Beautiful Blog

Tire skids, L.A., Leimert Park

2011-09-26T17:40:00.000-07:00

Hello

2011-09-21T10:24:00.001-07:00

hello

L.A. rainbow today, for Labor Day

2011-09-04T18:00:00.000-07:00

Exclusive tour of Mies van der Rohe Lake Shore Drive apartments in Chicago

2011-08-16T16:17:00.000-07:00

Ever want to get inside the 860-880 North Lake Shore Drive Apartments?
Here's your chance!

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Join the Mies Society for

A TOUR OF 860-880 NORTH LAKE SHORE DRIVE APARTMENTS

Tuesday, September 20, 2011

5:30 pm

Take an exclusive tour of four artistically unique homes in the 860-880 North Lake Shore Drive Apartments. These units have never been open to the public, and they are full of design inspiration. After the tour, join us for a wine reception in the apartment of Don Powell of Powell/Kleinschmidt. His apartment reminds one of the Barcelona Pavilion and is a rare treat. This will be a sell-out event and space is limited, so please make your reservations quickly.

Tickets
$250 for members
$300 for nonmembers

Proceeds go toward the restoration of Carr Memorial Chapel at Illinois
Institute of Technology.

Reservations are required by Monday, September 12, 2011.

RSVP with credit card payment to 312.567.5042 or at
www.miessociety.org/happenings.

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Rare treat is right!

Can't wait for 1100 more cars in L.A.!

2011-08-07T15:49:00.000-07:00

Love this film of this work of Chris Burden, soon to be seen where the banked turns and slots of the Richard Serras stood in BCAM at LACMA in L.A.

Click to play. Best enlarged to full screen.

Burden's installation will measure 20×30 feet and feature about 1100 matchbox cars traveling in 18 lanes at speeds up to 230 scale mph! Plus 13 toy trains and tracks, all coursing through a landscape of futuristic buildings made of wood, tile, Legos and Lincoln Logs! The sound, as you hear in the film, is as mesmerizing as a Steve Reich - or Elmer Bernstein - soundtrack. "Anxiety-provoking," says artist Chris Burden. Metropolis II, as it's called, will run and run and run at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art beginning this fall.

Here's how it was made and "what it means".

Here's how it got to LACMA (scroll down).

Shades of Fritz Lang's Metropolis

Charles and Ray Eames's films of toys

Walt Disney's Autopia at Disneyland

and of course, the best of all

childhood memories.

Mattel Hot Wheels Disneyland Walt Disney model cars road racing

Next in Chicago: sculptures "in the throes of sex"?

2011-08-01T15:16:00.000-07:00

Vanity Fair has the well over-the-top story of Prince Jefri Bolkiah, "notorious playboy brother of the Sultan of Brunei, (in) a world of orgiastic wealth: 250 companies, 2,000 cars, luxury hotels, planeloads of women and polo ponies, colossal diamonds." Well, the man's in court, and this came out:

Before the trial began, the defense had released photographs to the press of sculptures Prince Jefri had commissioned from J. Seward Johnson for $800,000, allegedly portraying the prince and his fiancée at the time, Micha Royale Raines, in the throes of sex.

The artist is the same J. Seward Johnson who designed the statue of Marilyn Monroe and her underpants, on view in Chicago.

It seems the work for Prince Jefri, designed for his 28-acre Long Island, New York estate Sunninghill, was designed to shock and appall. Marilyn too, a little bit, just maybe?

(Jefri's attorney Geoffrey Stewart says) Jefri commissioned J. Seward Johnson to make the sex statues to shock his brother. “Mohamed loved to buzz Prince Jefri’s palace in his helicopter, and Prince Jefri decided that the thing to do would be to have these life-size statues made and put them around the pool. The next time Mohamed buzzed the house, he’d be appalled and shocked.”

Johnson created four to six pieces for Prince Jefri.

Sculptor J. Seward Johnson has an extensive body of G-rated public works, controversial only for whether or not they are good art. Pioneer Court in Chicago previously displayed his tall sculpted homage to Grant Wood's painting "American Gothic," and a 20-foot tall "King Lear."

He is reported to claim he was unaware the more X-rated commission came from Prince Jefri. "The sculptures were a commission specifically featuring positions of the ancient public domain Kama Sutra," his spokesman told The Daily Beast. "Artists’ models were used and there was no reference to any collector, buyer, or other individual in the making of the pieces. The project was commissioned anonymously via a holding company and the sculptor was not told the identity of the buyer."

A little more from Vanity Fair's Prince Jefri: The Prince who Blew Through Billions:

(A 1998 lawsuit) described Jefri’s “sex parties” at home and abroad. (The manifest on his 747 usually comprised mostly young women.) An attorney called him a man of “unlimited tastes,” a “one-man walking market,” who bought practically everything he saw, including a rug woven with jewels in threads of solid gold ($7 million), 10 jewel-encrusted wristwatches that depicted on the hour a couple copulating ($8 million), and similarly erotic fountain pens ($1.3 million). In London alone, the Manoukians charged, he kept 40 prostitutes at the Dorchester hotel and spent $34 million for the former Playboy Club at 45 Park Lane—more than four times the market price, according to the brothers—so that he could house more hookers and secretly indulge his passion for gambling. (Jefri denied employing prostitutes.)

Read more here.

Kind of makes the Marilyn look not too bad? More on Chicago's Marilyn here.

Update: see comments for obligatory comparison to work of Jeff Koons.

The Seven Year Itch meets Kitsch

2011-07-18T16:14:00.000-07:00

Forever Marilyn

Chicago, Illinois 2011

Madonna of Mercy

Siena, Italy (c. 1308)
Simone Martini

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Marilyn in Chicago means curves against grid, which is always exciting!

From top: Barcelona Pavilion with Georg Kolbe's Dawn

Federal Center Chicago with Alexander Calder's Flamingo
Cell from "Mad Men" opening sequence

Forever Marilyn photo from Business Week

But not always tasteful.

The sculpture of Marilyn Monroe on Chicago's Michigan Avenue, erected by the management of the Equitable building behind it and not by the city, is only temporary, thank goodness. Based on the famous subway breeze scene in Billy Wilder's 1955 film, "The Seven Year Itch," Seward Johnson's twenty-six foot tall sculpture is due to be removed next spring. I wonder if other cities will want it?

Milton H. Greene, photographer, Marilyn Monroe, 1956

Andy Warhol understood curves against grid.

In greater Toronto, Ma Yansong and MAD Studio's new Absolute World South tower, like Jeanne Gang's Aqua Tower in Chicago, blends the grid and curves. Ma's is known as "Marilyn Monroe." Wonder why?

Japanese architect Arata Isozaki put in the "Monroe curve" in his Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

A Marilyn reference makes more sense in Los Angeles, where she's from and worked in Hollywood. The Seven Year Itch takes place in New York. But there is a Chicago possibility. They might have sculpted her pose from Hugh Hefner's Playboy issue Number 1, from December, 1953.

This, as a 26 foot high statue, would have been less vulgar. Interesting how the layout of this cover places squares and rectangles against her curves in modernist fashion.

This reminds me of what Rem Koohaas wrote in "Miestakes," around the time he was designing the student center at the Mies-designed campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology-

In all my visits to Chicago, I learned only one new thing from the Miesians, or actually two.

One, Mies had received a letter from Hugh Hefner once, asking him to do the Playboy Headquarters–Mies had said no, for reasons no longer accessible.

Two, Mies’ model shop had a (frequently exploited) view of the photo studios of Playboy Magazine–all during the Fifties and Sixties, Mies’ architecture and the first generation of playmates had been fabricated in voyeuristic proximity.

Mining for meaning in Marilyn, aren't we all?

Richard Serra, "Marilyn Monroe - Greta Garbo," 1981, Cor-ten steel

Niki de Sainte Phalle, Jean Tinguely and Per Olof Ultvedt

"hon-en katedral," 1966

Former New York Times architecture critic, the late Herbert Muschamp called Frank Gehry's Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, "the reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe."

Howard Finster, "Marilyn Monroe"

Willem De Kooning, "Marilyn Monroe," 1954

Claes Oldenburg, "Ghost Wardrobe (for M.M.)"

Photo © Thomas Wagner, Stylepark

Click on this "Church of Marilyn Monroe" scene from Ken Russell's 1975 film "Tommy," for the full mind-blowing effect.

As awful as the iconography is in that video, at least it "uses" Marilyn to say something, about idolatry and religion gone amok. That's more message than you'll find in Chicago's Marilyn. At best it speaks of desire, like many a modern building and plaza; alas, this, in the most simplistic way.

Chicago is becoming a more feminine city, all dolled up with flowers and newer buildings that are less hard-edged; you've come a long way, baby, from your past as "hog-butcher to the world." Is this Marilyn mascot then the Colossus of Chicago, a modern dance partner, perhaps, for the Colossus of Rhodes?

And art as commerce-- is she so different from those Calvin Klein underwear ads seen in cities around the world?

To sum up, I can only extrapolate from Barbara Kruger's piece on Marilyn.

We have met the meaning of Marilyn, and it is us.

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Happy 100th Birthday John Lautner!

