.

The structure will be open 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. for tours.

The big news today: as reported by the Trib's Blair Kamin, the Richard Nickel Committee has announced its archive of 15,000 items has been donated to the Art Institute of Chicago. The news follows the recent publication of over 800 of those images in The Complete Architecture of Adler & Sullivan, a landmark catalog of all the firm's known work.

$9.9 million pays your Dewes, lets you get your Gründerzeit on

2010-11-14T20:26:00.000-08:00

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When last I encounterd the 1896 Francis J. Dewes mansion at 503 West Wrightwood in 2007, the caryatids bearing the ornate balcony above the entrance had been mummified in a protective plastic wrap, part of an exhaustive restoration by developer Fred Latsko, which included the cleaning and releading of the house's art glass by the Chris Botti studio.

Latsko took over the property via foreclosure about seven years ago, and combined the apartments into which it had split up into a single residence that he made his home. One of Rod Blagojevich's last acts as governor was to erase Latsko's 1985 conviction for credit card theft, for which he had already received a pardon by then-governor James Thompson in 1985. Latsko was behind a failed $15 million deal to acquire the Three Arts Club for conversion into condo's or a boutique hotel. More recently, he bounced checks totaling $884,000 to City Hall covering development fees for the new Barney's store his firm built on Oak street. The checks were finally paid over two years later. Last month, the Irish bank that had financed the Barney's construction filed a $93-million foreclosure suit.

Things do not appear to be going well for Latsko, who is reportedly also in the middle of divorce proceedings. In Sunday's edition, the Chicago Tribune has a story that Latsko is putting the almost 10,000-square-foot Dewes mansion up for sale. Using a well-established marketing strategy, he's pricing it at $9.9 million. (See, if it were $10 million, you'd probably think it was expensive.)

The mansion was designed by architects Adolph Cudell and Arthur Hercz in what has been called the Gründerzeit style, which became popular in Germany when unification and the victory over France in 1871 created an economic boom in which the expanded ranks of the wealthy aggrandized themselves with neo-renaissance and baroque architecture. Although both on the National Register and a designated Chicago landmark, the AIA Guide refers to it as a confused "German confection" and Gene Shalit once sniffed, "this Dewes is a don't."

Francis J. Dewes, for whom the house was constructed in 1896, was born in Prussia in 1845, son of a brewer. At 20, he emigrated to Chicago, where the massive German population made beer a big business. He began as a bookkeeper at one brewer, and pushed himself up into positions of increasing responsibility. Within just seventeen years he opened his own firm, F.J. Dewes Brewery, which eventually became the Standard Brewery company,

In 1909, as President of Standard Brewery, Dewes was found guilty of patent infringement for using "infringing corks" not made by the manufacturer and creator of 1892 Crown Cork System of Bottling, "a system which has completely revolutionized the art of bottling," producing 2.5 billion corks in 1907 alone. Co-defendant Max Greenberg . . .

carrying on business under the assumed name 'Spanish-American Cork Company' is . . . supplying imitation sealing devices . . . being exact counterfeits of the complaintant's . . . When called to his attention, Mr. Dewes gave assurance that it would stop; but further supplies of the infringing corks were soon after obtained and used.

One profile of Dewes noted that "In the affairs of the German-American citizens of Chicago and the welfare of newcomers from the Fatherland he has always been conspicuous." He funded the Dewes Lectureship in the History of German Civilization at the University of Chicago, as well as the statue of the German naturalist and geographer Alexander Von Humboldt found in the Chicago park named after him.

Dewes sold the house in 1921 to the Swedish Engineers Society, which kept it into the 1970's. He died on December 21st, 1922. leaving behind an estate in excess of $1 million, which today would barely buy him a butler's pantry in his former abode.

Throwing Away the Headhouse: North & Clybourn Red Line Before and After Apple

2010-11-14T10:53:00.000-08:00

We've written before about the reconstruction of the North & Clybourn stop on the CTA's Red Line, financed to a tune of nearly $4 million by Apple Computer to provide a more fitting backdrop to its shiny new store right next door. It reminds me about the line in Lawrence of Arabia where Peter O'Toole is asked exactly what he found so attractive about the desert. "It's clean," was his reply.

As described on the excellent Chicago-L.org website, the North & Clybourn station was designed in 1939 by Shaw, Naess and Murphy. It is the only subway station in the system to have a headhouse. All the others have ticketing in below-ground mezzanines.

The redesign kept the building but largely threw away the design. It's been Californiaized: dark textured brick getting flat, lighter replacements, windows, doors and lighting all redesigned. The original building had character -it just needed to be cleaned up and restored. The redesign is generic and banal.

Thanks to Landmarks Illinois, we've gotten some photo's of the original design in its later days, and we put them side to side with the new station, allowing you to make your own judgements. Just remember to add a little imagination to see it in your mind as it was originally, not as the CTA had allowed it to decay. And speculate what we might have had if Apple, instead of spending all that money replacing and throwing away the old brick, doors, and windows - repeat after me, the greenest building is the one that already exists - had used it instead to clean, repair and restore the original. (All older photo's courtesy Landmarks Illinois.)

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According to Landmarks Illinois President James Peters . . .

There was no need to replace the brick or--even worse--the beautiful polished black granite panels that wrapped the base of the building and the eastern curved wall.

These materials were in fine shape, although dirty and in need of tuckpointing. This was purely a "make it look like any other 2010 commercial buff-colored brick box" cosmetic job.

Well before the work began, we tried desperately to redirect the project (and save money), but the die had been cast by the California designers for the project--and CTA was unwilling to cross them. Thus, a very unique Art Moderne (1943) station building gets banalized. And, in this era of "sustainability," a lot of great and beautiful building materials were tossed away, unnecessarily, in the process.

The CTA - and every other city agency - have recently announced that everything's now for sale to fill the gaping holes in all the budgets. They will be aggressively pursuing naming rights for every city asset they can persuade some advertiser to put up the cash to brand. This isn't necessarily a bad thing - I've already read someone suggest a UPS-sponsored Brown Line - but it's unlikely we'll find too many mores corporations as generous as Apple was at North & Clybourn. For renovations to come, we need to balance the need for cash against preserving Chicago's unique character and keeping it from coming just another generic could-be-anywhere shopping mall.

Red

2010-11-13T12:09:00.000-08:00

click images for larger view

Adler & Sullivan at Charnley House, The Fountainhead and John Lautner at the Block, Grant Park plans unveiled, Jarzombek, Woltz and more: new additions to the November calendar,

2010-11-11T22:29:00.000-08:00

We've just added some big items to the November calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.

Tonight, Friday, Evanston's Block Museum screens King Vidor's The Fountainhead with Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal, part of their series, The American Architect in Focus, which will also include Infinite Space: The Architecture of John Lautner next Thursday, the 18th.

Tomorrow, Saturday, November 13th, at Sullivan and Wright's Charnley-Persky House on north Astor, John Vinci and Ward Miller will be signing copies of their spectacular, must-have book, The Complete Architecture of Adler & Sullivan. Reserve ahead to make sure there's a copy for you to buy.

The other big event is this coming Wednesday, November 17th's unveiling of Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates' concept plans for the Grant Park Renovation Project, which will include the presentation of a large-scale model and images. I'm taking my mom to see The Lion King that night, so I wont be able to attend, but if any of you do, please let me know where the model's winding up and give me a report of your impressions.

Monday, the 15th, MIT's Mark Jarzombek lectures at the School of Architecture at UIC, and back on Wednesday the 17th, it's another logjam night, with not only Grant Park Renovation, but ULI Chicago offering up a panel on Real Estate Forecast 2011 at the Hyatt Regency. That same evening, AIA Chicago and the Consulate General of Sweden Chicago will be presenting two panels on From Brownfield to Urban Oasis, talking about post-industrial plans for Chicago's South Works site. The panels will include SOM's Phil Enquist, the Chicago Department of Environment's Dave Graham, Gunnar Söderholm, Head of the Environment in the City of Stockholm, and a host of others from both the U.S. and Sweden.

Then on Friday, the 19th, the Harry Chaddick Institute of DePaul will be presenting a panel, Reinventing Community: Branding, Rebranding and Economic Development, moderated by Urbanophile's Aaron Renn, with a keynote by Claudia Sieb giving a national perspective on branding, and Carl Wohlt offering up "cutting edge techniques being used to brand local communities."

I don't think it's really what Renn, Sieb and Wohlt have in mind, but lately in Chicago, branding seems most lately to have devolved into trying to sell off naming rights for everything from L stops to fire hydrants to anyone willing to kick a few bucks into our depleted civic coffers. Can we get alderman to pay for their own salaries by having GoldenPalace.com tattooed on their own foreheads? Can we train our pigeons to choreograph themselves in Busby Berkeley-like formations to promote Birdbgone? And really, why have we let them call it the Viagra Triangle all these years without shaking down Pfizer for some really big bucks? But I digress.

On Monday, November 22nd, landscape architect Thomas L. Woltz will be lecturing at Crown Hall, IIT. And Wednesday through Friday, the 17th through 19th, the Greenbuild 2010 International Conference and Expo will be taking over McCormick Place

There are over two dozen great events still to come in November. Get the details on all of them here.

