Kids just love that LOBLOLLY HOUSE · 07/22/2008
From the parenting blog DADDYTYPES:
7/21/08
“Another surprise: reading the prefab architecture book was a hit. The kid’s always asking why this and how’d they do that. all. the. time. So I broke out my new copy of the awesome prefab house project catalogue I’d just gotten Friday and read it to her. She ate it up. It’s Loblolly House, a getaway on Chesapeake Bay by KieranTimberlake which is made out of off-the-shelf industrial aluminum scaffolding.
“We’d watched the architects working on their house next to MoMA the last few weeks, but the added familiarity was less important than the detailed story of a house being built. We read it three times for an hour. On the other hand, my idea of drawing pictures of things we read about in Henry David Thoreau’s Walden was rejected. I swear, kids these days.”
Over and Over gets the star treatment in Publisher's Weekly · 07/21/2008
Today, notes contributor Jim Datz in his intro, drawing patterns with the fallible human hand is an art perched at the treacherous meeting place of authentic human craftsmanship and a world largely defined by trendsetting and online consumption: ideas, “almost at the moment they begin, are lifted, collated, named, and marketed in a willful act of pattern recognition by today’s cultural curators.” Though many of the patterns collated here were designed for commercial purposes (turned into t-shirts, skate boards and other product by hip designers), they make a strong impression as art-for-art’s sake. As Datz further notes, “we are pattern seeking animals,” and these selections are strangely gratifying, sometimes even meditative. Many designers share the aesthetic of popular contributor Jeremyville, clearly influenced by graffiti, cartoons and Keith Haring; others, like Deanne Cheuk, opt for retro colors and a hint of kitsch. Artists like Mario Hugo and Kirk Hiatt show a sparse, modernist approach, while Dan Funderburgh creates traditional floral wallpaper designs tweaked with, say, fire hydrants and parking meters. This makes a fitting following up to Perry’s well-received catalog of hand-drawn letters, Hand Job not only does this fun roundup help define a growing subgenre, it’s also a rousing introduction to more than 50 young artists. (Aug.)
HANDMADE NATION SILENT AUCTION · 07/16/2008
The Handmade Nation Silent Art Auction is from 6 to 10 p.m. Saturday at Poketo headquarters, 510 S. Hewitt St., No. 506, Los Angeles. The first 50 guests will receive bags of handmade crafts and art. A film clip will be screened at 7 p.m.
It is fitting that a documentary about the burgeoning movement of do-it-yourself crafters and artists was created by a dedicated crafter, veteran of the Seattle underground music scene and now first-time DIY filmmaker. In the best tradition of indie artists, Faythe Levine set out in 2006 to film craft fairs, interview artists in their studios and create Handmade Nation: The Rise of DIY Art, Craft, and Design. She’s whittled more than 80 hours of film shot in 15 states into what will be a feature-length documentary when it’s done—she hopes in time for next year’s film festivals. But for now, Levine, in the best tradition of indie filmmakers, calls her project “a labor of love financed by credit cards,” which is another way of saying she needs more cash to finish postproduction.
That’s why she’s headed to Los Angeles on Saturday to hold a silent-auction fundraiser. Angie Myung and Ted Vadakan, owners of L.A.-based Poketo, a brand of artist-designed apparel, accessories and home-décor goods, are hosting the event at their downtown studio. Levine, speaking from her home in Milwaukee, where she operates the Paper Boat Boutique & Gallery, said she also aims to broaden awareness of the film beyond the Midwest. “I don’t want the film to be tagged as a small, Milwaukee production,” she said. Indeed, the aesthetics of the indie craft movement have infiltrated high fashion (witness Rodarte’s spidery hand-knit dresses for fall and spring’s tie-dye and batik trends), and crafters are so numerous, they’re filling knit- and yarn-centric cruises and tours.