2011-07-15T22:01:00.000-07:00

Happy Birthday, Iconoclast! No one has designed L.A. residential architecture quite as spectacular since you've been gone (1911-1994). One of my all-time favorites, for his reverence of nature, that his spaces make me gaze at the heavens and see connections, with stars and celestial beings, he blurs land, sky and water, mixes solid and air, practices a humane modernity based on nature, finds low-cost solutions with progressive engineering, he infuses his work with optimism despite his own crankiness. John Lautner was born one hundred years ago today.

See a calendar of events to honor him here.

“

My childhood (in rural Michigan), I had a hundred miles of beaches, private beaches, you know: no people, no nothing. I mean, just go swimming anywhere you want, and no problem. The coast here to me is just ugly, you know, it's crazy. Malibu is nothing to me, it's just crazy." ... Oh it was depressing. I mean, when I first drove down Santa Monica Boulevard, it was so ugly I was physically sick for the first year I was here. Because after living in Arizona and Michigan and Wisconsin, mostly out in the country, and mostly with good architecture ... this was the ugliest thing I'd ever seen ... If you tried to figure out how to make a row of buildings ugly, you couldn't do it any better than it's been done [here]. I mean they're just ugly, naturally ugly, all the way. There isn't a single, legitimate, good-looking thing anywhere.
^{From "Responsibility, Infinity, Nature" — John Lautner interviewed by Marlene L. Laskey, Oral History Program, University of Los Angeles, California, 1986}.

Carmaggedon

If the Chicago Tribune had built Adolph Loos' design for Tribune Tower

2011-07-11T14:20:00.000-07:00

Computer generated, here.

Via John Crosse, who reminds us that Loos' design was surely tied to a Louis Sullivan Kindergarten Chat:

His design makes an obvious reference to Sullivan's chapter, "A Doric Column" which derided in great detail a design competition for a memorial for the 200th anniversary of the discovery and founding of the City of Detroit. (Note: Sullivan disparaged the Doric Column throughout the Chats). Loos must have been quite pleased with the triple entendre his entry presented and must have had great fun with it's design, obviously knowing that his hero Sullivan would see it and realize his inside joke. Sullivan ended his Doric Column chapter chastising the unnamed architect and the selection process with,

"So much for decay, so much for cynicism, for pessimism, for the downfall of the sturdy American pioneer, the hunter, the trapper, the woodsman, the riverman, the greatest in the world, the hardiest, the truest and the best - and their memory to consummate in what? A "Doric" Column! In any other land, in any other time, this would seem a fairy tale, so faithless sounds the story - so inhuman a response." (Kindergarten Chats by Louis Sullivan, Scarab Press, p. 62).

Hello Beautiful Fourth of July!

2011-07-01T19:12:00.000-07:00

Expand to full screen for best view

Video Flag Z

Nam June Paik

1986

(recently restored)
Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)

On view through July 4.

"This arrangement of eighty-four television sets in Video Flag Z

creates a vision of America from found video footage. "

More than ever, do your part to keep America great.

Happy Fourth!

Feeling light in a Lou Kahn stairwell in Richards Medical Research Laboratories at the University of Pennsylvania

2011-06-09T09:26:00.000-07:00

In a stairwell at Richards Medical Research Laboratories by Lou Kahn

at the University of Pennsylvania.

A mysterious place,

with light from the corners.

A place to be alone.

A place to rise.

I step and realize again,

Kahn does more with a stairwell,

than most do with a cathedral.

Richards / Goddard Laboratories

Louis Kahn, Richards Medical Laboratories, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia

Mies photo- caption contest

2011-06-09T01:54:00.000-07:00

Your caption here.

Be creative! Leave your caption in the comments.

Can you top these?

M. Jurick said...

Every Monday morning, I have a Bacardi hangover.

wilfried said...

Miesian power nap,
two fingers still in correct position
for the obligate cigar.

Leanne said...

Dreaming about almost nothing

LHS said...

Dreaming of almost nothing

LHS said...

"I told Edith she didn't need a closet — or a bed, or a pillow . . ."

Anonymous said...

Less is a snore.

Mies van der Rohe sleeping by antiquities photo caption contest

President Barack Obama: What architecture is all about

2011-06-02T21:46:00.000-07:00

President Barack Obama at tonight's Pritzker Architecture Prize ceremony in Washington D.C. at the Mellon Auditorium.

He started by saying, "My interest in architecture goes way back.

There was a time when I thought I could be an architect."

Before the award was presented to the 2011 laureate,

the Portuguese architect Eduardo Souto de Moura,

Mr. Obama said a few words about architecture

and in particular about Chicago architecture.

Lines in the Sand

2011-05-23T19:27:00.000-07:00

click images to enlarge

A foggy Midwestern beach hopes for summer

2011-05-22T20:59:00.000-07:00

A foggy Midwestern beach on lake Michigan hopes for summer

Moonrise over Lake Michigan, seen from the back of a Chevy

2011-05-22T09:55:00.000-07:00

The Rapture, seen from the back of my Chevy

2011-05-21T10:00:00.000-07:00

Rapture

Top Ten Reasons to Save Prentice Hospital !

2011-05-16T01:58:00.000-07:00

Some say tear it down because it's fugly.
To quote Nelson Algren:

"You may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real."
Nelson Algren on Chicago in Chicago: City on the Make (1951)

Sometimes I think the "real" scares people. Prentice is a beast. It is a maw. It pulls at you, yanks at you, makes you feel you're giving birth to something. Prentice Women's Hospital and Maternity Center (1974) will always be a massive mystery, like pregnancy itself. Bulging with mystery, containing a womb-like void inside, Northwestern University wants to tear it down to make more "efficient" use of space. But Bertrand Goldberg's Prentice Hospital is infinitely more interesting than anything they might build in its place; like a great cathedral it manifests a miracle.

Goldberg pairs the windows and the bulges of concrete, like Michelangelo paired his columns. Side-by-side, they radiate humanism.

Each window of Prentice represents a new citizen; first an individual, conceived by the pairing of two humans in love. Each individual is lined up with others to form a column of windows, which Goldberg pairs with another column; we are shown individuals, couples and groups, standing in circles, symbolic of faith.

Egg-shaped are the windows of Prentice -- each an orifice, piercing the shaft of hard concrete. The combination says fertility, an architectural trope at least as old as Roman egg and dart, also used with columns.

With Goldberg's innovative structural solution, the stacks of windows make abstract, very modern columns. They run up the side of the building, between heaven and earth, depicting what Elizabethan England called the "Great Chain of Being," stretching between heaven and earth. At the time, this belief system contradicted hierarchies of church and state. For example, in the cathedrals, some angels are even higher beings and more beautiful than others. But here at Prentice, with each window an individual, and every window the same, Bertrand Goldberg's inherent democratic and socially progressive impulses become clear. His material: common concrete -- not marble or anything elite.

It's not the concrete that's important; Goldberg hardly prioritizes it. He's expressing the space inside and forming it to best serve the purpose of bringing children into the world and making the mothers and hospital workers comfortable. Radiating the rooms from the core, which holds the nursing station, keeps every patient in direct and easy visual contact.

From the outside the windows rain down to earth as in paintings of Danae's moment of conception.

Tizian (Tiziano Vercellio) - Danae

Goldberg's corpus mysticum grows out of a Miesian right-angled base, housing the Stone Institute of Psychiatry. Women on top! The segment for women takes wing above the more square, solid, providing/supporting base, heaving, rising and lowering. Prentice Women's Hospital and the Stone Institute of Psychiatry- curves and squares, female and male, spirit and weight, mind and body.

In ancient Chinese cosmogeny, the earth is square and heaven is round. This was known as "Tian Yuan Di Fang 天圆地方;" it influenced many aspects of Chinese culture and is often seen in architecture, as at the 15th c. C.E. Temple of Heaven in Beijing.

These ideas traveled to Japan, see, for example, the great pagoda at Nara. From Japan, Frank Lloyd Wright picked them up; think of his planters and some of his lamps and chairs. For Wright, "the square was significant of integrity; the circle -- infinity." (FLW - A Testament, 1957.) Wright adds a cross to relate it to the "Gothic Master Diagram"- the circle of orientation which helped ancient architects orient a building plan to the sun - and used it for his logo.

The ancient Greeks, medieval thinkers, Leonardo da Vinci in his Universal Man, Louis Sullivan at the bank in Grinnell, Iowa, all attempt to square the circle, to marry the physical and the metaphysical.

Even Adolph Loos in his entry for the famous 1922 Chicago Tribune Tower competition picks up the theme.

In Loos's 1908 essay Ornament and Crime, he writes, "The evolution of culture marches with the elimination of ornament from useful objects." For Loos, ornament was "immoral" and "degenerate" in a modern society. The essay was influential in Bauhaus circles and helped define the ideology of Modernism.

Unlike Loos's Tribune Tower, Prentice was built. Keep it! It manifests the heroic beginnings of modern life and helps us understand the era. While a somewhat late work (1974), Prentice holds the ideas of Bertrand Goldberg who was present and a participant in Modernism's early days. He studied at the Bauhaus in Germany in 1932 and then briefly worked in Germany in the then small office of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

Prentice's curves, which Goldberg considered humanist, enjoys a visual relationship with Chicago's Lake Point Tower (completed in 1968, based on a 1922 design by Mies for a glass-curtained skyscraper in Berlin.)