Eye Surgery proves Terminal

2010-11-10T20:31:00.000-08:00

Eye, we hardly knew ya.

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It seems like just yesterday that Tony Tasset's 30-foot-high Eye came to State Street to start creeping us out. Over the summer, Eye became an almost soothing presence.

We grew accustomed to, even expecting of, his protective gaze over our shoulder as we sat reading in Pritzker Park and he scanned and transmitted all our personal information to a server farm somewhere in Virginia.

And then, yesterday, this . . .

When you say you've got something in your eye, it doesn't usually mean a construction winch or a swarm of workmen tearing it apart. Like the Furies shredding Dionysus, just more methodical and workman-like.

We knew this day was coming - the sculpture actually was supposed to be gone at the end of October - but there was still a bit of anti-climax in the way the slicing open of Eye yielded, not a Bunuel/Dali-esque rush of viscous ooze sliming its way down State Street, but a simple steel structure looking a bit like a hat rack . . .

. . . with the inverted bottom dome of the Eye an igloo . . .

. . . and the individual panels, slices of bloodshot raw bacon . . .

All the while, area pigeons gazed down disdainfully at the destruction of the bright orb they had also grown to love . . . to poop on.

If it's any consolation, if you happened to be a giant red Chinese Windy City Dinosaur in Millennium Park . . .

. . . Wednesday also turned out to be a pretty sucky day . . .

Reid Murdoch Tower gets Whirlpool Tattoo

2010-11-10T07:57:00.000-08:00

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The Whirlpool Corporation has opened a new 30,000 square-foot "flagship brand and product experience center" i.e., "showroom" in non PRspeak, in Chicago's 1914 Reid Murdoch building, designed by architect George Nimmons.

The eco-focused facility was built at this Chicago historic landmark building using locally-sourced construction materials; materials made from recycled, renewable and/or recyclable content; low-flow plumbing fixtures; and low VOC coatings. Even the construction waste was carefully recycled throughout the project. The location uses extensive day lighting, and includes a large outdoor space with an herb garden providing fresh ingredients for cooking demonstrations and events.

The facility includes "working kitchens, laundry rooms, garages and outdoor entertaining areas", as well as a memorial to the victims of the company's ill-fated 1930's Bidet-o-matic.

Whirlpool is launching a year-long celebration of the upcoming 100th anniversary of the company's November, 2011 founding with the introduction of the first electric wringer washing machine. Part of the celebration was a design competition for a logo, which received 40 entries from more than a dozen international design firms and ad agencies. 10,000 Whirlpool employees selected this:

For this they needed a competition?

Chicago Streetscene: Absolut Bus Shelter, HOB edition

2010-11-08T22:28:00.000-08:00

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Chicago Streetscene: Whitening Strips DO Work

2010-11-08T22:17:00.000-08:00

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Robots take over - from diapers.com to Helmut Jahn's Mansueto at the U of C

2010-11-07T21:01:00.000-08:00

October 7, 2010 - Business Week cover story: What Amazon Fears Most: Diapers - a story on how roving, merchandise-picking robots have let diapers.com drive down costs and beat Amazon at its own game.

And if Amazon wanted a diaper war, an all-out price and delivery-time smackdown? "I would like that," said Bharara. "I would definitely take that challenge."

November 5, 2010 - Business Insider - Amazon Nukes Diapers.com in Price War on how Amazon is selling diapers below cost to counter diapers.com. (Microsoft vs. Netscape, anyone?)
November 6, 2010 - Amazon to Acquire Diapers.com for $540 million - ah, the joys of predatory capitalism.

Diapers.com major weapon was a Mobile Fulfillment System (MFS) from Kiva Systems. hundreds of intelligent, bright orange moving platforms that grab pallets of product and bring them to human pickers fulfilling customer orders.

click images for larger view

The University of Chicago's new Mansueto Library, designed by Helmut Jahn and currently under construction with a Fall, 2011 completion date, is going a similar route, having hiring Milwaukee's HK Systems to deploy an Automated Storage and Retrieval System (ASRS) to create a state-of-the-art Automated Library System (ALS).

The soaring cranes you see here under wraps will automatically retrieve requests from the 3,500,000 volumes kept in a forest of soaring, untouched-by-human-hands stacks filling the huge, 50 foot deep bunker beneath the reading room under Jahn and Werner Sobek's massive glass dome shaped like the world's largest contact lens.

You can view a slow-loading video of how it works here.

The Library of Congress is denying reports that it is responding by developing an even faster, more advanced system, based on state-of-the-art teleportation technology from Star Trek Industries, which will allow readers to obtain a book just by thinking about it, enabling the LoC to outperform the Mansueto's delivery times by several minutes to a week and squeeze them out of the entire high-end storehouse of knowledge market.

We hope to writing a lot more about the Mansueto later. For now, there's a video of a great tour we took this past summer with Senior Project Manager Mike Natarus.

Under the radar or beneath notice: Rafael M. Leon new Landmarks Commission Chairman

2010-11-06T20:43:00.000-07:00

No news reports. No press release. But apparently Rafael M. Leon, Executive Director of the Chicago Metropolitan Housing Development Corporation has suddenly become the Chairman of the Commission on Chicago Landmarks. On the Commission on Chicago Landmarks webpage, he's listed simply as a member (his appointment dates back to September).

There's not a lot of information on the internet about Leon. In July, Mayor Daley reappointed Leon as a member of the Chicago Development Fund Advisory Board. Previously, he's been a member of the city's Community Development Commission, being reappointed in July but no longer listed as a member. The long-time Edgewater resident was also a small contributor to the Mayor's last re-election campaign. According to its website, the CHMDC "was created in 1982 to help finance the construction and rehabilitation of apartments for Chicago's low-income resident," and has invested more than $46 million in 525 units in 30 buildings over the last nine years. It was the co-developer of The Mark in Buena Park, described as a "luxury condominium complex" that also offers affordable housing.

When I wrote in my post from yesterday of "the useless Commission", I was not referring to the staff, which is hard-working, brilliantly knowledgeable and dedicated. You can see it in the superb report they created for the recent landmarking of the Old Republic Building on North Michigan, a splendid document informatively written and beautifully illustrated, creating a fascinating history both of the building and its times.

It also includes a great, much needed biography of architects Karl Vitzthum and John J. Burns, largely forgotten today, but who created not only the Old Republic, but such Chicago landmarks (designated or not) as One North LaSalle, the Home Bank at Ashland and Milwaukee, and the Painters District Council 14.

The actual Landmarks Commission is another story, a body of members appointed by the mayor less for their usually blue chip professional and civic credentials than for their dependability as a rubber stamp. When preservation groups and 42nd ward alderman Brendan Reilly were fighting to save Jarvis Hunt's 1924 Lake Shore Athletic Club from being demolished for still another mediocre Lucien Lagrange hi-rise, the Commission was MIA. When the Mayor recklessly demolished the Bauhaus-inspired buildings, designed with the collaboration of Walter Gropius, at Michael Reese Hospital, the Commission did nothing. And to date it's doing nothing to step in and protect Bertrand Goldberg's Prentice Hospital, now seriously endangered. The Commission is good at pushing through the paperwork, but it's all see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil whenever those seeking to destroy Chicago's architectural legacy happen to also be powerful interests like the mayor, Northwestern, or a clouted developer.

The Commission still hasn't gotten around to giving such essential Chicago architectural icons as the Wrigley Building or Marina City landmark preservation,

but they've got time to give landmark designation to a 1942, six-story Art Moderne former Spiegel Administration Building at 1038 W. 35th street to try to help a developer resuscitate a troubled project to convert it to housing that's been dead in the water since 2006. As noted by the Curbed Chicago website, will the Commission now prevent Dubin Residential from obliterating the building's most distinctive feature - continuous strips of tall windows, separated only by narrow brick mullions - with the peppering of black railed balconies showed in this rendering? Meanwhile, the 1893 Newberry Library and 1929 Daily News Building and plaza still have no landmark protection.

I doubt anything's going to change, but best wishes to Chairman Rafael M. Leon nonetheless.

Plaza of the Americas rehab: zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

2010-11-06T13:03:00.000-07:00

click on image for larger view (not especially recommended)

Civic junkspace. After covering what happened at the Wrigley Building this past August, I didn't really want to have to write about still another desultory, dispiriting redo of a plaza space along what is supposedly Chicago's Magnficent Mile, so my thanks to Blair Kamin for doing it for me.

The re-opening of the walkway to Wabash is nice.

Next up, Pioneer Plaza anyone?

Richard M. Daley, Emperor of Dirt

2010-11-05T00:36:00.000-07:00

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On Thursday, just months before he leaves office after a record 22 year reign, Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley announced the city would demolish the 1908 Michael Reese Hospital building that he had promised to save.

On a cool, Fall day in October of 1989, Richard M. Daley watched a Caterpillar tractor ram through the wall of a building opposite Marshall Field's on State Street. It was the ritual beginning for the destruction of almost every last building on a full city block, Block 37. "We take a giant step forward today," said Daley, "to rebuild our central business district" and make it a place where "people will live, work and play . . . " There would be over 2 million square feet of new construction, worth $500 million, including a five-story shopping atrium, and two sleek towers, 30 and 50 stories tall, designed by Helmut Jahn. Over 10,000 people would find employment, and nearly $10 million would go the to city each year in sales taxes.