Los Angeles, of course, is a center of the DIY and craft movements, and Levine filmed a number of local artisans, including craft fair organizer Jenny Ryan, clothing designer Christine Haynes and the owners of Silver Lake’s ReForm School boutique, Billie Lopez and Tootie Maldonado. A 20-minute rough cut of the film offers a glimpse of the wit and diversity she captured: There’s Knitta, a Houston “tagging” crew that knits over utility poles and parking meters; Whitney Lee, an Austin, Texas, textile artist who makes latch-hook rugs with images of women in pornography to make a statement about how women are walked on; and ReForm School’s Lopez and Maldonado, who say their boutique represents another way for women to create businesses and be self-supporting. Many crafters, Levine found, were drawn to their hobbies, which ultimately became their careers, by shared motivations. “I think people are tired of the massive amounts of sameness that exist at the mall,” she said. “You know that when you are walking down the street that you’re the only person to have this fantastic, original, personal item.”
Many of the pieces make a political statement, and the subversive themes appealed to Levine, who spent her teens exploring Seattle’s underground punk scene and the Olympia, Wash., riot grrrl community and her adulthood traveling the world, living communally in large groups, working in collectives and always, she says, making art. Though Levine had been connecting with other crafters online, it wasn’t until she attended Chicago’s Renegade Craft Fair in 2003 that she understood the size and influence of the scene. “No one was documenting what was going on,” Levine said. “It was a bigger cultural community and it was leaking into mass media. They were starting to realize there was a demographic and a market there.
“I wanted to make sure to capture what was happening from an insider’s perspective,” Levine said. That point of view has been invaluable. Her eight-minute clip, at
www.handmadenationmovie.com, led Levine and her assistant producer, Cortney Heimerl, to a deal with Princeton Architectural Press, which will release a companion book of the same title in November. The movement’s effect on mass culture may seem inevitable, but Levine also hopes to capture the intellectually provocative character of the artists and how they use craft to create awareness about social issues. “It’s not,” she says, “just girls making cute stuff and selling it.”
A suggestion for documentarian Ken Burns... · 07/15/2008
NY TIMES 7/15/08
ARTS, BRIEFLY
Ken Burns to Document the Nation’s Parks
A new documentary by the filmmaker Ken Burns, detailing the history of America’s national parks, is scheduled to run in fall 2009 on PBS, The Associated Press reported. The 12-hour, six-part film titled “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea” will be narrated by Peter Coyote. Tom Hanks and Andy Garcia are among several actors who will lend their voices to the film. It will be produced by Mr. Burns and Dayton Duncan, who wrote a book for the series as well. The film is also produced by Florentine Films and the public television station WETA in Washington. Mr. Burns’s previous documentaries include “The Civil War” and “Baseball.”
Organized by region, The National Park Architecture Sourcebook is unique and comprehensive guidebook to America’s most significant historic park-based architectural treasures. Kaiser leads readers beyond the rustic lodges of Yellowstone and Yosemite found in typical guidebooks to those special places where history, form, and natural beauty have combined to create moments of architectural magic or enduring symbols of patriotism and heroic action such as the Statue of Liberty, Mount Rushmore, the Lincoln Memorial, Fort Sumter, and the USS Arizona. Blending facts, anecdotes, and personal observations based on many thousands of miles of travel, Kaiser evokes the spirit of these places while offering a solid understanding of why national park architecture occupies a significant and unique place in American history.
In one accessible, engaging, and easy-to-use volume, readers (especially documentary filmmakers) can find historical context, directions, factual information, and succinct architectural descriptions for more than two hundred places of interest across the U.S. Designed in a convenient paperback format, this guidebook is an invaluable resource for the traveler, design professional, student, or anyone interested in learning more about the historic architectural treasures of our national park system.
As Dubai turns... · 07/14/2008
Dubai’s Moving Skyscraper “Dynamic Tower” Planned For 2010
From the 6/25/08 edition of the Huffington Post:
“An Italian architect said he is poised to start construction on a new skyscraper in Dubai that will be “the world’s first building in motion,” an 80-story tower with revolving floors that give it an ever-shifting shape. The spinning floors, hung like rings around an immobile cement core, would offer residents a constantly changing view of the Persian Gulf and the city’s futuristic skyline. A few penthouse villas would spin on command using a voice-activated computer. The motion of the rest of the building would be choreographed in patterns that could be altered over time.”