Each helps us appreciate the other, and understand Chicago's big, bold, innovative, and visionary architectural thinking in the modern era.

A humanist and social progressive, Goldberg does not crown Prentice with a kingly roof, erects no dome to symbolize heaven, and lights no lantern on top to beam light. The energy emanates from within the body of the building. He wanted no head (king or Christ) for this corpus mysticum. Instead, we get honest, democratic American architecture. As American Midwest as the grain silos Le Corbusier wanted to see on his trips to America.

Le Corbusier (1923)

The female portion of Prentice is a torso of a building: no feet, no head, no arms. We are accustomed to these fragments in sculpture, but not in architecture.

In art, the face and hands are the most expressive, thus Prentice is hard to read. But if in architectural history the head = Lord or king, feet = peasants, and hands = soldiers, then Prentice is wonderfully absent them. Think of it as a great Roman torso of a woman. Appreciate what is there; don't pine for what isn't.

Prentice is -- with the Pantheon (enter through columns, into a "womb," with cosmic navel), the Hagia Sophia, various Gothic cathedrals, and works by Louis Sullivan -- one of the greatest feminist works of architecture history, or works that embody female nature. Even as Chicago's built environment is becoming more feminine (planting flowers in median strips, transforming the urban airport Meigs Field into a nature park, etc.), the powers-that-be wish to tear it down for another businessman's box. This very mature work, by an architect who knew his history and turned it into a very original, thrilling, modern work.

While modern, Prentice builds on the past. We know of Gothic quatrefoil

and the plan of Prentice:

The plan, and the windows show us cell division, mitosis.

Here, one becomes two, becomes four; in both plan and with the windows.

Photo via SavePrentice.org

Ours is a scientific age. So much recent architecture is based on scientific revelations in DNA, biomimicry, evolution, metabolism, etc. Prentice is an important, rather early modern example of that ongoing source of inspiration.

As Vince Michael writes in Time Tells, "The building’s seamless integration of art and science is manifest in concrete cantilevers that pushed the lobes 45 feet beyond their base, a feat that took one of the FIRST applications of computers to aid in an architectural design. And it’s gorgeous." And Vince notes that the next great building in Chicago, owes a lot to Prentice.

Back to the quatrefoil -- the Gothic period used it, the Renaissance period used it; in Chicago, before Goldberg, Louis Sullivan used it. You'd be hard pressed to name an architect more interested in fertility, conception, growth from a seed, than Louis Sullivan.

In Sullivan's work, as above at the entrance to Carson's- a feminist, rounded volume like Prentice-

designed to appeal to the new "lady-shoppers," the organic and the man made come together to make powerful architecture. At Prentice, as in Sullivan, medieval art and even Mies's Farnsworth House, we feel the tension between form and chaos.

Prentice Women's Hospital and Maternity Center is feminist too, the female part of the building stands atop the male portion- the square base. This work is about what happens when male and female come together; about conception, pregnancy, birth, growth, and the goal of raising children to be good citizens. The "female" portion looks exalted, almost heaving, rising and lowering.

PRENTICE WOMEN’S HOSPITAL. Circa 1975.
Courtesy Hedrich-Blessing Collection/Chicago History Museum.

After birth, we'll spend our lives seeking to be reunited with our other half. Think of Prentice as an architectural equivalent of Orson Welles' Citizen Kane seeking to be reunited with "Rosebud."

The valentine-shaped base of the concrete, and its movement, remind me of the "angel wings" Matisse painted on another great portrait of a strong woman.

Henri Matisse Portrait of Mlle Yvonne Landsberg

1914. Eau- forte. Philadelphia Museum of Art

À la our great Louis Sullivan, the shape of the building begins with the most delicate of flora.

The four-leaf clover; you'd think that alone would make (former) Mayor Daley, an Irishman, partial to saving it. By the time it reaches the sky, Prentice has turned into a mighty tree, encouraging all born there and all who pass to grow up strong. And as these tree-like trunks lean on each other for support, so should we. There too, Prentice recalls those medieval "trees," holding up Gothic cathedrals.

And there you see the statue called the "Virgin of Paris" in Notre Dame, holding the baby Jesus.

In Chicago, Ceres is a protectress. She sits atop the Board of Trade, long the tallest building in our town. Here, grain is our fecundity. Goldberg's masterpiece -- Marina City -- is commonly called "the corncobs." For years, the Board of Trade was Chicago's tallest building, and from above it, Ceres looked out for our well-being, promising good crops and prosperity, reminding us both of who we are, and of forces greater than we. Like Prentice, she is faceless, we are plain Midwesterners, plain is our way in this town, and yet, we understand what Ceres says.

The landscape is America's inherent bible, Louis Sullivan and others taught us that. Think of Grant Wood's "pregnant" mounds.

We are the inheritors of one of the greatest cities of the pre-Columbian world, Cahokia, not far from Chicago.

And we still build our fertile mounds around here, in the landscape, as at Millennium Park.

Pritzker Bandshell and trellis, Frank Gehry, architect

Prentice is Chicago's "Venus" or "Woman of Willendorf" (24,000 - 22,000 B.C.E.) - both faceless fertility symbols. Is she "beautiful"?

I don't know. Important? Yes. Like Prentice, her creator was imbued with faith in fertility, she holds the stories of those she served, and the history of the place she was made for, and even if not "beautiful," she will impart her unique wisdom if you listen. Likewise, let us live with Bertrand Goldberg's "Venus of Chicago."

From a time and a place that built a masculine image of itself, Prentice stands out. "You may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real." That's what Algren meant. Prentice is great architecture, with cathedral-like power, might and majesty.

The womb-like nature of the spaces and voids are nothing short of an architectural version of Leonardo's drawing.

The windows are navels in a bulge, connecting those inside to the city, the body politic.

This building embodies Omphaloskepsis. When you turn the corner and see it, the egotism and desire-mongering of the city drop down to the ground. Omphalos = navel. Skepsis = the act of looking. (The windows of Prentice manifest both.) Omphaloskepsis "refers to excessive introspection, self-absorption, or concentration on a single issue." That's Prentice. Is that bad? No. We need that.Omphalism can be spiritual. Omphaloskepsis can be an aid to meditation.

When I see Prentice, in its raw purity, I think of higher things. Yes, it is terrifying, like a locked cathedral at night, when we need it most.

Chicago, you need Prentice now. Just as the headquarters of local companies are leaving and being bought by outsiders, so the city's built form is losing its "there-ness." Could Chicago slide into nothingness, homogenized, "no place-ness"? We need the monuments that remind us who we are. (I was born a few blocks from Prentice. Every day on the way to work, I walked past the hospital. Until one fine day scaffolding went up, and then arrived the demolition crews. Such an odd feeling it was to pass my birthplace as they razed it. A part of the story of my life went with it.)

From Wikipedia: "The four-leaf clover is an uncommon variation of the common, three-leaved clover. According to tradition, such leaves bring good luck to their finders, especially if found accidentally. According to legend, each leaf represents something: the first is for faith, the second is for hope, the third is for love, and the fourth is for luck.

I say, keep Prentice. Couldn't Chicago use some faith, hope, love and luck?

Shakespeare begins Coriolanus, set in Ancient Rome,with the fable of the belly. The belly, like Prentice, seems useless to many. It is bloated, idle and consumes resources. The belly comes even to symbolize what we think we don't need. In the fable, all the other parts of the body (like the new Northwestern Hospital buildings around Prentice) perform functions. So finally, those parts rebel. They try to stop the belly from getting any nourishment. In the end, of course, each part of the body realizes that it needs the belly, that they're all connected, and in fact, the belly nourishes them. Will we be as wise as Shakespeare would teach us to be, before it's too late?

Clearly, Prentice is more interesting and adds more to city life and the body politic than anything that will be built in its place.

The current plan is to demolish it as soon as September. As Maxwell Anderson wrote,

Oh, it's a long, long while from May to December

But the days grow short when you reach September

When the autumn weather turns the leaves to flame

One hasn't got time for the waiting game

Oh, the days dwindle down to a precious few

September, November

And these few precious days I'll spend with you

These precious days I'll spend with you

+++++++++

Make your voice heard. First, sign this petition to Save Prentice!

Then join Save Prentice on Facebook.

Then write 42nd Ward Alderman Brendan Reilly.

Landmarks Illinois shows us how to reuse the blessed thing.

Preservation Chicago writes, "At just 35 years old, Prentice has yet to be properly evaluated within Chicago's larger historical and architectural context," and they've prepared this fine video, in which experts, including Bertrand Goldberg's son Geoffrey explain how the building is unique in the world, for not just the form, but for how it was made. He also speaks of the innovations in patient-nurse-family care that this new kind of hospital and floor plan encouraged.

And don't miss the Art Institute of Chicago's major exhibition celebrating the work of Bertrand Goldberg, including Prentice Women's Hospital and Maternity Center. “Bertrand Goldberg: Architecture of Invention,” from September 10 through Jan. 8, 2012. Really.

Architecture and Design Film Festival - Come see us at the movies!