Except, of course, it was all a mirage. The proposed project fell through. Jahn walked away after years of work. For nearly two decades, except for an existing ComEd substation, Block 37 would basically remain a sprawling dirt pile. The development that was going to save the Loop became its most enduring blight.

The city, which had spent $80,000,000 to assemble all the property on the site, and sold it to the original developer for $12 million, finally bought it back in 2002 for $32,500,000, only to sell it to still another developer two years later for $12,900,000. And then the city dumped a quarter billion dollars on a Block 37 "superstation" for an express train line to O'Hare that didn't exist, pulling the plug before it could open because no one could see where the cost overruns would end. Instead of $9 million a year, not of dime of sales tax was generated by Block 37 over the next nearly 20 years, another $150 million+ down the drain.

Daley had inherited the scorched earth concept from the Washington administration, which had rammed through the City Council a de-designation of an official Chicago landmark, the 1872 McCarthy Building on Block 37's southwest corner, so it could be destroyed along with everything else. Also destroyed was the 1928 art-deco Hillman's building housing the venerable Stop & Shop gourmet emporium, which, if it could have been helped to hold on for a few more years, would become the great downtown Food Emporium that Daley always wanted for State Street but never got. There was also the landmark-quality 1890 Unity Building, the skyscraper built by heroic Illinois governor John Peter Altgeld, and the United Artists Theatre, designed by Holabird & Roche as the Apollo, opened in 1921 as a legitimate theater, which could have provided a much-needed smaller capacity venue for the mayor's revived Randolph Street district.

Richard M. Daley, of course, was willfully blind to all this. He chose to see only Block 37's then diminished state. He would solve the influx of gang-bangers with what one police official called "crime prevention with a wrecking ball." Leave no trace of the city's proud history or architecture behind. Wipe it out. Wipe it all out.

Richard J. Daley had actually done this successfully, leveling three city blocks along Dearborn and creating three great civic plazas adjoining iconic new towers that revitalized one of the world's greatest promenades of modern architecture.

Richard M. Daley wouldn't be so lucky; the world he lived in was very different from that of his father's. It wasn't until sixteen years later, in November of 2005, that ground was finally broken for Block 37, in a strange, high-glitz show with dancers, quick-change artists, models in gold lame, gold shovels for everyone, and even gold-flecked soil to turn over. Which all turned out to be more than a bit ironic when the developer who put on the show, Mills Corporation, soon went bust and passed the project onto another developer who, in turn, also lost control of the development just before its completion.

When Block 37 finally opened four years later, it was a sad, "better something than nothing" subset of the grandiose original ambitions, centered on a half-empty shopping mall which had fallen into receivership to a consortium of banks that now refuses to fund the build-outs required to sign additional tenants.

Richard M. Daley began his political career as "Dirty Little Richie", an obnoxious, bullying favorite son of the all-powerful Richard J. Daley. But, especially after a defeat in his first mayoral run in 1983, he learned and he grew. He won in 1989 as a conciliator, bringing together neighborhoods and constituencies that had risen in protest against his father, healing the fractures of the Council Wars years that followed Harold Washington's untimely death. Daley's earliest terms of office were times of optimism and great achievement, but as his tenure wore on, the city again grew lazy, all too eager to dump more and more of the heavy lifting at Daley's door, with the mayor all too happy to accept the additional power. He slowly assumed his father's role as civic monarch without anyone taking much notice.

And no one really noticed when it began to curdle. It's my sense that Richard M. Daley started to develop a contempt for all those people who flattered him - the courtiers, the developers, the boodlers - heaping praise on the mayor in public and holding out their hands for their share of the favors in private. The mayor's most willful initiatives were often his most embarrassing blunders; his greatest achievements, such as Millennium Park, those where we had the good sense to lend a helping hand and get out of the way. And the nasty habits of his youth returned: the bullying, the intolerance to dissent, the constant ridiculing of any ideas other his own, the incoherent, angry rants that were always sure to lead off the 10 o'clock news.

The job of running Chicago and securing its future started to become too much for him, but we had become so accustomed to willfully not seeing the truth that it flew beneath our radar, even when the mayor publicly confessed, while pushing for the 2016 Olympics, that he was coming up empty. He told reporters that the Olympics was now all he had got - he no longer had a single alternative idea for generating growth and securing Chicago's future. "I have nothing up my sleeve," the mayor told us, but we chose not to hear. It was an all or nothing gamble on a two weeks sports extravaganza six years into the future. Which we lost. In the first round. Now, The Hangover.

Block 37 and Michael Reese - twin bookends of Richard M. Daley's reign. At the beginning, he destroyed Chicago's architectural legacy on Block 37. At the end, to make way for a chimerical billion dollar Olympic athlete's village, he indulged himself in another insane rush, to destroy every last vestige of the city's irreplaceable legacy of Bauhaus-inspired architecture, designed with the collaboration of Walter Gropius: the buildings of Michael Reese hospital.

When the threat to Reese and the importance of its architecture was presented with meticulous documentation and research by architect and scholar Grahm Balkany of the Gropius in Chicago Coalition to the Commission on Chicago Landmarks, one commissioner quickly agreed that some of buildings met the National Register criteria for landmarking. And then the useless Commission did what it's designed to do when confronted with mayoral whims or the desires of clouted developers: nothing. The Commission's then Chairman, Daley crony David Mosena, was the mayor's Planning Commissioner during the obliteration of Block 37.

It's a truism that Adrian Smith again mentioned at his IIT lecture last night: the greenest building is the one that already exists. Yet "America's Greenest Mayor" destroyed 1.6 million square feet of constructed space, creating 120,000 tons of debris, enough to fill a train seven miles long, representing the embodied energy equivalent of a million barrels of crude. It's estimated that it will take 65 years for new construction to break even against the embedded energy lost in the demolished structures.

(Photograph: © Grahm M. Balkany / Gropius in Chicago Coalition.)

The city borrowed $85 million to acquire the Michael Reese site, and another $12 million to demolish all the buildings, except the original 1908 hospital building, which was to be preserved. A new TIF district was to be created to funnel another $100 million in subsidies to the project.

For what? For nothing. Another mirage. Another financial sinkhole. Another empty, endless, dirt-filled lot. Check it out in this aerial photo by Lawrence Okrent on Blair Kamin's Cityscapes blog.

Oh, and that original 1908. Prairie style hospital building by Schmidt, Garden & Martin that Daley promised to save? He lied. After acquiring the property, the city did nothing to seal and secure the building from rain, scavengers and squatters. Blair Kamin reported on Thursday that it's been allowed to deteriorate to a state where the mayor now says there's no alternative to demolition. And they'll spend another $2 million to do it. "If the structure was sound, if there was no hole in the roof, you would save it. But there's a huge hole in the roof. How are you going to save it," opined Daley, glossing over his own role as slumlord-in-chief.

Daley claims it would cost $13 million to secure the hospital, so where's the money? You can bet that if it were a hugely profitable company with its hands out, Daley would find some TIF fund to dip into, but unless you're a clouted insider, there's apparently no longer money in Chicago for preserving or building things - just for tearing them down and creating more empty lots. Welcome to Detroit.

This is how it began. This is how it ends. As Rahm Emanual is in L.A. to help raise millions for his quest to become Chicago's next king, this is the deeply troubled, bankrupt city, the government run out of ideas, that Richard M. Daley dumps in our laps as he walks away.

And you could have it all
My empire of dirt
I will let you down
I will make you hurt

IIT Triptych: Where's Mies in each of These?

2010-11-03T22:32:00.000-07:00

click images for larger view (recommended)

Rethinking Madrid, Barcelona & Bilbao, Eric Owen Moss, Terzo Piano, Decarbonization in the Loop and celebrating The Complete Architecture of Adler & Sullivan - the November calendar fills

2010-11-02T21:21:00.000-07:00

We're still not done with the November Calendar of Architectural Events and, even with the holiday, we'rve already got over three dozen great items. The Instituto Cervantes kicks off a three lecture series Restoring, Regenerating, Rethinking: The Urban Transformation of Madrid, Barcelona, & Bilbao, with a November 18th lecture by Ibon Areso, Bilbao’s strategic evolution. From the industrial to the post-industrial city, to be presented in Spanish with simultaneous English translation. The series is curated by the tireless Iker Gil of MAS Studio, whose Fall issue, Information, of the excellent - and free - periodical, MAS Context is now available for download.

The 18th is turning out to be one of those nightmare scheduling logjams that Chicago is prone to. All on the same evening, there's a just announced lecture by Eric Own Moss for the Architecture and Design Society of the Art Institute of Chicago, Roger Frechette talking about the PositivEnergy Practice of Smith+Gill architects for AIA Chicago, landscape architect Nelson Byrd Woltz lecturing on Stewardship and Design in the Urban and Agrian Landscape at Crown Hall, IIT, and architect Dirk Denision and chef Tony Mantuano talking about their new Terzo Piano at the Art Institute's Modern Wing while feeding you samples from the menu.