Alternately lauded as the future of architecture or dismissed as pure folly, revolving buildings are a fascinating missing chapter in architectural history with surprising relevance to issues in contemporary architectural design.
The follow-up to his critically acclaimed book A-Frame, Chad Randl’s Revolving Architecture: A History of Buildings that Rotate, Swivel, and Pivot explores the history of this unique building type, investigating the cultural forces that have driven people to design and inhabit them. Revolving Architecture is packed with a variety of fantastic revolving structures such as a jail that kept inmates under a warden’s constant surveillance, glamorous revolving restaurants, tuberculosis treatment wards, houses, theaters, and even a contemporary residential building whose full-floor apartments circle independently of each other. International examples from the late 1800s though the present demonstrate the variety and innovation of these dynamic structures.
LEISURAMA NOW mixes up a "yachtini" in the NYT Sunday Styles section · 07/07/2008
From The Yachtini Lands in Montauk by Allen Salkin (7/6/08)
Gordon M.Grant for The New York Times
LEISURAMA NOW toothbrush keeps TIMES keyboards clean! · 07/02/2008
The Washington Post calls THE CONCRETE DRAGON "powerful" · 06/26/2008
The Washington Post says:
”...a powerful overview of China’s huge building boom and its social and environmental consequences.”
The quote appears in context below.
Of All China’s Stories, None May Be More Telling Than The Ones Architects Are Creating in Concrete and Steel
By Philip Kennicott
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 22, 2008
BEIJING
A few months ago, one of China’s most outspoken and admired architects was asked to name the stupidest thing he’s heard someone say about Chinese architecture. Speaking at a Columbia University conference, Qingyun Ma offered up a question rather than a statement: “What is Chinese architecture?”
He hates it when people ask that.
But how can you not ask it? Half of the construction in the world today is happening in China. Driven by a booming economy and a huge population migration to the country’s cities, making new buildings is a round-the-clock, frantic, awe-inspiring national obsession. It is happening at such a rapid rate that young Chinese architects, even ones still finishing architecture degrees, have burgeoning portfolios of built projects—while their counterparts in the West may spend the first two decades of their careers mulling the philosophical niceties of what it means to dwell. And given that Ma isn’t just a prominent Chinese architect, but also dean of the architecture school at the University of Southern California, the question has a certain urgency. Whether they know it or not, young architects in China may already be learning to make Chinese architecture—whatever that turns out to be.
Ma’s exasperation, however, is understandable. Asking “What is Chinese architecture?” is a bit like asking “What is Western art?” There’s too much to be considered. Western architects have flocked to China, where they can build projects on a scale that would be impossible almost anywhere else today. With the Olympics focusing world attention on Beijing, China can boast two new world-class athletic facilities and one soon-to-be-completed office tower that have set the standard for powerful, daring, jaw-dropping architecture—all designed by blue-chip foreign firms. But it’s not clear that what they’re producing is Chinese architecture.
Nor is it easy to talk about the history of Chinese architecture. The red roofs and upturned gables that define its ancient buildings suggest a monumentality and permanence that many Chinese scholars believe is misleading. And throughout much of the last century, fraught with war and revolution and cultural violence, China basically checked out of the larger, international conversation about the built environment.
So the current building boom feels strangely alien, like an outside force with unknowable intentions, even to many Chinese who take pride in their country’s economic growth. New mega-projects have thrust the country into the forefront of architectural innovation, while cheap construction puts a veneer of shabbiness on almost everything that isn’t a government-backed super-project with a Western architect at the helm.
The question “What is Chinese architecture?” turns out to be another way of asking “What is China’s future?” Is it a globalized vision of modernity? Are there nascent ideas yet to emerge that will transform the generic into something uniquely Chinese? Or will the sheer accumulation of mass—the great, gray forests of new construction choked in smog and haze—overwhelm all efforts to steer it in a sustainable, aesthetic and humane direction?
Very likely: all of the above.
Instant Icons
One thing is clear. When the Chinese government goes shopping for architecture, it doesn’t just want name brands, it wants best in class.