2011-04-29T18:37:00.000-07:00

Come see us. Say hello, at the

Chicago

May 5–9, 2011

The first annual Architecture & Design Film Festival, Chicago
Five days celebrating the creative spirit of architecture and design through the art of film!

Showcasing 39 films from 11 countries, dozens of Q&A's,
five panel discussions, two book signings,
and one reading of a play about
Philip Johnson and Mies van der Rohe and Edith Farnsworth.

Tuesday, May 3
Screening of Sarah Morris film "Points on a Line"
Wright Gallery, 1440 W. Hubbard
Reservations required.

The following films and events in the festival will be at the Gene Siskel Film Center or the SCREEN@the Wit Hotel

Thursday, May 5
Opening night film: "How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr. Foster?"

Friday, May 6
3–10:30 Films

5:30–6:30 Panel discussion
"Documenting Architecture" with Bjarke Ingels, Zoe Ryan, Iker Gil, and Rick Valicenti

8:30–9 Book signing with Bjarke Ingels, Yes is More

Saturday, May 7
1–10:30 Films

1–3 Reading of "The Glass House," a play by June Finfer
Seating is limited, and tickets may be reserved here.

3:30–4:30 Panel discussion
"Design/Build/Learn" with Kyle Bergman, Dave Sellers, Frank Flury, and Hank Jones

5:30–6:30 Panel discussion
"Telling Stories" with Geoffrey Baer, Edward Lifson, and Ultan Guilfoyle

Sunday, May 8
1–10:15 Films

3:30–4:30 Panel discussion
"Objects of Desire" with Zurich Esposito, Richard Wright, Obi Nwazota and Tim Parsons

5:00–6:00 Panel discussion
"Filming Architecture" with Edward Lifson, Lee Bey, Red Mike and Jonathan Rosenbaum

6:30–7: Book signing with Jeanne Gang, Reveal

Monday, May 9
6–9:45 Films

For more information regarding locations, scheduling, films, and speakers, visit here.

.

What kind of city, what kind of people, would tear this down?

2011-04-23T13:19:00.000-07:00

Seems to me if you could find someone - even today - to design a building, a place, a monument to maternity, so forward-thinking, so interesting, profoundly smart, honest, daring, ambitious and enlivening, that you'd be grateful. If you could find the money to build it without watering it down, straightening out the curves, oversimplifying it in every way, you'd be proud.

Well, this building already exists in Chicago, a city lucky to have its legacy, but, as often, destroying greatness for mediocrity. Shame on Northwestern University for planning to tear it down. The image above is from a terrific reuse plan by Landmarks Illinois. With will, creativity and foresight, Prentice Women's Hospital could rather easily continue to contribute to making Chicago a place you'd want to be. Why make your city a less interesting place, less original, with less native character?

Prentice is by the great Bertrand Goldberg, best-known for Marina City, and always ahead of the curve.

Wilco Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

And kudos to Landmarks Illinois for using research and beautiful imagery to "sell" their idea. That's what preservationists, planners and visionaries should always do. That's what Daniel Burnham and Edward H. Bennett did; they showed the public seductive images by Jules Guerin and other artists to "sell" their 1909 Plan of Chicago.

Mies's IIT campus before and after demolition of a corner

2011-04-12T08:03:00.000-07:00

By tearing down a piece of the campus designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe,
Chicago just got less interesting.

"I firmly believe a campus must have unity."
-Mies van der Rohe

There is no joy in Bronzeville. Mighty Metra has struck out.

Click images to enlarge. Much more information on the IIT case here.

Which do you like better?

---

And now Chicago is fixing to do something equal wrong.

Mies IIT Chicago Test Cell Gunnery

Chicago Debates! - Come see us Tuesday Night --------- Chicago Public Transit: On Track or Derailed?

2011-04-11T08:24:00.000-07:00

Tuesday evening - come out and see us. I'll moderate a stellar line-up of debaters.

We'll talk about what Chicago needs to take its public transit from good to great. And we want to hear your ideas. Sponsored by the Chicago Architecture Foundation. The first Chicago Debates-Malls was a grand success and very valuable. Come out for this one, if you ride the rails, take the bus, or think Chicago deserves a better system. Click the image, or here, for more information. I hope to see you there, come say hello.

Which came first?

2011-03-31T20:05:00.000-07:00

Adolph Gottlieb Icon - 1964 - oil on canvas , 142 x 98 1/2 inches, copyright Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation /
Licensed by VAGA, NY NY

Supermoon over the Parthenon 3/19/2011 - Image Credit & Copyright- Anthony Ayiomamitis (TWAN)

The Mies birthday cake

2011-03-30T01:02:00.000-07:00

from this year's Mies birthday party in Crown Hall

sponsored by the Mies van der Rohe Society.

(Reminds me of this Mies cake.)

Lego Farnsworth House!

2011-03-30T00:42:00.000-07:00

The 10th installment in the LEGO Architecture Series.

The model is almost a foot in length and contains 546 pieces. It comes with a booklet on Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House in Plano, Illinois, including drawings provided by the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

Primavera becomes plastic

So, is it more than just white tiles? Yes, it comes with LEGO Mies furniture!

No LEGO water pump? It needs LEGO landscape.

Remember when the real Farnworth House was for sale?

Remember this "fake" LEGO set of the Farnsworth House?

A Word from the LEGO Artist - Chicago architect Adam Reed Tucker

Farnsworth House celebrates our 10th model in the LEGO Architecture series. As a minimalist “Steel & Glass” modernist symbol of the 1950s, it delicately balances clean lines, volume of space, minimal structure, and expansive glazing, creating an inviting relationship between the natural and built environments.

In order to effectively replicate the balance between the refined white structural elements and expansive clear glazing, I started with the smallest cross section I could make for the vertical exterior columns. After several attempts, the most promising turned out to be using basic 1x1 bricks. Everything else essentially fell into place: the inviting steps, the floating floor and roof decks, the understated furnishings and cleverly designed built-ins. It’s fitting that recreating a minimalist symbol of modern architecture was done so with the simplest of LEGO bricks, the humble 1x1.

This is LEGO #21009. 546 pieces. Released April 2011. For ages 12 and up.
The LEGO Farnsworth House is available to purchase now for $59.99.

Enjoy!

--
Second photo by nightfury21@flickr
.Copenhagen

Eduardo Souto de Moura receives the 2011 Pritzker Architecture Prize

2011-03-29T00:02:00.000-07:00

Here's looking at you. My story on Eduardo Souto de Moura on NPR.

Mies and Jackie O

2011-03-25T02:07:00.000-07:00

In honor of Mies van der Rohe's 125th birthday, a rarely published photograph:

Jackie Kennedy Chatting with Mies Van Der Rohe

Original caption: Mrs. John F. Kennedy, chats with Mies Van Der Rohe, internationally known architect on April 12, 1964. Architects, designers, and artists assembled here (Hyannis Port, Massachusetts) to discuss type and design of the $10 million memorial to be erected on the Harvard University campus at Cambridge, Massachusetts. ©Bettmann/CORBIS

The John Fitzgerald Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum of course, went to a young I.M. Pei. After many iterations, site changes and even money issues, it was built (with many compromises), away from Harvard, on Columbia Point in Dochester.

From the Library's website: Jacqueline Kennedy played a major role in the selection of I.M. Pei to be the architect of the Kennedy Library. At an early meeting in 1964, Mr. Pei explained to Mrs. Kennedy, somewhat apologetically, that as a relatively young architect he had not worked on monumental projects. Though relatively unknown and obscure at the time, Mrs. Kennedy nevertheless selected Pei from a list of candidates that included of some America’s best-known architects. He seemed to her so filled with promise and he had the imagination and temperament to create a structure that would reinforce her vision of the goals of the library.

And in Chicago, a Mies birthday party you can attend in Crown Hall!
I'm told that someone special to Mies will make the toast.

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Mies's 125th Birthday Par-tay in Crown Hall! ~~~~~~~~~ Monday, March 28, 2011, 6-8 pm

2011-03-21T17:35:00.000-07:00

The Mies van der Rohe Society
invites you to

Celebrate Mies’ 125th Birthday

In celebration of Mies van der Rohe’s 125th birthday, we’re planning on good company, delicious cocktails, student exhibits and a brief presentation on collecting the master’s work by Wright auction’s Michael Jefferson. We hope you can join us!

Tickets are $50 per person. In honor of this special occassion, we are also offering a $125 ticket, which includes a one-year membership to the Mies Society. Tickets are can be bought online or by phone (312-567-7146) through March 18th. To send Mies a birthday gift, kindly make a donation to support the preservation of his buildings.

For more information about this event, call 312-567-7146.

Purchase Tickets Online

The Most Interesting Archi-Man in the World

2011-03-15T03:37:00.000-07:00

(With thanks to LACMA and apologies to Dos Equis.)

He likes his "sustainable" architecture
with a healthy dose of hedonism.

Other world leaders might have to apologize,
but he will stop climate change.

He can pass through an entire building he designed and see everything,
in two minutes.

He improves the aphorisms of giants who came before him.
And can say more words in one talk, than they said in a lifetime.

When he appears in public, the next generation lines up to show him his own book.