On Tuesday the 30th, AIA Chicago will celebrate with Ward Miller and John Vinci the publication of one of the most essential and stunning books of the year, The Complete Architecture of Adler & Sullivan. At AIA Chicago lunchtime on the 9th, Peter Kindel of Smith+Gill will be discussing their firms Decarbonization Plan for the Central Loop. And on Thanksgiving eve, November 24th, leading Chicago structural engineers will discuss the tensile and aerodynamic properties of the skeletons of turkeys, both before and after cooking. Following the discussion, surviving turkeys will get to dress up as pilgrims and shoot randomly at spectators.

Start filling up your dance card: check out all the events we've added to the November calendar here.

The Election Ends Today (Hallelujah! Hallelujah!) Don't forget to vote.

2010-11-02T04:35:00.000-07:00

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Adrian Smith, Venturi and Scott Brown, Victor Margolin, Thomas Jefferson, Columbia College Media Center and Urban China - it's the first week of November events!

2010-10-31T21:27:00.000-07:00

Since it's not yet Thanksgiving, it's way too early to expect the November Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events. However, there are so many great events just this first week, we wanted to bring them to your attention:

On Monday, November 1st at 6:00 p.m., at the Graham, co-curator Martino Stierli will be talking about their new exhibition, Las Vegas Studio: Images from the Archives of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. (click images for larger view)

On Tuesday, the 2nd at 6:00 p.m., at Columbus Auditorium of the Art Institute, Victor Margolin will be talking about Design and the Risk of Change. At CAF's lunchtime lecture at 12:15 p.m. on Wednesday, the 3rd, John H. Waters will be discussing Thomas Jefferson, Architect of Private and Public America, and at 6:00 p.m. at Crown Hall at IIT, Adrian Smith will be lecturing on Towards the Zero-Energy City.

Thursday, November 4th has Alica Berg talking about Columbia College's new Media Center, designed by Studio/Gang, at 12:15 p.m. at the Cultural Center, for Friends of Downtown, and on Saturday, November 6, 10:00 a.m., to noon - UIC professor Alexander Eisenschmidt will be conducting coffee and conversation after taking participants through the Museum of Contemporary Art's new Urban China: Informal Cities exhibition.

There are already nine events on the calendar for this week, and you can get the details on all of them - plus everything else we've got in the calendar in its nascent state - here. Or, if you're really impatient, you can check out the Blueprint's monthly calendar of events here.

News of the Weird: Chicago Architecture descends into Halloween's Dark Night

2010-10-30T23:13:00.000-07:00

The webs had already begun to be spun . . .

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undernourished victims began hanging around . . .

weird creatures began to awaken . . .

an unearthly glow curled through the subways . . .

and the purplish protoplasm of Dr. Frankenstein's monster pulsed up through the donaldish spire . . .

while ghost towers stalked the streets, half clad in sheets, neither dead nor alive . . .

Misplaced holidays haunted the rialto . . .

and at last it grew impossible to tell what was more frightening - this beastie . . .

or the dark, creepy castle it had made its aerie . . .

Happy Halloween!

Chicago Streetscene: President Obama goes to Dinner

2010-10-30T22:01:00.000-07:00

Chicago Skyscene: Dark Tower

2010-10-29T04:28:00.000-07:00

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Opening Reception Tonight - Las Vegas Studio: Images from the Archives of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown

2010-10-27T22:37:00.000-07:00

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Tonight, Thursday, October 28 from 6:00 to 8:00 there will be an opening reception for the Graham Foundation's new exhibition, Las Vegas Studio: Images from the Archives of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, which runs at the Graham's Madlener House home, 4 West Burton Place, through February 19, 2011.

The exhibition looks back at the 1968 investigation of Las Vegas by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Steven Izenour and students from Yale . . .

Their fresh way of looking at the city: the influence of popular culture, advertising, film and the experience of the built environment from a moving automobile extended the categories of the ordinary, the ugly, and the social into architecture. Their use of photography and film as a research methodology became as revolutionary as their findings, which were published in the legendary 1972 book, Learning from Las Vegas. Offering great insight into the creation of this groundbreaking publication, the exhibition . . . curated by Hilar Stadler and Martino Stierli in collaboration with artist Peter Fischli, presents original research materials from the archives of Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, Inc.

Next Monday, November 1st at 6:00 p.m., co-curator Martino Stierli will give a talk, Las Vegas, Film, and the Mobilized Gaze. The event is free, but reservations are required. RSVP here.

Information on the exhibition, Thursday's reception and RSVP here.

Revival Meeting at the Church of Weese

2010-10-27T21:58:00.000-07:00

click images for larger view

Tuesday night, there was a bit of a revival meeting at the Seventeenth Church of Christ, Scientist. At the pulpit, the Right Rev. Bob Bruegmann, co-author of the superb new book, The Architecture of Harry Weese, discussing the life and work of the great architect, planner and iconoclast who died at 83 in 1998, designer of the very auditorium in which the roughly 600 acolytes now happily congregated.

Bruegmann was introduced by Ben Weese, Harry's youngest brother, and a distinguished Chicago architect both in his long collaboration with Harry, and with his own firm.

The Architecture's co-author Kathleen Murphy Skolnick provided an overview of the Church, and the two authors signed copies of their books after the lecture.

Even if you knew the story, there was something bracing in again making the acquaintance of Weese's iconic buildings, his fervent crusades - from saving the Auditorium, to creating Printer's Row, one of the first beachheads in the back-to-the-city movement - and the vivid trajectory of a life epic, antic, tragic, impassioned and inspired, portrayed in a succession of striking images projected on the back wall of the handsome, modernist sanctuary that has no pews, only plush seating that would be the envy of a Broadway theatre.

The benediction came during the Q&A session after the lecture, when a member of the audience suggested that all the architects in attendance who had at one time or another worked for Harry Weese stand up. It felt like half the audience rose. And even if the photograph below would indicate the percentage was perhaps slightly less, it still proved in moving fashion that the famous inscription memorializing Christopher Wren holds true not only for buildings, but for the lives a person touches: Si monumentum requiris circumspice.

I've previously discussed The Stormy Life and Magical Architecture of Harry Weese here, and Weese's wonderful River Cottages here. I bought my copy of the Bruegmann/Skolnick book at the Chicago Architecture Foundation's fine bookshop, whose website, inexplicably, does not have it among the paltry eight titles listed. If you need to order on-line, I'd recommend you get it from William Stout Architectural Books. The Architecture of Harry Weese is an invaluable book that anyone who loves architecture will want to add to their library.

Tonight at IIT: Jiang Jun, Reading Urban China in Five Dimensions, plus Louis Sullivan back at the Cliff Dwellers

2010-10-27T04:30:00.000-07:00

Tonight, October 27th at 6:00, the IIT College of Architecture is sponsoring a talk, Reading Urban China in Five Dimensions, in Crown Hall, 3360 S. State by Jiang Jun, editor-in-chief of Urban China Magazine, which was been described as "An Encyclopedia of Chinese Cities in a Time of Junk" The magazine is currently the focus of the exhibition Urban China: Information Cities at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art through April 3rd, organized by NewYork's New Museum, where it was on display last winter. According to the MCA . . .

For the past six years, Urban China has been engaged in a unique multidisciplinary inquiry into the rapid state of change in China, presented in the format of a magazine -- the only one devoted to issues of urbanism published in and about China. With offices in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou, and a network of correspondents and collaborators around the world who work under the guidance of its visionary Editor-in-Chief, Jiang Jun, its photographs, texts, and diagrams, as well as a growing archive of artifacts and images have become a repository of knowledge about the fastest process of urbanization ever recorded in human history.

The lecture is free and open to the public. Information 312/567.3312 or on-line.

Louis Sullivan returns to the Cliff Dwellers

Tomorrow, October 28th, there'll be a showing of the new documentary, Louis Sullivan: the Struggle for American Architecture, as the kick-off event for the Block Museum's The American Architect in Focus film series. The screening will be at 7:00 p.m., tickets are $7.00 and will be on sale 30 minutues before showtime at the museum 40 Arts Circle Drive, Northwestern University in Evanston.

And if you move quickly you may still be able to get one of the last remaining tickets for a unique showing of the documentary at the Cliff Dwellers, the artist's club where Sullivan was a regular and where at the end of his life he wrote The Autobiography of an Idea. A few years ago, the Cliff Dwellers was forced out of its original location atop Orchestra Hall, but it's now right next door, at the crest of the Borg Warner Building at 200 S. Michigan. Tickets are $20.00 at the door.

Both screenings are scheduled to be followed by Question and Answer sessions with the documentary's director, Mark Smith, and its composer, Michael T. McLean.

Information on-line.

The Pasteur Monument, or, Why do Dead Scientists always seem to get the Hot Babes?

2010-10-25T22:51:00.000-07:00

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Looking down to his right, the bust of Louis Pasteur sees a chastely draped young woman cradling two suffering children, symbol of the world of disease and want that the famed French scientist's discoveries helped to dramatically transform for the better. Even as he contemplates their forms with a stoic dignity, however . . .

. . . he's about to be slapped in the face with a palm frond a buxom nude is stretching out to him from his left side: "Yoohoo, Lou-eeeee!"

It's reminder both of how the enduring search for beauty has always found expression in the feminine form, and that from Titian to Robert Altman, before and beyond, one of the attractions of being a great artist is getting beautiful women naked.

