Entries associated with the tag "Architecture":

You can't read Chicago Architect, the glossy magazine published by the local chapter of the American Institute of Architects, online--it's free to members and available by subscription to the rest of us for $35 a year. But the AIA has posted an interview with Chicago architect Walter Netsch, who died in June. It's not the world's most fascinating Q & A--the Art Institute has a much more in-depth one here (PDF), conducted in 1995--but it's notable because it was conducted just last year.

Among other things, he discusses climate change (briefly), his fight to keep his license, and which among his many projects (including the U.S. Air Force Academy, the U of I Chicago Circle campus, and "brutalist" libraries at the U. of C. and Northwestern) he considered failures (bold emphasis mine):

Z: You've had many successful projects. Do you consider any of your projects to be failures?

W: I did some dorms at the Air Force Academy long after we did the campus itself. They really were awful. They were for visiting officers who were out there to have a good time. Well, I didn't design them a good-time joint—the dorms I designed were rather perfunctory.

It was a case of the wrong architect and the wrong client. That project was a flop. I wasn't proud of it at all. But I wasn't going to design a nightclub or a whorehouse. That's what it became. They had a particular ethic of their own. It's not mine. And I didn't understand that. I misunderstood the client, in other words, and designed a lousy building for them.

The Inland Steel building. That could have been quite wonderful. I designed a double glass curtain wall system, much like what you see some architects doing today. It was very energy efficient. But in the middle of that, I was assigned to lead the Air Force Academy campus project. Twenty thousand raw acres to plan, design and build. I wasn't going to complain. But Bruce Graham finished the Inland Steel Building. It could have been a better building.

I like the U. of C. law school, designed by Eero Saarinen. I don't have to use it, though. My circle of friends includes many law students and one former employee; for the most part they very much dislike it, especially the library. So this quote by law prof Douglas Baird, in Blair Kamin's positive but balanced evaluation of the newly renovated building, jumped out at me (h/t Liz, Monica):

Such were the shortcomings that, around the turn of the millennium, the school even entertained the idea of constructing a new building directly to the south.

“I would say, ‘this is great architecture,” recalled former dean Douglas Baird, now a professor at the school, “and people would say, ‘Are you crazy?’”

As someone who likes architecture, I can appreciate user-unfriendly buildings; as a Web editor who has drunk from the Jakob Nielsen school of usability, I also think it's insane. It's the Soldier Field dilemma--from all reports (I haven't been in it) it's an outstanding place to watch a game, which by some measures is the point, but the consensus is that it's butt-ugly from the outside, which is what the vast majority sees. Is seeing this thing that's part of your city's landscape "use"? I don't have an answer for you, honestly, but it's an interesting question.

Just e.g.: I did three years at the U. of C. and spent all three in Stony Island, which had been built as faculty housing and was adopted for undergrad use. So I didn't live in Saarinen's (botched) Woodward Court, or the lovely Gothic buildings of Burton-Judson or Snell-Hitchcock, or the bonkers new Max Palevsky. I lived in the most boring dorm on an architecturally sophisticated campus--a red-brick bunker with white walls, thin gray carpet, and that's it. Check it out, it's really ugly.

And it had full bathrooms, studio-size kitchens, large living rooms, central heat, and, perhaps most importantly, large balconies overlooking the Museum of Science and Industry. Overall it was much more pleasant than living in one of the more storied dorms. I'm just saying; something to keep in mind when architect-types rag on the (admittedly ugly) plague of beige towers that dominate Streeterville and the South Loop.

Also: Blair Kamin is kind of a local treasure. If you don't, read his blog and articles. 

2004 Pritzker Prize-winner Zaha Hadid and and Ben van Berkel will be contributing pavilions to Millennium Park next year as part of the Burnham Plan centennial celebration next year. But possibly more exciting:

"Also educators, they and their studios will participate at Chicago architecture schools in workshops and presentations related to the pavilion projects, Hadid at Illinois Institute of Technology and van Berkel at the University of Illinois at Chicago."

Neat choices. The Zaha Hadid Blog is a good intro to her work. She's also a painter, and her work in that field is a little bit along the lines of Yes album covers. Her architecture puts me in the mind of Star Wars come to life, but reasonable people will disagree--for example, other reasonable people think her work looks like something out of Battlestar Galactica. The park, I think, will temper the effect, so hopefully it won't give me the creeps too much.