At age 36, he has known for years
what it took other architects lifetimes to understand.

He's sure juries of important architecture competitions rewrite rules
so he wins.

He doesn't design buildings,
he designs forces of nature, like mountains

and pyramids.

His work is so cool, it blows smoke rings.

He spent three years with Rem Koolhaas, but he remained a charmer.
Even when he's silent, people listen.

He is the most interesting Archi-Man in the world.

"I don't always drink beer, but when I do,

I prefer Carlsberg."

He's Bjarke Ingels.

Stay thirsty, my friends.

To see Archi-Man in action, click here.

Chicago gala - "Marshall's wall" - East Lake Shore Drive - turns 100

2011-02-26T18:10:00.000-08:00

March 4, 2011
GRAND GALA NIGHT
AT THE DRAKE HOTEL
Make reservations online now
Also make reservations by calling
312-932-4309
or e-mail: marshallgala@yahoo.com

More information at The Benjamin Marshall Society.

100 years ago, in 1911, the flamboyant architect and developer Benjamin H. Marshall, began turning what was then landfill into what is now one of Chicago's toniest addresses and defining postcard scene of the city: East Lake Shore Drive. Marshall's firm, through the jazz age and slightly beyond, designed some of the most perfect, graceful and satisfying melanges of older styles ever built in the Chicago area.

Marshall was another one of those who as a young man had been impressed by Chicago's World Columbian Exposition of 1893. He decided to become an architect. Mostly with a partner, Charles Fox, he designed the Drake, Blackstone, and Edgewater Beach Hotels, the ill-fated Iroquois Theater, the Blackstone Theater, the Sheridan Trust and Savings Bank (now Bridgeview) in Uptown, and the South Shore Country Club - now South Shore Cultural Center - where Barack and Michelle Obama held their wedding reception. The firm designed five of the buildings on East Lake Shore Drive. While not innovative in terms of defining modernism, Marshall and Fox promoted civilized living. Look in the top image of East Lake Shore Drive and see how it is even more lovely with a lawn and trees in front of it than it is today separated from the beach with that gash of a very wide and speedy concrete highway.

Marshall and Fox worked in urban and suburban settings. Marshall's own home was a 32 room "Shangri-La" in Wilmette, near where Plaza del Lago stands today. The firm designed several mansions on the North Shore, including one in which I was lucky enough to spend time when very young. There I absorbed some of my earliest experiences of how architecture works, of how divine proportions can brighten your life, quality craftsmanship and solid construction can help form a complete person, and touching and looking at fine materials can enrich one's thinking. If you let it.

where Oprah lived briefly, and advice columnist columnist Ann Landers lived for many years.

When cherry trees blossom

2011-02-21T01:31:00.000-08:00

After a rain in L.A.

you see the world afresh

After two days of heavy rain

I went out today

and stopped still when I saw

snow-covered mountains like diamonds in the distance

I thought of Mt. Fuji

and how good it is to live beneath sacred mountains

I went in to the park and saw

a Japanese-American girl in a kimono, wooden shoes and all

And when I noticed

(click any image to enlarge)

cherry blossoms

I understood

I remembered my time in Kyoto

Where a man sees his shadow

and other sights impossible to categorize

Today in L.A.

on a fine day

Asian-American kids

dress up

and photograph each other

when cherry trees blossom

Vivian Maier's mysterious mid-century Midwestern misfits, masters and more

2011-02-19T19:11:00.000-08:00

A very moving and exciting find is the street photography of Vivian Maier. From the 1950's to 1990's, Chicago-based Maier traveled the world. See as many of her photographs as you can. This one caught my eye.

The second image is Boulder. Frank Lloyd Wright put this work by Richard Bock by the entrance to his studio in Oak Park, Illinois. It shows the theme of this post - the soul's eternal struggle to break free of its bonds and to express the self.

My friend, the critic and educator James Yood, notes that Chicago art often portrays the distressed body. Think Chicago-born Leon Golub, e.g.,

Interrogation III - (detail)

The Greeks began to show the life of the mind in their sculpture; much later, Rodin gave us this weighted-down

Crouching Figure

And in popular 20th century culture

Harry Houdini

breaks free of his chains.

. Wright's Boulder, of course, owes much to Michelangelo's

Prisoner

... which we used to call "slave."

Which takes us back to where we started, to the Vivian Maier photograph at top. She shows us a man, perhaps born free, but in chains. Fallen man, with unwashed clothes and inward-turned pose, she has us think he doesn't believe that another human being in the world could care for him. He makes a cube, like the pair in Brancusi's "The Kiss," but he hugs no one and no one hugs him. Instead, he, maybe instinctively, takes the fetal position, with some memory of a time when someone must have cared for him. Now, only a thin, rumpled coat protects him from the buffeting and the elements of the world. His shoes are past their half-life; now perhaps best-suited to walking downhill. The man hides his face, with a hat that in better times would be his crown, and now can act as a shield for shame.

The material world in Maier's photo puts him at around 1963, the year of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech on the condition of bondage and the longing to be free. The speech, given at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, is scriptural and sculptural.

With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope...

   Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia.
   Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee.
   Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi.
   From every mountainside, let freedom ring.

And when this happens, when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every

village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that

day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants
and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual:

Free at last! Free at last!

Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!

---

Another photograph by Vivian Maier.

The elder's identity is hardly seen. The young one reaches up towards a circle-like perfection. A circle figures in many of Maier's works.

It's also interesting as we watch current events unfold in the Middle East, with people there demanding dignity and freedom, to note that Maier had traveled to Egypt and around the region.

See a second, also poignant, collection of Vivian Maier's photography here.

She lived the rich, if eccentric, life of a woman refusing to be shackled, finding her self, and expressing it.

Vivian Maier
(1926-2009)

Practical and philosophical: Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley

2011-02-15T12:05:00.000-08:00

Mayor Daley, announcing today the good news that Target plans to open a store in Louis Sullivan's vacant department store on State Street in downtown Chicago:

"State Street’s not just State Street. It’s Michigan Avenue, it’s Wabash, it’s Dearborn, it’s Wacker, it’s Clark, it’s Roosevelt Road. It’s all of it. It’s not — it has to be more than just one street, and that’s what it is. I mean, everything’s connected."

Designer Charles Eames:

"Eventually, everything connects."

Louis Sullivan medallion

from the store

The more things vanish...

2011-02-03T12:13:00.000-08:00

Contemporary - Computer rendering

Resort Alila Villas Uluwatu, Bali, Indonesia by WOHA

Modern (1939) - Photomontage

Resor House (unbuilt), Wyoming, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

Renaissance - Painting

Ideal city

Italian Renaissance vanishing perspective

Hollywood, Jack Black, and the Italian Renaissance

2011-01-28T07:47:00.000-08:00

I used to live in Italy and I'd walk around and see art like this:

Now I live in the U.S. and I drive around and I see art like this:

Renaissance Italy

Hollywood taps into hard-wired high culture.

Bottom: Renaissance Ideal City. I suppose neither US cities nor Italian cities look quite like that today. Or ever did.

Jack Black in Gulliver's Travels - 2010 Piero della Francesca - The Ideal City

Andrea Mantegna The Lamentation over the Dead Christ 1480 Pinacoteca di Brera of Milan, Italy.vanishing perspective

Wanna buy the Farnsworth House or a Villa Savoye?

2011-01-27T16:38:00.000-08:00

Looks like a fine model, by a professional architectural model maker in Verona, Italy. Says he's worked for Aldo Rossi, Mario Botta and others. Here the scale is 1:100. Steel and glass become forex and plexiglass! This shows though, how the Farnsworth House is not merely an object, but needs the land, trees and sky. I'd that here it looks like a set for Waiting for Godot but even that requires a tree, per the author's wishes.

If you prefer Le Corbusier and the Villa Savoye and 1:200 scale.

To me the Farnsworth model is more intriguing. Because there is less there, and it's more pure. Your thoughts?
.

iLifson on iPad on Heatherwick's Shanghai Seed Cathedral

2011-01-24T11:00:00.000-08:00

If you have an iPad, go to the gorgeous Edition29 Architecture issue, to see and hear me on Thomas Heatherwick's extraordinary "Seed Cathedral" - the U.K. pavilion at last summer's Shanghai World Expo.

Extraordinary it was. On Edition29 I try to say why. Available only on iPad.
Let us know how you like it.
.

The spin on Louis Sullivan

2011-01-13T23:20:00.000-08:00

At the show of the year, "Louis Sullivan's Idea", at the Chicago Cultural Center you see

Sullivan ornament from the ceiling of the Auditorium Hotel barber shop, Chicago 1886 - 1890.

Sullivan's swirling, rotating, counter-clockwise and centrifugal forces danced across the ceiling, repeated at intervals. He builds in you the tension we "naturally" feel between the organic and the geometric; as in the tension between straight line and curve, male and female, city and nature, indoor and outdoor, private and public, one and many, Federal and Antifederal.

A century before Sullivan's Auditorium, mostly on the east coast, Americans debated between the Federalists and the Antifederalists. Alexander Hamilton advocating order over anarchy; Thomas Jefferson advocating freedom over tyranny. Here in the first truly American city - Chicago - Louis Sullivan balances the debate.