Beijing is now dotted with stunning buildings. For the Olympics, the Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron designed the new National Stadium, already an icon. Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas and partner Ole Scheeren of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (based in the Netherlands) are building the massive new China Central Television tower. Norman Foster, the Brit who designed the Hearst Tower in New York and the new glass-covered courtyard at the Old Patent Office Building in the District, has also designed the city’s new airport, now the largest in the world, and it’s beautiful enough to break through the cynicism and jitters of even the most jaded traveler.
With the appearance of these landscape-altering projects, the city once defined by the massive, squat, faceless architecture of the state is learning how to have an opinion on the subject of architecture. And this new, theatrical architecture is inviting Beijing to discover how we love buildings—and how we hate them, too.
The National Stadium is as compelling a building to appear anywhere in the world in recent years. Its enthusiastic embrace by both city residents and Chinese architects is certainly genuine, even if television is filled with an endless parade of pimple-free teeny-boppers singing “We are ready!” and encouraging the country to love all things associated with the Olympic Games. Known as the Bird’s Nest because of its huge and poetic steel exoskeleton, the stadium has become perhaps the single most iterated symbol in the grand, exhausting propaganda campaign for the Olympics.
But Paul Andreu’s National Theater, a titanium-clad egg-shaped structure just off Tiananmen Square in downtown Beijing, hasn’t been so lucky. Although it is a powerful spectacle, especially at sunset, when it seems particularly buoyant in the pool of water that surrounds it on all sides, there is little enthusiasm for it. One architect faulted it for being essentially a big dome over multiple theater spaces, with little rational arrangement of the interior. It doesn’t help that as it was being built, a terminal Andreu designed for Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airport collapsed, raising doubts about the architect. Or that it’s the kind of building that is always surrounded by security guards, who police every infraction of public order. Or that it is wildly different from the historic buildings, the old hutongs (neighborhoods) and the more than half-century-old Maoist piles that surround it.
Feelings about another massive project—the China Central Television tower by Koolhaas and Scheeren—fall somewhere between the enthusiastic reception of the Bird’s Nest and the glum acceptance of Andreu’s egg. The CCTV tower is a steel behemoth rising above the city’s rapidly growing central business district. It looks like a single skyscraper that has been broken and reassembled into two L-shaped pieces and fitted together on an angle, resulting in a single, continuous rectilinear tube. A huge amount of the building’s space is known as “the overhang,” because it is suspended some 500 feet above the city.
It is a building thrilling and horrifying at the same time. The CCTV tower is deliberately, brutally, almost absurdly iconic, imitating the blunt, slick and professional voice of the state media it will contain. Its shape sends a basic message: We can defy gravity. Which is another way of saying: Our power is unlimited.
When asked about the building, several Chinese architects focused on the question of . . . steel. This says a lot about the space they operate in, compared with the rarefied world of Koolhaas and other Western stars. The issue of steel isn’t minor. China consumes steel at more than three times the rate of the United States, and prices for steel have been steadily rising. Lining up a reliable and affordable supply of steel is a concern for anyone building in China.
Ma Liangwei, deputy director of the Beijing Municipal Institute of City Planning and Design, speaks for many when he says the CCTV tower is too expensive, that it required too much money to engineer, that it is all about “shamelessly showing off.” Wang Jun, an authority on the Beijing cityscape, says the tower “tames the buildings” around it—an astute observation not just about the bland corporate architecture of the central business district, but the role of CCTV in Chinese society.
A Most Basic Building
In the shadow of these high-profile projects are thousands of what may be the most characteristic, most essential buildings in China today: the blue-and-white shed.
It is usually two floors high, made of a metal frame, with walkways and stairs on the outside. Sometimes two or more of these rectangular, temporary structures are joined together, often with their doors and windows facing each other, as if in imitation of the age-old courtyard houses that once filled Chinese cities. These buildings, seen at the peripheries of construction sites, serve as housing for the migrant workers who have come to the cities to build the towers and shopping malls and apartment complexes that are the most visible manifestation of China’s double-digit economic growth.