The composition is part of the Louis Pasteur Memorial, with a base designed by Edward Bennett, created by sculptor Leon Hermant, born in France, educated in Europe, but who wound up being very active in Chicago, usually in collaboration with Carl Beil. His work includes the reliefs on One North LaSalle, and the frieze on the Illinois Athletic Club.

A bronze plaque on the monument carries a quotation from Pasteur . . .

One doesn't ask of one who suffers: what is your country and what is your religion? One merely says, you suffer. This is enough for me. You belong to me and I shall help you.

If he were alive today, they'd be running attack adds against him.

The monument was originally erected on a site just to the west of the Field Museum. It was the work of a committee of civic leaders created by Dr. Frank Billings, who had studied under Pasteur. Its October 27, 1928 dedication, seen in the photo above from the Pasteur Foundation website, was attended by U.S. Vice President Charles G. Dawes, whose Evanston mansion - at least for now - is home to the Evanston Historical Society.

Traveling to Chicago for the event was the newly appointed French ambassador to the U.S., poet and playwright Paul Claudel, who was writing eleven-hour plays when Eugene O'Neill was still brooding in knee socks, and who was also the author of the libretto for Arthur Honneger's 1938 oratorio, Joan of Arc at the Stake.

Claudel was accompanied by his daughter, but not his sister, a far more famous and accomplished sculptor than Leon Hermant, Camille Claudel. Back in 1913 Paul had committed her, after a diagnosis of schizophrenia, to a psychiatric asylum, where she would be confined for the final three decades of her life despite the continual entreaties of her doctors that she be released.

In June of 1946, as part of a general renovation of Chicago's west side medical district, the Pasteur Memorial was moved to its present location at what was then called Convalescent park, at 1800 N. Harrison. At the time, it was said to be 25 feet, 4 inches tall, and weigh 41 tons. Descriptions have been varied and confused. One account describes the bust of Pasteur at the top of the monument as cast in bronze, though it's obviously stone. In 1928, the monument was described as being made of Italian Carrara marble; in 1946, of Georgia white marble, although it is actually limestone.

Whatever its composition, the Pasteur monument has aged badly. There are numerous cracks. The features of its figures have eroded and grown indistinct over time. Pasteur now seems to look down in a mood of rueful abandonment, a ghostly presence in the shadow of the crumbling grandeur of an abandoned hospital, the roar of expressway traffic rushing indifferently at his back.

Heavy Metal: chainmail on Clark, curves along the Mohawk

2010-10-24T21:31:00.000-07:00

Truserve block, Halsted & Blackhawk, Valerio Dewalt Train Associates, architects, 175,000 square feet, 500 parking spaces.

Before . . .

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After . . .

Fletcher Jones Audi/Volkswagen, Clark and Maple, Gensler, architects, Thorton Tomasetti, structural engineers. 100,000 square feet.

A major renovation of three interconnected buildings, the oldest being a poured concrete structure dating back to 1928, with a new facing of Dri-Design perforated corrugated metal panel system of anodized aluminum. See a pre-renovation photograph here.

Red Line Station Applized as Apple Mania Descends on North Avenue for opening of Lincoln Park store

2010-10-23T23:36:00.000-07:00

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A drear, rainy day didn't stop Macaddicts from turning out in force for the Saturday opening of Apple's new store at North and Halsted.

According to the website infoAppleStore.com, nearly 300 people were standing in line by the time the store opened at 10:00 a.m., with mayoral hopeful Rahm Emanuel earlier working the line, shaking hands and asking, "What are you going to buy today?"

As the rains came, store employees handed out Apple branded umbrellas, which were collected as customers entered the store, in small controlled batches, to the thanks of employees, applause . . .

and even high fives . . .

In essence, the steel-clad store is a 6,500 square-foot rectangular tube for selling. open at both ends with all-glass facades, centered by the iconic Apple logo floating above in benediction. According to Crain's Chicago Business, the property on which the store stands, formerly home to a gas station, was acquired for $10.5 million by an unnamed Mexican investor, with Apple paying a cool $750,00 for leasing rights, which extend through the next 30 years.

The total size is 18,000 square-feet, including the back-office basement and adjacent, marble paved plaza. Included is a flush-surfaced shallow fountain that's the very model of Apple minimalism.

infoAppleStore.com has an informative and entertaining account of the preparation and opening here, including links to other accounts and some great photos far more professional than what you see in this post. (They had better weather: that's my story and I'm sticking to it.) See our previous report on the Lincoln Park Apple store, including a more detailed account of the elements of the design here.

After the break: read about the Apple-funded North & Clybourn station rehab (with pictures) and John Sculley's take on his days at Apple.

The plaza faces the CTA Red Line's North & Clybourn subway station head house.

As part of the project, Apple "adopted" the station at a contribution reported to be nearly $4,000,000, with the original dark brick facing getting a much lighter replacement, part of a total rehabilitation with a handsome plaza-side entrance, and new, large windows and an interior refurbishing which make the formerly decrepit interior a bright, inviting space.

Although the word "Apple" has not officially been incorporated into the station's name, the situation becomes clear as soon as you begin to head down the stair and pass under the first of the many Apple adverts that now have the exclusive run of the facility.

Beneath ground level, there's no new construction, but all the surfaces have been scrubbed clean to their original sparkle . . .

with a slight residue of decades of stubborn grime and graffiti, and a few inscrutable previous patches in evidence as well . . .

At platform level, everything is pristine and bright. The concrete walls left bare at pretty much every other station in the system have been given a uniform whitewash, the better to show off the CTA's first trackside backlit billboards, here all touting Apple products.

Back at the store, prominently featured is the new Macbook Air, released just this week, which totally jettisons the usual hard drives for solid state storage, making for a laptop that is both incredibly thin (.68 thick at the edge in the 13 inch version) and superlight (2.9 pounds). The first Macbook Air was left pretty much to fly under the radar while all the attention was going to iPhones and iPads, and when it first came out I was skeptical of the viability of any device that required an external optical drive, Ethernet available only through a USB adapter, small hard drives, and only one USB port.

Now, it seems like the Air may have been ahead of its time. We are becoming predominantly a wireless world. With more and more of our work in the cloud, those small hard drives - in the case of the new Airs, from 64 to 256GB - begin to seem ample. And with a video card whose 1440 by 900 resolution can drive an external Cinema Display, the question to me becomes not why anyone would want a superlight, unibody durable Macbook Air, but why anyone who has the couple hundred extra dollars to spend would really want an iPad.

The Air could, of course, turn out to be the flop that brings Apple back down to earth, but I wouldn't bet on it. Apple seems to have discovered the magic sweet-spot convergence between innovation, design, and marketing.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
It anyone needs a reminder of this, CultofMac.com editor Leaner Kahney has a fascinating, in-depth interview of former Pepsico President John Sculley, who was brought in to be CEO of Apple in 1983 and who two years later fired co-founder Steve Jobs, and set him off on a long exile. Sculley remained, Apple all but collapsed, Sculley departed, and Jobs was finally brought back to lead a seemingly terminally damaged entity. Michael Dell snidely remarked that the best course for Apple stockholders would be to liquidate the company. Then came the iPod. iPhone and iPad. Apple's market share in computers has now passed 10%. Its market cap passed Dell's in 2006. Since then, it's almost quadrupled, and currently Apple is America's second most valuable company, surpassed only by Exxon Mobil.

Sculley's retrospective take on Jobs is almost creepily mea culpa: Steve was right; I was wrong. For Microsoft, its end customers are its second concern, once removed or more from the manufacturers and vendors that are the primary partners for propel its business. Sculley notes that Job's take was always different:

Steve had this perspective that always started with the user's experience; and that industrial design was an incredibly important part of that user impression. He recruited me to Apple because he believed the computer was eventually going to become a consumer product. That was an outrageous idea back in the early 1980s.

Sculley relates that when a friend recently had a meeting at Apple, discussion stopped when the designers entered the room, because "designers are the most respected people in the organization." When the same person had a meeting at Microsoft, "no designers ever walk into the room. All the technical people are sitting there trying to add their ideas of what ought to be in the design. "

Ironically, Sculley himself relates, without seeming to be aware of the implication, why Sculley/Apple would be inevitably oil and water. Sculley was asked to run Apple because of his success with Pepsi. Pepsi was an also-ran product. While not identical in taste to the dominant Coke, it was not massively dissimilar, and far deficient in reputation. Sculley's brilliant - and successful - strategy was a form of diversionary marketing: "Coke always focused on the drink. We focused on the person using it." What came to be know as lifestyle marketing lifted Pepsi into the big leagues.

Apple, of course, is also very much about promoting a lifestyle but, ultimately, it's all about the product. iPod, iPhone, iPad - will the Mac Air be next?

You can read the entire Sculley interview here. Business Week has also published a condensed version here.

Chicago Architects' Post Mortem on Mayor Richard M. Daley: Too Much Spun Sugar? A Manifesto for Fresh Thinking

2010-10-21T23:52:00.000-07:00

Robert E. Thomas and Alan G. Brake of The Architects Newspaper asked eleven of Chicago's best architects "to reflect on Daley’s impact on the city’s architecture, planning, and landscape, and to ponder the challenges facing the next mayor." You can read the results here.