Sullivan's desires and prescription for how to live are shown in this geometric framing with the organic at the prime place of importance- the center. The organic even grown out over the geometric. As the fine exhibition wall text says, "encountering a potentially obstructive architectural molding as it nears the outer edge, the leaves refuse to be stopped." Their life force is great, unstoppable, and they reach with determination.

Sullivan's protege´ Frank Lloyd Wright will develop this, based on his encounters with Sullivan and other great art from various places and periods. In his plans for modern houses, Wright radiates the wings outward from the center - often the hearth - as at Wright's Wingspread (1938) - the Herbert F. Johnson house - just north of Racine, Wisconsin.

Wright's windows frame nature, as Sullivan does in the ornament above. The space in most of his rooms radiates out to continue out over the open land.

And they have continuing influence. When I saw the Sullivan ornament I remembered this piece by American Minimalist sculptor Tony Smith, recently posted on Eric O'Malley's always inspiring PrairieMod.com.

Image via www.ryman.org

Is there a connection? Eric points out that Tony Smith studied under Frank Lloyd Wright. Smith moved to Chicago in 1937 to attend the New Bauhaus under Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. Not finding what he wanted there, he took a job as an office clerk for Frank Lloyd Wright. Not bad to have such choices. Then for seven months in 1939-40 Tony Smith apprenticed at Taliesin.

Today's urbanists would do well to keep Sullivan's ornament in mind. After decades of insensitive building, American cities, like cities in Asia and elsewhere, wish to re-harmonize with nature.

Mies movies we might miss - "Mies van der Rohe's masterpiece is a juicy tale of sex and real estate"

2011-01-12T23:00:00.000-08:00

Mies van der Rohe's masterpiece is a juicy tale of sex and real estate

Chicago boardwalk

2011-01-06T02:31:00.000-08:00

Walking across the Wabash Avenue bridge last night

I am struck that it is fashioned of wood planks. A major downtown street in a major American city has a wood plank walkway.

It reminds me when I first visited downtown Chicago, so much of it was a frontier city. A wooden walkway over a bridge is a last vestige of this.

I look around. I see Chicago's honesty in the expression of materials everywhere.

Wood planks. Concrete curving plastically. Steel girders and glass planes. Rivets everywhere. Brave the cold.
.

Lego Mies!

2011-01-03T13:42:00.000-08:00

UPDATE! For the real LEGO Farnsworth House, click here.

-------

Pretty amazing. Especially since it's not really packaged by Lego. Credit and congratulate T. Oechsner, who writes in his comments:

I'm not 100% happy with the proportions. I had to stop at the Lego grid.

If it floods, there's always this.

More Lego Mies and other building art here.

Hello Beautiful! 2011

2011-01-01T01:28:00.000-08:00

Buildings are not Christmas trees, they should not be decorated for Christmas?!?

2010-12-23T01:32:00.000-08:00

Jon Miller, president of the storied Chicago architectural photography firm Hedrich Blessing, loves Chicago's John Hancock Center. He likes the horizontal white light that for most of the year tops off the building as it meets the sky. But around this time, when they change the light to red and green for Christmas, it kinda drives Jon nuts.

"I just wish they wouldn't change the colors, on top, that's all. I want to make sure I become public with that, because, I don't think that buildings are not Christmas trees. I think they're buildings; and you don't change the colors seasonally. It just seems very backwards to me. You know, that you would take such an international sophisticated piece of design, and then do something so kind of cleverly silly. I don't know, maybe I just take it too seriously. But I don't like things that change the way a designer intended something to be. Cuz it's kind of like, well, it goes "Duh, duh, duh, duh" (sounds out the opening bars of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.) Not "duh Duh duh duh" (alters the opening bars.) Right? But that's just me. That's just my Larry David side coming out." - Jon Miller

Is he being curmudgeonly like Larry David on Curb Your Enthusiasm?

Do you agree with Jon, or do you like when they light the John Hancock Center in Chicago and other great buildings with red and green for Christmas?

---

I spoke with Jon Miller as part of a project with the Chicago Architecture Foundation.

We're gathering stories of life and work in the John Hancock Center in Chicago. If you can tell a great story about Chicago's John Hancock Center, please get in touch. EdwardLifson@gmail.com

So, just for Jon and the season, we put new koi in our pond on the upper right. They're red and green. Like the parking ramp at Trump Tower Chicago:

Mies gets the butterflies

2010-12-12T23:37:00.000-08:00

A new installation by Bik Van der Pol – a house with hundreds of butterflies

inspired by Mies van der Rohe’s popular Farnsworth House –

was chosen to inaugurate the new wing of the MACRO museum in Rome.

Floating, like the house itself,
on their wings of desire. .

The preeminent Mies van der Rohe website in the world

2010-12-02T22:19:00.000-08:00

Click here, I'll take you there.

Pages from the all new website for the Mies van der Rohe Society.
Information-filled.

6pm tonight! Chicago Debates - The Malling of Chicago. See you there.

2010-11-30T23:31:00.000-08:00

A new and lively series of debates on what makes a great city and region.

From the Chicago Architecture Foundation.

Our first great debate will be:

click for better view

I'll moderate an opinionated panel of experts. Pro and Con.

We'll debate three important projects changing, improving, destroying, remains to be seen - tell us your thoughts - on the "malling" of neighborhood life in Chicago.

Audience participation is encouraged. At the live event, and on the website.

All the information you need to participate is right here. Don't wait. Do it now.

We'll debate one project on the North Side, one on the South Side, and one downtown. Our terrific panelists are:

click for better view

The Malling of Chicago - Good or Bad?

Chicago defined the "City of the Century" in the Twentieth Century. But is Chicago becoming the "Suburb of the Century" in the Twenty-First?

Are big-box retailers eating up our neighborhoods? Or are they the perfect solution to the problem of food deserts and widespread unemployment?

Is the land of Sullivan and Wright becoming generic Anyplace, USA?

Or do mixed-use developments replace historic buildings that no longer serve their purpose, ultimately enlivening the neighborhood by providing much-needed amenities?

Are we becoming less of a city in which to stroll? Or do the adjoining green spaces planned for many mixed-use developments make Chicago, in fact, more walkable?

Join leading voices from architecture, design, business and politics at Goose Island Wrigleyville as they debate the pros and cons of mixed-use development and big-box stores in the city of Chicago.

If you care about our city, be a part of the debate. If you care about the quality of life here, be a part of the debate. For no-holds barred, real, thoughtful, lively, solution-oriented conversations, be a part of the debate.

We may be losing our Mayor, but we'll maintain the mojo. Be a part of the debate.

Chicago Debates.

I hope to see you there,

-Edward

A John Lautner house: needs plenty of water, does best in bright sun

2010-11-28T16:33:00.000-08:00

For part one click here.

After Jim Goldstein bought the Sheats Residence in 1972, he hired John Lautner to renovate it and to adapt this single-family house for a family to his purposes. Both men hailed from the Midwest: Lautner from Michigan, Goldstein from Wisconsin. Jim Goldstein was happy to leave behind his native landscape. He's glad to be in a warmer climate. He wishes L.A. were even warmer than it is. So every week he fills his house with flowers flown in from Maui.

Goldstein said John Lautner, who died in 1994, agreed with all the changes Goldstein wanted to make to the house, including the decision to tear down a second Lautner house next door, for new construction partly based on a Lautner design. (Goldstein says Lautner thought the now-demolished house was not one of his best.) The one thing he says Lautner did not agree with was Goldstein's landscape plans. Goldstein wanted tropical.

The koi pond, over which you cross to enter the house.

Lautner, no lover of L.A., wanted pine trees, like the ones he grew up with in Michigan. Lautner recommended a landscape designer but he didn't do tropical. He recommended another but he couldn't do tropical. Goldstein found his own landscaper and the result is a Brazil-like micro-climate on the acres around his house. Species from exotic lands around the world grow here, with the help of four full-time gardeners. Imagine the water flow, here in arid L.A.

I had just been to Disneyland, and couldn't help making the comparison. No insult intended to Lautner and the Sheats-Goldstein house, which of course is a deeply philosophical work. But here goes: both the house and Disneyland are products of eccentric genius. Both feature highly artificial lush landscapes with water features, to inspire a happier, other-worldly, vacation-like mood. Both are fully designed environments- down to the smallest details. Both hold "Rosebudian" memories. Walt Disney reclaimed aspects of the small town Main Street of his youth in Marceline, Missouri. Lautner always reclaimed aspects of the family home he helped to build as a youth, named "Midgaard" by his mother, meaning "midway between earth and heaven."

The master bedroom of the Sheats-Goldstein house.
At Disneyland you "fly" over London on the Peter Pan ride. Here you "fly" over L.A.

And Jim Goldstein installed something like a "ride"- with his James Turrell Skyspace.

Jim Goldstein in the Skyspace he and Turrell put together.

Here's Jim Goldstein, seeming to levitate, in his otherworldy, orgasmatronic James Turrell Skyspace- with LED lights and music.

How does a man get like this? I don't mean levitating, I mean in love with Lautner. Jim Goldstein said, "As a boy, growing up in Wisconsin, my best friend lived in a house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright." The Adelman House.