Some of these sheds bustle with people all day, given the round-the-clock shifts at many building sites. The sheds have all the usual signs of haphazard domesticity—laundry is hung willy-nilly, empty instant-noodle cups are littered about—that men, living far from their families, display. Everything about the structures suggests impermanence.
One might consider the standardized shed as beneath the dignity of the word “architecture,” except that the shed’s transient quality may well be one of the fundamentally Chinese characteristics of building today. Chen Zhao, an architect and historian who teaches at Nanjing University, which has one of the country’s best architecture schools, insists that the first step to understanding architecture in China is to get rid of the word “architecture.”
It is a distracting concept, he says, at least when used “in the same sense as in Europe.” Zhao, like other Chinese architects, says that ideas of permanence and monumentality—so essential to much of Western architectural thinking—are essentially foreign to “architecture” in China. Throughout the long millenniums of Chinese history, building has been more functional, limited to standard types of structures. Cities are made and remade, buildings are built and rebuilt. A place—the axial center of a city, the environs near a temple—often matters more than what it is built there. Buildings aren’t necessarily conceived of as a permanent, lasting solution to a particular social need. They are expendable, sometimes in as little as 15 or 20 years.
“The obsolescence cycle is like a dog’s life,” says Thomas Campanella, author of a new book, The Concrete Dragon, a powerful overview of China’s huge building boom and its social and environmental consequences.
Regulating the Rise
Between the transient architecture of the blue-and-white shed and the trophy architecture of Koolhaas, there’s a vast middle ground. If the former symbolizes the country’s refreshing and sometimes terrifying willingness to make and remake its landscape, and the latter suggests the power of its ambition and determination to compete on the world stage, the middle ground seems to belong to forces beyond anyone’s control. It is a frenetic, chaotic, often frustrating world, where the great torrents of China’s economic miracle are channeled through a maze of unpredictability and regulation. For better and worse, the architects working in this space are building the China that China will have to live with.
Teh Kon Hu, whose firm is based in Kansas City but does extensive work in China, remembers when construction on an axle plant he had designed simply came to a stop—at harvest time.
“There’s no way you can stop it,” he says. “All the workers disappear. And when they came back three weeks later, 200 of the 400 workers were different.”
Johannes Dell, who runs the Shanghai office of AS&P architects, puts it more bluntly: “When you catapult a peasant from a rice paddy to the 81st floor and say you should install a suspended ceiling, this is what happens.” By “this” he means sloppy work, something lamented by almost every architect in China who doesn’t have access to the resources of a Rem Koolhaas or a Herzog & de Meuron. Sleek, modernist structures often suffer the most. Look closely at a generic concrete, glass and steel box in China and you see lines of bad rivets, cracks in the concrete, misaligned moldings and flashings, and holes where they shouldn’t be.
There is also a shifting landscape of government regulation. Li Hu, a partner in Steven Holl Architects, a prominent American firm with several projects underway in China, remembers an instance in which the exterior wall of a building had to be redesigned midway through the project when the government mandated more functional windows. He also says it is difficult to persuade government regulators to accept state-of-the-art engineering ideas that are common in the West. There is, paradoxically, a huge interest in cutting-edge architecture, and an official culture that requires buildings to be unnecessarily overengineered and overbuilt.
“There is a lack of a sense of trust that is common throughout China,” Hu says.
Even as China hurtles headlong into the age of ruthless capitalism, building regulation is a quiet, behind-the-scenes vestigial holdout of social engineering. Distances between buildings are tightly controlled, sometimes resulting in what would seem (to American urbanists) like unwanted dead spaces in the urban fabric and often jagged or irrational frontage on streets. There is also a law that forbids new structures to blot out the sun from older residential buildings. No apartment can receive less than two hours of sun on the shortest day of the year, says Jun Xia, design director for Gensler architects in Shanghai. The consequences of this seemingly basic rule are so complex that there is special software to deal with it.
And then there is the perpetual change in Chinese government, especially in the provinces where bureaucrats move up the ladder to better posts every few years. Smaller cities—and in China that means cities of only a few million inhabitants—are the crucible of edgy new work, especially for Chinese architects who often lose to Western architects for the trophy projects in places such as Beijing and Shanghai. But ambitious political figures who sponsor progressive new architecture—and you find it in the most unlikely places—may only be around for a few years. If a project can’t be pushed through to conclusion during their tenure, it may well be dropped after new leadership comes in. So there is a perpetual sense of urgency—and a lot of unmaterialized work.