To be fair, the responses were restricted to the length of little more than sound bites, and how the piece was edited could have heavily effected how opinions were places and shaped within it, but for 11 of the most brilliant minds in the city to come up with such a vacuous pile of platitudes makes, at least for me, some highly dispiriting reading. It's so soft a marshmallow would be jealous. We even see the mayor being credited with helping the city lose its association with Al Capone, the vampire mobster previously claimed to be killed off by everyone from George Solti and the CSO to Michael Jordan.

According to the responses, Mayor Richard M. Daley's over two decades in power resulted in not a single negative worth mentioning. The closest we come is Carol Ross Barneys comment, "The jury is still out on housing and the airport." Mostly, it's the kind of eulogizing you find at a funeral of a guy who was so intimidating in life that the mourners fear an unkind word might cause him to leap out of the coffin and strike them dead.

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Not that the Mayor's accomplishments that were mentioned fail to impress. Millennium Park, of course, comes up. It is, without a doubt, a triumph for which Richard M. Daley deserves some of the credit, but also a lot of blame. Not mentioned are the cost overruns due to rework caused by city bureaucrats racing to fulfill the mayor's whim to get a new park up and running by the start of the new Millennium (hence the name, in case you wondered), overruns that in one of his famously crabby press conferences the Mayor, whose allergy for accepting responsibility was a mainstay of his reign, angrily tried to palm off on Frank Gehry.

That aside, the Mayor's greatest contribution to Millennium may have been in starting the ball rolling and then getting the hell out of the way when Cindy Pritzker's took charge and enlisted Frank Gehry to design the bandshell, jump-starting a chain of events that would see Jaume Plensa, Anish Kapoor, Kathryn Gustafson, Piet Oudolf, and Robert Israel enter the mix to transform what would have been a pleasant public space into an international sensation, a process made possible by the leadership of Ed Uhlir, the incredible fund-raising of John Bryan, and the hijacking of funds from the TIF district across the street. And yet it's always "Daley's Millennium Park" Was there not even a cook in his army?

For nearly two decades, Richard M. Daley was unable to get Block 37, one of the city's most critical pieces of real estate, beyond anything more than a dirt-surfaced vacant lot, and when development finally came the results fell far short of expectations, dominated by a troubled shopping mall that has been placed in receivership. Far more importantly, over a quarter billion dollars sits buried at the bottom of Block 37 in a "Superstation" that was shut down before it could ever open, left uncompleted because no one could see where the cost overrruns would end.

In any other city, that kind of scandal would have run a mayor out of office. In Chicago, the city of silence, it was never even a blip on the radar.

The Superstation from Hell was just a subset of a far larger scandal, the massive TIF scam, which siphoned off billions by designating Chicago's wealthiest districts as economically challenged while leaving the city's most desperate neighborhoods to stew in their own juices. An architect recently wrote to me defending TIF's as making viable projects perceived as economically marginal, neglecting the fact that most projects are designated marginal for a very good reason - they are marginal.

How much was Chicago's housing collapse exacerbated - and the recovery delayed - by the wild overbuilding of new condo projects subsidized/encouraged by TIF's? How much was any comprehensive, co-ordinated, city-wide planning process eviscerated by the way TIF districts balkanized the city, carving up revenues and spending into a hundred individual fiefdoms?

The next mayor of Chicago faces a financial abyss because Richard M. Daley essentially punted the city's financial crisis to his successor, buying himself time by selling off assets - in the case of the parking meter leases, at fire sale prices - for 75 years or more, stripping the revenues within just several years to keep his administration afloat, while leaving three future generations of Chicagoans holding an empty bag. Where will the money come from to fund Chicago's future?

This is a mayor who arrogantly fought to force a favored heiress's private museum into the city's front yard, the same Grant Park zealously defended by A. Montgomery Ward, and who sought to silence all opposition by smearing dissenters as child-haters and racists. This is a mayor who illegally sent bulldozers to tear up the runways at Meigs field in the middle of the night so he could seize the site. (And you wonder why Chicago still has an Al Capone reputation). This is a mayor who frantically and recklessly demolished Chicago's irreplaceable Bauhaus legacy at Michael Reese Hospital for an Olympics that would never be, leaving another gaping open wound in the heart of the near South Side. (Or as Blair Kamin calls it, the new Block 37) How can you preserve and rebuild a great city on a single man's whims?

The irony, of course, is that the eleven architects surveyed by The Architects Newspaper have been pretty much frozen out of major projects sponsored by the City of Chicago and its agencies. In Cesar Chavez and Little Village, Carol Ross Barney's created some of the Chicago Public Schools' best new buildings, but she hasn't been involved in any of the newest schools. She's recently designed an award-winning library for Champaign, but has had no library commissions in Chicago since the 1990's, and her redesigns of CTA Brown Line stations were severely compromised by cutbacks. John Ronan builds schools that have received national praise, just not for the CPS. Studio/Gang's handsome new pavilion for the South Pond Boardwalk had the Lincoln Park Zoo as the client, not the city.

What has been built over the last decade, in my view, has often been extremely mediocre, as in the faux Prairie styled libraries that have gone up across the city. Until Millennium Park came along, the Mayor had a reputation, after being smitten by Paris, for favoring traditional design. How true this was we may never know, but it certainly traveled down the bureaucratic food chain, stifling innovative design.

I have been noticing, however, some solid work from smaller, less known firms, such as GREC Architects recent Engine Company 18,

and Schroeder Murchie Niemiec Gazda-Auskalnis Architects, Ltd's Mark Skinner Elementary.

Designs such as these enrich the urban fabric, and provide the kind of visual anchors that give a neighborhood a distinctive, inviting character.

Mayor Richard M. Daley has a deep, passionate love for the City of Chicago. That is undisputed. His accomplishments are many: Stability? Absolutely. While the rescue of the Chicago Theater has proved something of a financial sinkhole, his bet on subsidizing the restoration of the Loop's other great surviving theaters - the Oriental, the Palace, the Schubert - as well as the new Goodman, has paid off big time, beyond even what he might imagined.

Unattractive, if not downright scary neighborhoods all along the periphery of the Loop and beyond have become thriving, revived communities. I could do without some of that infamous metal fencing, but I'm not among those who disparage Daley's efforts to bring more flowers and landscaping to the streetscapes of Chicago. It's easy to see it as marginal, but it's like Rudy Guliani's broken window theory - a street that is clean, well maintained and attractive even looks safe - it's one of the best investments you can make for reviving a neighborhood.

We can learn much from all that things Richard M. Daley did right, but only if we also look unflinchingly at all the things that went off the rails, and why. Silence is not an option.

In The Architects Newspaper piece, Clare Lyster, an exceptionally talented architect and thinker whose writing has an unfortunate tendency to veer towards the style of a grant proposal, still has the most lucid final words:

The city has multiple young design firms with great ideas for the future of Chicago. Local architecture schools are think tanks for both practical and visionary explorations. Both the academic and professional design communities are ready to engage the public and help transform the city. Are you listening, Rahm?

Or, I might add, Tom, or James, or Gery or whomever else winds up running this deeply troubled city that endures as among the world's greatest.

And the time to pose the questions is not after the election, but during. To try to make the candidates go on record about their intentions for Chicago's built environment, to be sure, but even more importantly, to force making a discussion about this crucial topic a core part of the campaign debate.

In a time when election campaigns have become saturated with vile attack ads created by slick, amoral specialists in slime who, in the case of the upcoming mayor's race, in all probability won't even live in Chicago and whose interest in the city will disappear the moment their last invoice is paid, Chicago's future depends on displacing reckless smears with informed discussion. Instead of articles that are little more than a snapshot poll, we need a series of panels:

inclusive
incisively conceived
participants expert, engaging and unleashed
accessible and inviting locations, venues and times
aggressively and relentlessly promoted

~~Rahm~~, CAF, AIA, the Graham, APA, are you listening?

Chicago Streetscene: Stanley Wave

2010-10-21T05:34:00.000-07:00

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Chicago Skyscene: Cloud Zipper

2010-10-21T04:47:00.000-07:00

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The Rise and Fall of Garrett Kelleher and the Calatrava's Chicago Spire

2010-10-20T09:03:00.000-07:00

John Meagher in Britain's Independent has a great story on the Gatsby-like saga of Garrett Kelleher, the ambitious Irish developer who went from rehabbing lofts on Chicago's web site to partnering with architect Santiago Calatrava for the 2,000 foot high Chicago Spire. Faced with multiple liens and foreclosures, the Spire appears to have had a stake driven through its heart, just in time for Halloween. Read Meagher's great piece here. And read ongoing coverage the story of the Spire, as it happened, from what Meagher describes as one of "Chicago's foremost architecture critics" (me) here, and also here, and here.

Halloween attacks Chicago architecture - Giant Spider on Rush, Poe at Glessner, PC at Cobb's dungeon

2010-10-20T04:46:00.000-07:00

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No, your eyes were not deceiving you. That was a giant, scabby spider you saw climbing up the side of the 1883, oh so stately and sober Nickerson Mansion on Rush. If his huge rhinestone eyes are bulging with anger, it's because he just found out the Nickerson Driehaus Museum is closed on Monday's, and he's grown way too big to scamper through a crack in the window.