Here's a tour of van Berkel's Astrohome (sensing a theme?). Five Franklin Place reminds me of Aqua. His Mobius House made a splash awhile back.

Walter Netsch, the longtime Skidmore, Owings & Merrill giant and former Park District commissioner, died yesterday at 88. Blair Kamin has an obit; Lee Bey recommends his oral history from the AIC's great collection. As far as I know these things I think the consensus is that his greatest work is the Air Force Academy chapel, which is indeed stunning (his early Inland Steel building is also well-regarded).

But I will earnestly and honestly defend his often-maligned Regenstein Library, where I passed many hours (the chairs next to the windows on the north end of the first floor are a great place to sleep). There's a tendency for libraries to be delicate, ornate, welcoming, etc. The Reg is none of those things; it's a massive, geometrically complex bunker that looks even bigger than it is and like it doesn't like you.

With one caveat--it's welcoming in the sense that it looks like a place you could ride out nuclear apocalypse. Not coincidentally, the threat of nuclear apocalypse really started with Fermi's first chain reaction, which took place under the stadium that the library replaced. I think I remember reading that Netsch was influenced by the nuclear reactor Fermi built; looking at it, it'd make sense.

You might not guess it from looking at the Reg, which does look cold and intimidating, but it gets used. Criticized, yes, but U. of C. students burn away the hours there, and my wholly unsupported-by-evidence theory is that it's secretly beloved by students because it's hard, dark, and complex, which compliments the U. of C. student self-image.

Not to mention the fact that its Fermi-inspired design and historical lineage gives it gravitas. If the cathedral-like Harper Library suggests the abstract transcendence of study, the Reg is a reminder of the tangible power of knowledge and higher education, for good and ill. On the campus that brought you Paul Wolfowitz, David Brooks, Ahmed Chalabi, and John Aschcroft, not to mention nuclear war, the Chicago Boys, and some of America's earliest and most, um, "successful" urban renewal, it's a ballsy and not-trivial architectural statement.

Witold Rybczynski has a nice little Flash gallery on Eero Saarinen; his building for John Deere in Moline is great. The local work that Rybczynski elides ("In college dormitories for Vassar, Chicago, and Penn, Saarinen created a modern architecture that responded to its historic architectural surroundings," aka Woodward, a pit that featured a unique, bad smell on each floor*) or ignores (the U. of C. Law School, which is designed around a fountain that's in operation for like a third of the school year) is, almost universally, reviled. It happens; Saarinen's a great architect. But he's also one of the reasons U. of C. people are always on guard when the brass announces a fancy new building.

*In fairness to Saarinen, the U. of C. lowballed him on the money they were willing to devote to its construction, so he pulled his name from it, allowing the university to tear it down several years ago, if I remember my history correctly. I can't even find a picture of it. But my Memorial to Woodward in the student paper, featuring a picture of people tearing down the Berlin Wall, was appreciated.

A new chapter in the U. of C.'s long, mixed history with starchitects is about to begin: I bring you the Pillbug Robot Library.

Um, I mean the Joe and Rika Mansueto Library. At bottom right is the "high-density, automated shelving system." Chicagoist "digs" it; Blair Kamin fears it will look self-indulgent. Then again, Kamin hates on Walter Netsch's Brutalist Regenstein Library, which is my favorite building on campus--an imposing, grim bunker of books that doesn't make nice and keeps the riffraff out, the Berlin Wall of university libraries. You want repose? The dim cubicles tucked deep into the concrete on the upper levels are brimming with repose. You could die in there and no one would find you for weeks. A greenhouse? You are afraid of repose. Maybe they could build some cubicles down in the shelving system.

Also worth noting--the underground A Level of the Reg is one of the most social places on campus, despite having all the charm of a DMV. How the building fits into the school aesthetically is one question; how it fits into the culture is another. U. of C. students are odd and may not take to your fancy glass domes. I suspect it will be another nice place to read on a campus filled with such places, provided they find chairs that are more comfortable than the ones in the rendering look, and in the grand scheme of Helmut Jahn it's obviously better than the ridiculous Thompson Center but not as awesome as his gorgeous IIT dorms. And it looks better than the Days Inn-chic new dorm at 61st and Ellis.