Sheats-Goldstein house is like the Adelman house too. Both are of concrete, with wide overhangs. (Adelman is one of Wright's "low-maintenance Usonian" houses.") Both have interior furnishings by the architect. And semi-covered exterior walkways. The Sheats-Goldstein straddles a hill, the Adelman house overlooks a ravine. Both are sited to take maximum advantage of the natural light.

The power of Wright. (Me, from childhood on I spent a lot of time in and around Wright's works, and seriously so from the age of nine. It hurts so good.)

In 1935, John Lautner wrote to Frank Lloyd Wright: "If there is anything that I value in this world, it is my connection with you... I can hardly say or do anything without connecting it with you and your ideas."

Rain after Thanksgiving, from my car window. Pacifica, California, 2010

2010-11-28T15:55:00.000-08:00

Mies, this is Andy. Andy, this is Mies.

2010-11-26T00:16:00.000-08:00

The best videos I've seen of Andy Warhol's clouds in Mies van der Rohe's Crown Hall last summer. An event sponsored by the Mies van der Rohe Society of the Illinois Institute of Technology.

By "zeldazonks". My own video of this was more spare. But I still like my stills of the Clouds in Crown Hall.

Viewed in winter, these summer clouds look even better.

.

What to wear to see Crown Hall or, G-d is in the Bifocals

2010-11-25T21:57:00.000-08:00

Steel and glass, right?

Romantic Residence in L.A. - The Sheats - Goldstein Residence by John Lautner

2010-11-21T20:37:00.000-08:00

It was a dark and stormy day...

Well, "dark and stormy" by Los Angeles standards.

Not sunny and no bright blue sky.

We had been invited to visit Jim Goldstein at his John Lautner-designed house, first named after the family that commissioned it, and now commonly called the Sheats - Goldstein Residence, given all the care and money Jim Goldstein put into it; and also perhaps in recognition of his opening it up to those interested in such things. On this gray day of fog and drizzle driving there on the 101 felt more like being on the autobahn in Prussia. In L.A. if it rains, you take a moment to remember what and where windshield wipers are.

Jim Goldstein, the owner and great caretaker of the house greeted us,

in colorful coat by John Galliano, short pants and bright yellow sneakers, topped it off with a baseball cap.

Gray and rain bring out more complex emotions in the Lautner house. To see it this way is a privilege. It tests your love of Lautner. The house, less overwhelmingly gorgeous, feels more intimate. You get to know it better, like a lady without makeup. You see sides of the house you didn't know where there. More moods to the experience.

I had known, in sunny weather, how the great roof framed a view of nature and sent my soul flying out to the treetops and beyond. Now I saw how in the rain, the triangles on the underside, became like abstracted leaves of a tree.

The cement ribs became the structure of the leaves. We stood under it as man and woman in nature gather under trees to keep dry. The roof was now one large leaf keeping us dry. You thank it. Because of the design and because the side is open you are much more aware of the goodness of this roof - especially in the rain. You experience more fully in this contemplative condition how the individual triangles merge into one large triangular roof. The parts combine into the whole.

The oculi, in sun allowing light to pass, transform into abstracted raindrops on the leaf. Light becomes liquid.

Move farther inside.

I know of no better cave than this place. Radiant heat in the floor keeps you warm from your feet up to your head.

Lautner too was moody. The dwellings he designed are not gee-whiz pads for James Bond; they are ruminations, on our relation to nature, to changing light, to materials, to the metaphysics of geometry, the parts to the whole, organic to inorganic, solid to spirit, house and human to landscape and heaven.

It's easy and pleasant to forget this under the sun, when all is perfect and warm, as is so often the case in L.A.

John Lautner didn't like it here. Jim Goldstein once asked him how he would improve the city.

"I'd make a huge concrete boulder and roll it down Mulholland Drive," Jim Goldstein says Lautner told him.

I think Lautner would approve of the German Romanticism felt in his house on this day. His Austrian father had filled him with the German philosophy he'd studied in studied Göttingen, Leipzig, Geneva and Paris. His Irish mother, an artist, filled young John Lautner with Nordic myths.

This great architect of mid-century Los Angeles roadside eating and hillside homes, could never anchor himself in this sun-drenched sprawl, but drew inspiration from the nature and dwellings he knew back home in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan; and of course from having worked with Frank Lloyd Wright, in Wisconsin. More on that in the next post.

Greet the Light

2010-11-19T21:19:00.000-08:00

Inside the James Turrell / Jim Goldstein Skyspace, on the lush grounds of Jim Goldstein's extraordinary and lavishly maintained Sheats / Goldstein Residence.

The house is a John Lautner design in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles. Mr. Goldstein had hoped to have James Turrell and John Lautner design the Skyspace together. Both work with cave-like sheltering enclosures, looking outwards to bring in and worship the vista, the light and the heavens. Lautner and Turrell had a few discussions, but did not collaborate on this. That was not meant to be.

Mr. Goldstein was extraordinarily generous today to allow me to bring this year's USC Annenberg / Getty Arts Journalism Fellows to his house, and to spend time sharing it with us. We thank him.

As we walked up the driveway, leaving behind this particular paradise, some were giddy, some were glad, all were grateful.
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Supermodels of Architecture

2010-10-29T19:56:00.000-07:00

Wanna buy an original architectural model? After the recent auctions of architect's drawings to support worthy causes, now you can start collecting models too. 100% of the final prices in these auctions will go to support SCI-Arc-
Southern California Institute of Architecture.

So check 'em out, prices start at only 250 bucks.

Designer: Eric Owen Moss, Eric Owen Moss Architects

Project: Mariinsky Theater, St. Petersburg, Russia- Façade Study Model, 2002

Model dimensions and materials: 6" W x 4" H x 2.5" D CNC milled foam, white paint

Designer: Thom Mayne, Morphosis Architects

Project: The Cooper Union/ 41 Cooper Square

Model dimensions and materials: 9 1/2"H x 7 1/4"W x 1 1/2"D

Designer: Michael Maltzan, Michael Maltzan Architecture

Project: Playa Vista Bandshell – outdoor amphitheatre

Model dimensions and materials: 12 x 12 x 12" - paper and wood

Plus models by Odile Decq, Zvi Hecker, Brendan MacFarlane, Cesar Pelli, Zaha Hadid, Greg Lynn, Steven Holl, Henry N. Cobb, Michael Maltzan, Richard Meier and Partners, Thom Mayne, Oyler-Wu and Marcelo Spina. All here.

Let us know if you win. You must know someone who would love one. I know I do.
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meta Morphosis

2010-10-29T15:35:00.000-07:00

Mayne / Morphosis

Caltrans - Los Angeles

Gropius Gone, Gropius Reborn

2010-10-15T17:03:00.000-07:00

Good buildings live on,
long after fools smash them asunder.

Sadly, this is gone forever:

But reborn as:

This is the first in a series of sculpture/furniture pieces that are based on the architecture of Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus. Specifically, I am making IKEA models of all eight mid-century Modern Gropius buildings that are currently being demolished by the City of Chicago.

Thus spoke Jeff Carter, the man who made this "Cabinet for Walter Gropius" ("Das Kabinett des Doktor Gropius"?) Brilliant work.

The collection of buildings to which he refers is mostly gone. They made up the campus of Michael Reese hospital on Chicago's South Side. Walter Gropius and others designed them, Sasaki contributed the wonderful landscape. In a bone-headed move, the city demolished this beauty, partly to make way for the 2016 Olympic Games. In the end those games were awarded to Brazil, not Chicago.

The photo at the top is of the late Michael Reese Power Plant. Here are the other Michael Reese buildings. And more photos and information on the campus, with a video I made in front of the Power Plant, of the man valiantly attempting to save all this.

I can't wait to see Carter's other Reeses pieces. What a living room that will be.

- = - = -

Thanks to Jeff Jacobs of Design Organization for suggesting this for HB!.

PS - Although it's not threatened, Jeff, would you make me an IKEA Crown Hall? Or an IKEA Prentice Hospital, which is threatened?
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Renzo Piano speaks about his "grand projet" at LACMA

2010-10-07T09:43:00.000-07:00

Read my Q & A with Renzo here.

--

And a coda to Frank Gehry's closing comment on Renzo Piano's wing of the Art Institute of Chicago, facing Millennium Park. Before saying he likes the galleries, Gehry told me, "Renzo's Modern Wing is kind of serious. I don't think he came to the park to play."

"Le Corbusier" in L.A.

2010-10-01T18:36:00.000-07:00

Top: Le Corbusier - Chapel at the Monastery de La Tourette, near Lyon, France

Bottom: Wolf Prix / Coop Himmelb(l)au - Central Los Angeles High School #9

Then this:

Wolf Prix: When I was 18 and ready to go to university my father sent me to see Le Corbusier’s Monastery of Sainte Marie de La Tourette near Lyon, France. It is an extraordinary building. When I saw the monastery’s chapel I was speechless. I decided – if this is architecture – I want to be an architect.

Prix's tower has a energy that spirals upward. In the same 2008 interview he tells Vladimir Belogolovsy:

Wolf Prix: When I was 10 or 11 my father took me to the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna and showed me the famous painting by Pieter Bruegel of the Tower of Babel. I was thrilled by this picture, but it bothered me that the tower didn’t have a spire. In other words it was unfinished. I think the duty of every architect is to finish the Tower of Babel.