If you want to move inside, there a number of Halloween events coming up.

Tuesday, October 26th, 6:00 to 8:00 p.m., Preservation Chicago is offering up Paranormal Preservation at the Excalibur nightclub on Dearborn.

Eat, Drink and Be Spooked! Join us at this haunted historic landmark for a Halloween celebration and be possessed by one of the scariest of places in Chicago, the Dome Room. Sean Parnell author of Historic Bars of Chicago will be giving a brief talk in the haunted history of the Dome Room and will be signing books.

The building that is now Excalibur, of course, was built in 1892 as the home of the Chicago Historical Society, done up in architect Henry Ives Cobb's best fortress dungeon style. One little known fact about the structure is its basement crypt were Laeddis was kept shackled before he was shuffled off to Shutter Island

The $30.00 tariff for Preservation Chicago's event includes 2 drink tickets, appetizer buffer, a one year membership for new members to PC, and a real shock if you choose to investigate that last stall in the washroom with its door half open. Information and reservations here.

Unfortunately, Unity Temple has already suffered a repugnant "trick" when 58 of the 72 tarnished bronze letters spelling out "For the worship of God and the service of man" were stolen from the sides of Frank Lloyd Wright's masterpiece.

Fortunately, on Thursday the 28th from 7:00 to 9:00 p.m., there will be a more positive event, Wine, Chocolate & Architecture: A Haunting Halloween Trio that will take place in a candlelit Unity Temple. The event will also feature clothing, jewelry and accessories "in hues of wine and chocolate" (makes it so much easier when you spill some of it on yourself) from Oak Park's Takara boutique. $30.00 in advance, $35.00 at the door, 50% tax deductible. Get information about the event and how to purchase tickets here.

Finally, the Glessner House Museum will be offering actors from Lifeline Theatre presenting staged readings of Edgar Allen Poe's "terrifying stories and poetry. A holiday tradition!" (nevermore, schmevermore), Saturday, October 30 at 5:00 and 8:00 p.m. And, by the way, if you catch sight a huge ghostly figure, hooded in a monk's black cloak, remember it's bad manners, even on Halloween, to remind him that if he had just eaten more sensibly he would have had time to make a lot more buildings. The event is $25.00, $20.00 for museum members, pre-paid reservations required. On Saturday and Sunday, October 30 and 31, the Glesnner is also offering Haunted Tours of Prairie Avenue at 7:00 and 8:00 p.m., "Tales of strange sounds, unexplained sightings, and untimely endings as your explore Prairie Avenue after dark." $10.00 per person, $8.00 for members. Information about the events and how to order tickets here.

What? You say we still haven't come up with anything that really scares you?

Ok.

how

about

THIS! : : : : : :

BOO!

Studio/Gang and the new Lincoln Park Nature Boardwalk. Part one: Raising the Dead - Necropolis as an urban eco-system

2010-10-18T20:48:00.000-07:00

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Let's talk ecosystems. When you come right down to it, anything beyond an amoeba is an ecosystem. Each one of us is an ecosystem. The worlds we find ourselves in, the worlds we create for ourselves, the obstacles and the fulcrums encountered on the way. The family you grew up in, the relations of power between you and your parents, your siblings, your friends and adversaries, the house you grew up in, the neighborhood, the street, school and church.

And no less than a bird building a nest or a rabbit digging out a burrow - if with a measure more ability and presumption - we also fabricate our own environments, in structure and landscape. Winston Churchill once said, "We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us." That's an ecosystem.

It's easy to walk the site of the stunning new Nature Boardwalk, designed by Studio/Gang around the South Pond of Lincoln Park, and feel as if it must have been there forever, but in fact it, too, is a fabrication, the end point of a succession for urban interventions.

Read all about it here, pictures, in abundance.

"The collection of energy must be the ground of form" - not said by Louis Sullivan, but . . .

2010-10-17T21:46:00.000-07:00

“ ‘The collection of energy must be the ground of form,’ ” he recited, and laughed. “What it means I do not know.”

That's composer Arvo Pärt talking in an extensive and quite good profile by Arthur Lubow in the New York Times Magazine this past Sunday. He was leafing through pages of a 1976 notebook described by Lubow as consisting of "musical notations, there were comments — in Estonian, Russian, Latin, German and English — that recorded his thoughts as well as quotes from texts." But later in the piece, as he describes the concept of tintinnabuli that has been central to his work since he moved away from classic 12-tone composition in 1976, the meaning becomes clear:

The two lines. One line is who we are, and the other line is who is holding and takes care of us. Sometimes I say — it is not a joke, but also it is as a joke taken — that the melodic line is our reality, our sins. But the other line is forgiving the sins.” One line is like freedom, and the triad line is like discipline. It must work together.

It's something that was also quite clear to Louis Sullivan . . .

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The organic, whether in architecture or ornament, is a synthesis of a fantasy of variation and development growing out of a determinist spine of form.

I may be the only person in Chicago who really liked Pärt's Symphony No. 4 "Los Angeles" from the moment I heard it in its CSO premiere conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen, and that affection only grows as I continue to listen to it in an L.A. Phil performance on my iPod. For many, Pärt's music is a case of "There's no there there." For me, it passes the Mies test of being simple but not simplistic. For someone for whom Boulez or Ligeti are still my idea of a contemporary composer, Pärt still packs a punch.

If you didn't catch it in the paper on Sunday, you can read the Lubow profile of Arvo Pärt here.

Marilyn Monroe and JFK's birthday. This is the way the world ends: not with a bang, but with dessicated sugar

2010-10-16T02:43:00.000-07:00

I am riding on a limited express, one of the crack trains of the nation.
Hurtling across the prairie into blue haze and dark air go fifteen all-steel coaches holding a thousand people.
(All the coaches shall be scrap and rust and all the men and women laughing in the diners and sleepers shall pass to ashes.)
I ask a man in the smoker where he is going and he answers: “Omaha.”
Carl Sandburg - Limited

A long time ago, when it was only two hours long, the first hour of NBC's Today show was broadcast live in Chicago, followed by the first hour. This was made necessary by the time difference between Chicago and New York; it was made possible by the quality of videotape, which made a live broadcast and a rebroadcast visually indistinguishable. This is why I have a great love for old videotape in pristine condition. An event as much as half a century in the past has a raw immediacy. It looks like it's happening know. The strikingly different decor, fashions, and personalities may give things a slightly weird vibe, but otherwise it looks exactly the same as if it were a live news report today. Videotape is the visceral idiom of the here and now.

Film, on the other hand, distances the past. We experience our world in color. A film in black and white abstracts that experience into a subset presence. When the film goes soft and blurry through age, the events it depicts become less a historical record than a kind of dream.

This blurry film - apparently the only one to survive- has exactly that dreamlike state. Little more than a minute long, its montage, from the standpoint of today, takes on an almost Godfather-like narrative. There's Marilyn Monroe, perhaps best remembered for playing the big band chanteuse Sugar Kane in the classic Billy Wilder comedy, Some Like it Hot, singing Happy Birthday to President John F. Kennedy at a 1962 celebration in a Madison Square Garden in New York packed with 15,000 guests, everyone from Jack Benny and Henry Fonda to Jerome Robbins, Ella Fitzgerald, Jimmy Durante and Maria Callas.

Monroe begins haltingly, as if almost paralyzed with stage fright, a quality that seamlessly morphs into the slow, sultry purr that has made the performance infamous. The song is brief; we see a huge, towering cake being borne through the crowd by two bakers. Just behind the podium, Monroe exhorts the audience to join in an orchestral reprise of happy birthday. She leaps into the air, her arms gesture in emphatic, desperate, almost defiant strokes.

We see the young, handsome President stride down the aisle to riotous applause, skip up the stairs to the stage, and stride confidently to the podium, where Monroe now, in an instant, has completely disappeared. When Kennedy quips that, "I can now retire from politics after having Happy Birthday sung to me in such a sweet, wholesome way," he turns back as if acknowledging Monroe, but she has vanished into thin air.

image source: Wikipedia. click for larger view

The photograph above was taken after the party at Madison Square Garden. Despite numerous encounters between them, it is the only known photograph showing Monroe with either of the Kennedy brothers. The Secret Service was charged with making sure no such images ever saw the light of day, confiscating the photo's, including invading the dark room of White House photographer Cecil Stoughton after he took the shot you see here, which survived only because it was overlooked in a dryer.

In the picture, John F. Kennedy is looking away from Monroe. He had had a brief affair with Monroe that past February. For him, it was just another in his string of conquests, but Monroe became obsessed, repeatedly contacting the White House and trying to re-establish contact. Like Tom Hagen being flown to California to "request" a favor of producer Jack Woltz, Bobby Kennedy was dispatched to Hollywood to tell Monroe to stop calling the White House.

Little more than two months after the birthday affair at Madison Square Garden, Marilyn Monroe died of a drug overdose. On November 22nd the following year, John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. The murder of the country's most powerful figure was a shock to the system of unprecedented force - the last assassination of a president - McKinley's - went all the back to 1901. Few had personal memories of such an event, and there had been no radio or television to transmit each new, dreadful detail as it happened, to every corner of the nation.