But if they're going to spend that much money on a reading room and giant robot librarian, I hope they can find some to spruce up Harper Library, a truly elegant and reasonably well-lit space that, up close, looks shopworn.

NB: Re Kamin's nicknames, I believe the Chicago Maroon was the first to use Barbie to describe Max Palevsky ("Barbie's Dream Dorm").

WHEREAS children, at least boy-children for the most part, love cars;

WHEREAS everyone loves the Berwyn Spindle, an important part of our film heritage;

WHEREAS WHY DO YOU HATE CHILDREN? CHICAGO IS ABOUT CHILDREN! SPITTLE FLECKS!

WHEREAS the Spindle is Brutalist;

THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED:

The two views presented here, screenshots from Fox News Chicago's Wednesday report by Tera Williams on the introduction of the Chicago Children's Museum proposal to build itself a new museum in Grant Park into the City Council, make it all too obvious why the CCM works overtime to keep them hidden from the general public. (None of these drawings, apparently, were presented to the Chicago Park District before they rubber-stamped the museum's land grab of park property earlier this week. )

Lynn Becker has screen grabs and a critique of the "desperately busy and unsettling" Chicago Children's Museum design (from the same architects who did the remarkable Spertus building), which have been hard to come by. He doesn't like it, and not just because it's a much busier intrusion on the park than the Daley Bicentennial Fieldhouse. Andrew Patner, who is a friend and fan of the architects, is also unimpressed: "I think that they would do a superb job with this project -- if they could design it as an above-ground building for another site. In Grant Park, they are trying to solve a problem, and a problem that need not be addressed at all."

Amazing images of Walter Burley Griffin's plan for Canberra , which is documented in his wife Marion's The Magic of America, plus more of his work, at BibliOdyssey (h/t ptb, who has the best EveryBlock find ever).

On the day of the shooting at Crane Prep, I noted that it's had a troubled history over the past couple decades. Today the Sun-Times has outstanding coverage of the incident, noting that the school is a crossroads for students from four housing projects dominated by five different gangs. The fight broke out over a hat adorned with a watch, called a Buck Fifty (in reference to the price, i.e. $150); according to GLC, the style is identified with Chicago. I've seen a lot of them in recent months, but that may only correlate to me taking the 63 to work since the fall, not to fashion trends.

(I'm also having a hard time finding any references to them outside of Chicago, so I'm wondering if the style and/or the term for it is local.)

In other education news, the Sun-Times highlights a study that puts real numbers on an underrated problem with getting CPS students into college--applying is a huge, incomprehensible pain, particularly doing the FAFSA. I applied as an undergrad twice, out of high school and as a transfer, and it was awful, despite the fact that I was a dedicated student with supportive, college-educated parents, one of whom is a college teacher; many helpful adult friends in higher ed, plus four years of college classes; a student in a small school with lots of guidance; a great deal of experience with the Internet; and lots of experience in self-directed learning (I went to a very alternative high school with no history of sending students to college). The paperwork still made me want to cry, and I managed to screw it up regularly (my older friends and colleagues seem to have had an easier time, although I'm not sure if age has softened their memories).

Without the support structure I had, I'm sure the chaos of the process would have limited my options, even if I'd just become overwhelmed by irritation. Mentoring is enormously important at this step.

Finally, a pleasant diversion: Lee Bey has great pictures of and an interesting post about the overwhelmingly beautiful Carl Schurz High School on Milwaukee, a great blend of Prairie School architecture and big-shoulder old-school massive-red-brick institutional architecture. He's also been writing about the low-slung, modernist Pershing School in the at-risk Lake Meadows complex.

Lee Bey has an interview with Jeanne Gang and photos of Aqua in its current state. It looks even more Bertrand Goldberg 2.0 than was clear from the models, which is a good thing. As a Hyde Park/Woodlawn resident, I'm still excited for Windermere West. Below, a neat photomontage of the building's construction (warning: annoying generic techno):

This “Y” shaped figure, which represents the three branches of the river as they come together at Wolf Point, can be found on structures and buildings all across the city. While prominent on many municipal buildings and street lighting boxes, it can also often be found interestingly hidden in the facades of older commercial and industrial buildings across the city.

Forgotten Chicago notices the Chicago Municipal Device hiding in buildings throughout the city. 