Each time I see this high school tower rising over the freeway it thrills me. It excites, captivates, intrigues, scares and puzzles me. I'm always trying to figure it out -- (scroll and scroll). The Corb connection helps.

And this connects the high school even more strongly to the Rafael Moneo-designed cathedral across the freeway. Like much of Moneo's work, his cathedral for L.A. is heavily Corbusian.

Aren't Expo's supposed to show the World of Tomorrow?

2010-09-26T01:28:00.000-07:00

Top: China Pavilion - (host country) Expo 2010

Bottom: Canada Pavilion - (host country) Expo 67

Modern in Moline - John Deere World Headquarters in Cor-Ten steel, by Eero Saarinen. "Nothing rusts like a Deere."

2010-08-27T18:57:00.000-07:00

John Deere World Headquarters

Eero Saarinen

Moline, Illinois. Opened 1964

Eero Saarinen's John Deere World Headquarters looks better and better as the years go by; as do all of Saarinen's works. The approach is carefully choreographed as you rise up out of a valley, and first see man-made lakes. Saarinen created a working monument that glorifies with dignity industry, technology and craftsmanship, all in balance with nature. The building is in, of, by and for the land- the land which is this building's reason to be. Thomas Jefferson would be proud. The offices seem to be satisfy the workers needs for light, calm, and dignity.

The Deere brochure says,

John Deere and Eero Saarinen, the Finnish-American architect who designed the building, both created masterpieces in steel. Deere used steel to forge the plow that tamed the prairie; Saarinen used it to build a structure that reflected the character of the company that bears Deere's name.

Deere's plow had to be strong enough to till Midwestern soil. The building is not of shiny steel like many office buildings of the day, but rather, rugged Cor-Ten® steel, made to rust. Cor-Ten dated to 1933 and was developed for the railroads. John Deere World Headquarters was the first use of Cor-Ten in such a major architectural application. Over the years here it has picked up ever more hues of the Land of Lincoln, and of the all important oak trees, among which it nestles.

Saarinen's large "universal space," half-buried in the earth like a plow digging in; the exhibition space where they display the John Deere combines, tractors and plows.

This elegantly detailed glass box is the fanciest farm shed in the world. Since the late 1930's John Deere has hired industrial designers to make their products aesthetically pleasing as well as functional. With the building, as with the products, one marvels at the design and engineering.

In the showroom you will also find one odd wooden bench, I saw just one. Its oddness recalled for me the prow on Saarinen's Ingalls hockey rink at Yale, though I don't know if Eero Saarinen had a hand in designing this bench. It is sculpted as if over time human bottoms have polished indentations into the wood. One seats one's bum in it, in this natural material, much as the building itself is embedded in the land.

I was surprised to learn that Saarinen's first proposal for John Deere headquarters was an inverted pyramid.

Saarinen sketches for John Deere headquarters, 1957-63

This struck me as I've recently returned from the Shanghai World Expo where the national pavilion of China is an inverted pyramid. I'm glad Deere didn't go with that, it would have likely dominated the nature, and created too much space where the sun don't shine. As built, the John Deere building has an Asian feel to it with a harmony, equilibrium and delicacy that especially when the lights are on can remind one of the Golden Temple in Kyoto; in the end this is a fine American work- rugged and right for the frontier - its "sticks" and "logs" of steel stacked, fastened, and demonstrating its will to endure.

The critic John Jacobus places the John Deere headquarters in "a particular American pictorial vision of a metallic industrialized building style set in an ordered, uncluttered landscape - the vision of Sheller, Demuth and Hopper."

The surrounding landscape by Hideo Sasaki and associates is as brilliant as the building - balancing structure and building art with land, water, trees, brush, sky, water and air. Sasaki's mid-century works are American masterpieces; often better than the acclaimed "land art" created by "land artists" in the following decades.

Sasaki knew Illinois, he had studied at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign in 1946 (Sasaki and his firm have done design and landscape work there for decades). He later worked at the Chicago office of Skidmore Owings & Merrill. (I regret that it was a Sasaki landscape that was brutally ripped from the earth earlier this year at the campus of Michael Reese hospital in Chicago.) John Deere had begun to make smaller tractors for lawns and gardens just before work on the headquarters building began in 1955, so it's appropriate that much of the landscaping is well-trimmed lawn.

Alexander Girard composed the huge mural on the display floor with memorabilia from company history.

Even if I hadn't just seen proud and optimistic China, re-visiting John Deere reminds me of the American commitment to greatness, pride and belief in the value of creating a place of beauty, when corporate America had the fortitude to create such a showplace as this pilgrimage temple to agribusiness. Such work strengthens us, shows us we are made of, and what we are capable of as a nation. I know that spirit still exists here. Maybe we just have to dig around to find it.

---

"Nothing runs like a Deere" says the ad, but I try. I leave what is wrongly called the "rust belt," and until I stop again: well, if John Deere is where rusty Cor-ten steel architecture started, see here where it has gone. I leave Moline, and cross the Mississippi.
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What's Chicago without a little Frank Lloyd Wright?

2010-08-26T19:38:00.000-07:00

Heading west from Chicago, looking for modernity, had to stop at

No, that's Bruce Price in Tuxedo Park, New York (1885/86).

I stopped at

Frank Lloyd Wright's Home and Studio in Oak Park, Illinois - 1889/98. Restored to its 1909 appearance.

Wright pushes six panes together, lifts the arch above them and all but begins to make a modern ribbon window!

The triangle reminds me of Venturi's post-modern house for his mother, in which he also plays with the windows, and I loved the proto-post-modernism or maybe more mannerism, in Frank Lloyd Wright's Studio, when he stops the posts before they rise up to meet the heavy beams.

How does it all stand up? Show off! Between the posts and beams, tranquilly repose, at least now, houseplants, as calm as the magician's girl about to be sawed in two, or the innocent bloke standing unknowingly under a grand piano. At first you're shocked to see it, then your eyes tell you it will all be alright. The man in charge here has some talent, indeed, is masterful. Look up and you'll see chains holding his dome together, a wink in the studio perhaps to architectural history, to the medievalism of H.H. Richardson or even to the Renaissance when Filippo Brunelleschi famously circled chains around the base of the otherwise impossible to construct dome of Florence Cathedral.

I hadn't been to Wright's place in a while, not since the business and marketing of Frank Lloyd Wright really took off. Sure I'd seen the recent knicknacks and novels, but I didn't realize there's a whole lotta Loving Frank going on. Is this nostalgia? People catching up with homegrown American genius? A new definition of the "Ken Burns effect"? On this day Italians abound. I overhear one U.S. couple ask another, "Didn't we see you at Monona yesterday? (Monona Terrace in Madison, Wisconsin- a post-Wright Wrightian work for all Wright-lovers.)

At Unity Temple you wander on your own. Led and conducted by Wright's rigorous, flowing and "musical composition" you absorb this sacred space as you will, pass through it as you like, and as it passes through you.

At the FLW Home and Studio you first enter the gift shop to buy tickets for the tour. That's a sad sequence of spaces confusing the soul seeking beauty. Next it's a docent-led tour. You can't but marvel at the creativity here, the modernity and the genius; that Wright designed in this place Robie House, the Larkin Building and Unity Temple, and that he designed his house in so many ways to instill creativity in the six children he raised here with his wife Catherine.

The docents are well-informed and tell Wright good stories, but I would also appreciate the option of visiting in silence. Facts can be learned before you enter, on YouTube or a smartphone. The architecture can only be experienced here; and you've made the effort to physically come here. Let the architecture do its thing. If conditions are right and you're quiet and open, architecture can do things to you that nothing else can.

So now I head in the direction indicated by the prow of Wright's Robie House. As we all do at a certain point in our lives, I head west.
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From the Getty Tomb to the Getty Center. Archi-road trip. 2,000 miles plus from Chicago to L.A.

2010-08-25T13:57:00.000-07:00

A plaque in front of Louis Sullivan's Getty Tomb in Graceland Cemetery in Chicago says modern architecture in America starts here. Thus it's a fitting place to begin my archi-drive west, to see great buildings along the way. Destination - a city of the future - Los Angeles. Where the continent ends in a wash of golden light. This tomb too says sunset.

Graceland looks great today, having recently had its landscape sensitively restored. The administration buildings also sing delightful prairie songs to me as they too have been restored. They feel like the turn of the century and early twentieth century wooden buildings you find in America's national parks. I wonder if the toll booths and other public buildings I am about to encounter along Midwestern roads will be as humane and appropriate to their sites as these little "cabins" in Graceland.

I always regret leaving Chicago and as usual I delay my inevitable departure. This time, in addition to not having seen you, I wish I had seen Louis Sullivan's Idea, the exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center. It must be illuminating as it was conceived and designed by the incomparable duo of Tim Samuelson and Chris Ware. I promise myself to return to Chicago before the exhibition closes.

Next stop... ?

Traveling Man

2010-08-22T13:51:00.000-07:00

So much to see in this beautiful land. Back soon to posting.
Road trip USA