Kennedy's death marked the United States' long descent down a rabbit hole of chaos and violence that would become the 1960's, culminating in the murderous fever of Vietnam, the killings of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and a spinning out of control that would see Chicago, during the 1968 Democratic convention, blister between anarchic provocation and brutal repression, and a wave of riots across America that set city after city ablaze.

The Kennedys and Monroe have all turned to dust. To most Americans alive today, the past they lived is no longer a shared experience. It survives only in books, photographs, blurry film and memorabilia. The rhinestone encrusted dress Monroe wore - not white, as it appears in the photographs, but flesh-colored pink - sold in auction in 1999 for over a million dollars. A print of the photo Stoughton took after the 1962 party - one of only 10 surviving - was expected to bring in $23,000 when it, also, was put up for auction earlier this year.

Which leads us to the photograph at the top of this post. This one last artifact - whimsical, unsettling, obscene. The Presidential Seal rendered as a decoration for that giant cake we saw in the film of the 1962 Madison Square Garden event. It is being auctioned off at Heritage Galleries at their Dallas headquarters, about a mile from the site where John F. Kennedy died, on November 17th, five days before the 47th anniversary of his assassination. The pre-auction estimated price is $5,000.

It's part of a lot of items assembled, as described in the press release, "to mark the 50th anniversary of his 1960 election, including treasures such as a gold presentation watch worn by JFK throughout the campaign, and what may well be the only example of Kennedy's trademark rocking chair to come with an authentication from the Kennedy family."

The Presidential Seal decoration "is being offered by the family of decorated New York Police Department Detective Patrick "Patty" Larkin. Larkin, who was working security detail the night of the event, took a shine to the piece, and was in the right place at the right time to get it out of MSG and back to his home, where it has been for the last 48 years." Larkin's widow notes:

It was not preserved in a spirit of reverence, however, but merely a curiosity the family shuffled from residence to residence over the years, occasionally taking it out on Thanksgiving or St. Patrick's Day to get a laugh or an astonished shake of the head from friends.

". . . this delicate creation, nothing but so much sugar, really," is how Heritage Galleries' Tom Slater describes it, but somehow, to me, it seems more like a prop from some mutant version of Shakespeare's Macbeth. The stuff that nightmares are made of.

Ambani about to move on up to his $1 billion Mumbai mansion. Perkins+Will would really rather talk about something else.

2010-10-14T11:11:00.000-07:00

Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani is taking his wife and three kids and moving on up to his comfy new house. One that's 27 stories high. Really BIG stories - the thing soars more than 550 feet into the Mumbai skyline. Great views of the city and Arabian sea. 400,000 square feet in all. Did I mention it's the world's first billion dollar residence?

Three helipads, a health club and gym, a 50-foot movie theater, nine elevators, parking for 160 imported cars. A four-story cantilevered garden; a ballroom where crystal chandeliers take up 80% of the ceiling. A nursery for unicorns. And a staff of 600 to keep it all going. The opening is getting a lot of press, worldwide, but what you don't see much of is the happy architects - in this case Perkins+Will - beaming in the reflection of their bold new baby. The spectacular project seems to be missing in action on Perkins+Will website, although there is a page on the New Mumbai headquarters the firm has designed for Ambani's Reliance Group.

78% of readers responding to a New York Daily News poll claim to "outraged" at this "obscene, offensive display of wealth." 18% say, "Good for him." Larry Ellison wrote in, "Why didn't I think of this? (Call me, Ralph Johnson.)"

photo courtesy Wikipedia - click on it for larger view

Chicago Streetscene: The Old Mag Mile Curiosity Shop

2010-10-13T22:51:00.000-07:00

click on image for larger view

Great Moments in Marketing: Is this the worst commercial ever?

2010-10-13T22:01:00.000-07:00

Crispin, Porter + Bogusky has just released the initial commercial for Microsoft's new Windows Phone 7, and it may be the worst ad in the company's history, which is a pretty impressive feat when you consider it had to top such campaigns as "Windows 7 was my idea", the print campaign that portrayed anyone who didn't leap to buy the latest version of Office as - literally - dinosaurs, and the epically disastrous spots that attempted to make Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld a comedic tag team.

Windows Phone 7 is by all accounts an absolutely adequate product, which kind of falls short of what you need when your smart phone market share is plummeting and your competitors - primarily Apple and Google's Android - are eating your lunch. Clearly, something major is required to reverse this trend.

Which brings us to the Crispin spot. Big, undoubtedly. Textbook awful, oh yeah. What makes this ad so bad? Let me count the ways:

1. It's trying to sell smart phones by ridiculing people who are devoted to smart phones.
2. It's trying to sell smart phones to an imagined class of consumers who aren't the people being ridiculed, in other words, people who have an aversion to the entire category of smart phones. Really? How big of a market is this?
3. Apparently ad agencies know of only four pieces of classical music:
a. the Dies Irae from the Verdi Requiem.
b. O Fortuna from Orff's Carmina Burana
c. The Aquarium from Saint-Saens' Carnival of the Animals
d. and the big winner - slathered onto the Crispin spot - In the Hall of Mountain King, from Grieg's Peer Gynt. Could we please retire all of these, please? From movie trailers, too, if possible.
4. Is that really the grand staircase of the Paris Opera, enlisted for a slapstick middle-aged-lady-falling-down-the-stairs sequence? The surest sign of an impoverished concept is a blank-check expensive, overproduced spot, overpopulated with vignettes that, even when individually funny and engaging, don't match in tone and don't progress in any kind of dramatic arc - just a laundry list of ideas dumped together.
5. The final tagline, "It's time for a phone to save us from our phones - designed to get you in and out and back to life," is never explained.

How exactly is Windows Phone 7, even in future spots, supposed to substantiate the campaign's premise? No report I've seen claims the OS is faster than its competitors. I'm sure the cellular companies Microsoft are depending on to push phones running their new Windows 7 OS are overjoyed that it's being promoted as a way of cutting back the minutes users buy.

The final shot is of a young man in a restaurant finally able to focus on his lovely date, because he's left his cell phone sitting on the table. Problem is, you can just as easily set an iPhone or a Droid on the table, as well. All it takes is willpower, not a new OS. (Now, if an OS let you text an electric shock to your significant other's ear when they were on their phone ignoring you, that could send product flying off the shelf.)

Obviously, neither Apple or Google are above running down the competition, but they've never lost sight of the fact that the ultimate focus needs to be, not the shortcomings of their competitors, or their competitors' customers, but the selling points of their own products. As they've proven again and again, that's something Microsoft still doesn't get.

Brazilian Design for Real Cities, Modern Ball, Active Layer, Epstein in Racine, engineering for kids in Des Plaines - more great events for October

2010-10-12T20:53:00.000-07:00

You'd think that by October 12th, we would have everything there was to find about what's going on in October. You'd be wrong. We've just put up over half a dozen great additions to the October Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.

From October 28th to the 30th, at locations including the Instituto Cervantes, the Graham Foundation, and the South Side Community Arts Center, there'll be a three-day symposium, Building Connections: Brazilian Design for Real Cities, which will include the participation of such architects, planners, and authors as Jaime Lerner, Carmen Vidal Hallet, Fernanda Barbara and Jorge Wilhelm.

Not yet maxxed out by benefits? Have $500 in your pocket? Can make your reservations by the 15th? The Architecture and Design Society of the Art Institute will hold its Modern Ball on Saturday, October 23rd, in the new Renzo Piano designed Modern Wing, with dinner, cocktails, a video, and a live auction offering such morsels as a Chicago River tour with WTTW's Geoffrey Baer, dinner with architect Dirk Denison at L20, and first-class sojourns to Hamburg and Berlin, New York and New Canaan, and Cap Martin, France.

If that's a little bit beyond your budget, there are plenty of free events to choose from. This Friday, the 15th, there's a reception and lecture at the Extension Gallery at Archeworks for their new exhibition, Active Layer, an installation by Mason White and Lola Sheppard of the firm Lateral Office.

On Saturday, the 16th, there's a Chicago Architecture + Design Day at Hermann Hall, IIT, offering a college fair, admission and career workshops for students interested in Architecture, Interior Design, Construction Management, and Landscape Architecture programs. It's part of Discover IIT Day. On Wednesday, October 20, Michael Damore of Epstein Chicago will talk about their collaboration with Norman Foster on the expansion of the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed S.C. Johnson Campus in Racine, Wisconsin at the Häfele America showroom on Hubbard.

And if you have third-to-eighth graders with a budding interest in architecture and engineering, take them to the Des Plaines Library this Saturday the 16th for their Second Family Science Expo, where they'll be able to get hands-on experience from structural engineers Chas Hague and Larry Novak, who will talk on High Rise Building Design and show an earthquake shake table testing the stability of towers made out of LEGO's™. Also participating will be our tireless correspondent, engineer Bob Johnson, who gave a preview to ABC7's Linda Yu and Sylvia Perez.

And that's just the new stuff. There's the Tribute to Bruce Graham this Thursday, plus the Design Evanston Awards, the Traditional Building Exhibition and Conference, the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat symposium at IIT, Julie Snow, Dana Buntrock, Robert Bruegmann talking about his new book on Harry Weese in Weese's Seventeenth Church of Christ, Scientist, and dozens of other great events. Check out the entire October calendar here.