But that’s not how the economy works. The real estate economy – at the micro level of a billion-dollar 70-acre development – works best when it is wasting resources. The banks like new and the buyers like new and just like that there is capital to knock everything down and start again and if you ask the banks and buyers to invest in what we already have they see a smaller margin and would rather wait for someone to tickle them big-time because there is no party like the party where you plow it all under.

Vince Michael laments the latest round of urban redevelopment. In other housing and development news, Chicago can look forward to 5,900 new residential units downtown this year, a record, which should decrease prices and increase the already high number of vacancies.

The always excellent Blair Kamin has a good time calling out downtown's most recent apartment building travesties. Aside from the one liners ("urbanization without urbanity"), this observation struck me:

"Since 1998, developers have completed or started construction on more than 160 buildings in Chicago's greater downtown area that are at least 12 stories tall (the widely accepted definition of a high-rise), according to Gail Lissner, a vice president at Appraisal Research Counselors. That's more high-rises than there are in all of Detroit (126), St. Louis (105) or Milwaukee (83), according to the Emporis building database. It means that Chicago has built the equivalent of an entire downtown in just 10 years. It's also why there are fewer gaps in the skyline than there used to be."

Kamen laments the fact that many of these buildings are hideous yuppie filing cabinets ("public housing for the rich"), and if you click through or just walk around you'll see he's got a point. On the other hand, these awful buildings, it would seem to follow, reduce the number of similarly cruddy townhouses in the more vibrant neighborhoods of the city, where there's presumably a social benefit to keeping rents low. So while turning downtown into a visually characterless beige-and-glass jungle might be bad for postcards, there might be some benefit to the neighborhoods that make Chicago what it is.

One of my favorite things that happened on the Web last year was the Art Institute's online publication of The Magic of America, a long manuscript on architecture, city planning, anthroposophy, and many, many other topics, by Frank Lloyd Wright's draftswoman, Marion Mahony Griffin. The elegant, noticeably Eastern style of Wright's drafts is straight from the pen of Mahony Griffin.

Now the New York Times has picked up on her story, which Sarah Downey covered for the Reader in 2005. Also worth a read: Downey's profile of Mahony Griffin's husband, Prairie School architect Walter Burley Griffith, and his plan for Canberra, and her piece on the Wynant House in Gary, Indiana, a rare example of Wright's mass-production houses. Lynn Becker has also written about Marion Mahony Griffin.

* The Lyric Opera's sexed-up, critically acclaimed Julius Caesar (a Bollywood-style dance number?) features the first female conductor in the company's history, French harpsicordist Emmanuelle Haim.  My date to see it isn't for a couple weeks, but from the opening-night WFMT broadcast on Friday, it sounds like a hit.

* Blair Kamin had a great piece this weekend on the architectural renaissance along the Edens. "Why three towers? Because . . . you can start getting income from the first tower while you're still building the other two."

* Crain's checks in on the business of booze tasting in Chicago.

* The secret of the MRSA superbug's success? Weird bacterial sex. Science writer Maryn McKenna has a blog about MRSA.

* Microsoft is building a $500 million data center the size of eight football fields in Northlake. As the Web gets bigger and milliseconds of loading time become a competitive advantage (think of how fast Google searches load), the speed of light is actually a constraint, so the physical location of these data centers becomes increasingly important.

* In related news, if some guy tries to sell you a Dell server out of a van, don't buy it.

Just saw today that one of my favorite Reader Flickr contributors, Metroblossom (aka David Schalliol), was featured on one of my favorite blogs, thingsmagazine.net, for his isolated building studies.

Update: Schalliol has an opening on Friday at Chicago City Arts Gallery in the Fine Arts Building, and from the looks of it other Reader Flickr contributors will be there.

Here are some of his shots from the Flickr pool:

 

No one ever mentions Millennium Monument, the neoclassical peristyle that is both a literal throwback (an almost identical one was at the same location for about half the 20th century, part of Burnham's grand plan) and an aesthetic one in the midst of a giant postmodern architectural theme park.

That's because it's boring and ugly. But it's boring and ugly in a very interesting way, my favorite aesthetic object lesson in the city.

Neoclassical architecture is the official architecture of overarching civic power and old-school fuck-you money.* Some of it's actually good (the delicate Wrigley building), some of it's endearingly narcissistic (the Tribune Tower), some of it's kind of dull, like the Millennium Monument. But it all says one thing: We built this city on rock and reputation. Rarely is it quite so stubbornly obvious as the Millennium Monument, which is why I begrudgingly love it.

*Alternately, baby-boomer fuck-you money is more van der Rohevian. 

Chicago has a fun feature called Ten Modern Masterpieces, their picks for the best new buildings in the city. Some of the choices are pretty obvious--the Pritzker Pavilion, Helmut Jahn's State Street Village dorms, the terribly named Contemporaine. There are some surprising omissions, such as Aqua, perhaps because it's not built yet, and Rem Koolhas's fun, controversial IIT student center, an omission Reader architecture contributor Lynn Becker doesn't appreciate. The biggest surprise was a Glencoe house I'd never heard of, the Shingle House; I'd like to see more pics of it before passing judgment, but it's nice to see a residence, even if it's a pie-in-the-sky one, among the usual public buildings.

My personal favorite on the list is the new Spertus expansion, a dynamic, crystalline addition to Michigan Avenue that's kind of my idea of what a utopian city's buildings would look like. Overall it's a fine list, as Becker notes, though I'd hasten to add Cesar Pelli's Ratner Center, the finest place to play hoops in Chicago, save for maybe the lakeside courts off 47th.

Also noteworthy: a piece on the construction of skyscrapers by Chicago treasure Blair Kamin. 

 "You can neither lie to a neighborhood park, nor reason with it," Jane Jacobs wrote in 1961 in The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Unlike lots of planners then and now, she never pushed open space as an antidote to city crime and dullness, asking "More Open Space for what? For muggings? For bleak vacuums between buildings?" 

To her mind great parks--my hometown's Rittenhouse Square and the Prado in Boston's North End get props--are rare birds among sprawling failures, boring at best like Grant Park, or dangerous like Philly's awful Fairmount Park.

I think she would have liked AMA Plaza, a pretty little spot under the American Medical Association building, across from the Reader's offices on Illinois. Ringed by businesses that get too much of my money, it's surprisingly charming for a corporate-owned park, and never empty. It's not full of trash or drunk guys either, and it fulfills Jacobs's good-parks criteria: sunny and small, drawing different kinds of people, and far from other parks.

Too bad it's probably fallen prey to developer John Buck, who filed plans in March for a 40-story boutique hotel and condo tower. Buck's already littered River North with boring beige boxes . Oh well, maybe we'll be out of here before the bulldozers show up.

Jeanne Gang, whose innovative residential skyscraper, Aqua, was the subject of a cover story in the Reader, has a clever new building called Windermere West planned for Hyde Park (h/t Gapers Block). Many of the south-facing windows are tilted 71 degrees, so that when the sun is low in the winter more light gets in but the rooms are shaded when the sun is high in the summer. More light in winter and less in summer means simple energy savings. It's a bit radical for such an architecturally homogenous area--"I would go to that building only to get directions away from it," said one friend and long-time resident--but it appeals to the geek in me. Or, more accurately, to me, being a geek.

Speaking of Gang, you might enjoy this Q&A with her on Aqua.

The Pitchfork Music festival is outdoing itself this year: Sonic Youth will be playing the whole of their masterpiece, Daydream Nation. To whet your appetite, check out the video of "Teenage Riot," which doubles as a Where's Waldo of cutting-edge cultural figures. Can you find Mark E. Smith, Harvey Pekar, and Patti Smith?

If the NCAA tournament isn't exciting enough for you, you can bet on the Conrad Black trial. But last I checked you'd be the first.

Dubai sees our Calatrava spire and raises us with the silliest-named building ever, the Pentominium. To paraphrase Jon Stewart, if Saudi Arabia and Las Vegas had a baby, it would be named Dubai. I say forget the Calatrava and build Frank Lloyd Wright's mile-high "Illinois" building, because this architectural aggression cannot stand.

Meanwhile, Wicker Park's Northwest Tower, the coyote-shaped landmark that gave the long-running Around the Coyote arts festival its name and neighborhood's only skyscraper, is at risk of coming down (h/t Beachwood Reporter).

The House of Crosses, an urban folk-art treasure in West Town, may also be doomed, as I learned in the comments section in the Reader's Flickr group (where I found the photo below, by Margaret Nissen). Weird Chicago has a rundown and a podcast with the nephew of the house's creator.