There is a dark side to all of this, as well—a dark side much discussed after the massive earthquake in Sichuan province last month. The need for speed, combined with the perpetual migration of workers, leads to sloppy construction. The cost of steel results in a tendency to scrimp on reinforced concrete, which can have fatal consequences. Regulation, no matter how well intended, is only as good as its enforcement, and the quality of enforcement has two essential variables: the distance from the central government in Beijing, and the degree of corruption in the locality.
The demand for new architects has also strained the educational system that produces them. Fifty years ago, there were fewer than two dozen architecture programs in China. Today, according to Bao Jiasheng, an architect who is also vice president of the National Board of Architectural Accreditation, there are 183. (In the United States there are 129, according to the American Institute of Architects.) And that doesn’t include an unknown number of unaccredited programs that operate on what would be a community college level in the United States. The professionalism of architects emerging from those programs is unknown.
‘Beijing 2050’
In a roomful of young architecture students at Nanjing University, the uncertain future of Chinese architecture is obvious. They are fluent in all the current trends, interested in building small and modest and “green.” They are conversant with the latest projects of glamorous architects such as Koolhaas. They are also up on their theory, and cite Kenneth Frampton, with enthusiasm. Frampton, an English architect, has been particularly concerned with how regional cultures can harvest new ideas from the globalized style of the last century.
That is the essential problem of architecture in this tremendously dynamic country. “What is Chinese architecture?” may be a stupid question, but it certainly haunts the minds of the country’s younger generation of architects. They are deeply concerned that what they build be Chinese, even if only in a vaguely “spiritual” sense. They respect the native forms—the upturned gables, the courtyards and walls of rammed earth—but there’s little sense that these offer much direction for a new Chinese architecture in our globalized age.
In an old neighborhood in Beijing, at well after 9 p.m. on a weekday, the office of an architecture firm called MAD is still buzzing. Founded by Yansong Ma, a U.S.-educated architect whose star is rapidly rising, MAD has the bohemian feel and energy of any young, up-and-coming firm anywhere in the world. Yet it also has an enormous amount of work—major buildings throughout the country. Its architects also like to make statements, provoke, propose ideas in competition that are meant to agitate the status quo. On the wall is a rendering for what they call “Beijing 2050,” a futurist vision of the city center a half-century from now.
It is a peculiar future, however. Although the project includes some decidedly futurist elements, central Beijing hasn’t been transformed into some unrecognizable forest of avant-garde shapes. Rather, it’s been covered in green. Tiananmen Square is a forest, and Paul Andreu’s egg has been covered by a little hillock of trees in a pool of water. The image exudes a calm, an organic peacefulness, at odds with everything around it: the city, the country and MAD’s own daring and often biomorphic building designs. “Beijing 2050” is a vision of the future in which the mistakes have been covered over, the city has calmed down, nature has returned and some kind of spiritual equilibrium has been achieved.
It’s a lovely vision—and young American architects can only envy the practical experience that even the most esoteric firms are gaining in China. But most architects in China will never dream these kinds of dreams. They will emerge from architecture schools and go straight into the state-affiliated design institutes that do the heavy lifting of architecture. They will work for years in a system that resembles medical internship in this country—small pay for huge amounts of work, with the credit taken by their superiors. They will design factories and apartment complexes and shopping centers, with little more creative input than one has pressing the button on a photocopying machine. They will further a profound transformation of their country, with virtually no influence on its direction. If they remember pondering the question “What is Chinese architecture?” from their student days, it will be a distant memory. They will be too busy building to think about such things.
Chicago makes plans for the 100th anniversary of the Plan of Chicago. · 06/25/2008
This meticulous reprint of the Plan of Chicago reproduces all 142 plates from the original, 48 of which are in color. It also contains a color plate of the City Hall that was omitted from the 1909 edition. The most visible document of the City Beautiful movement, this reprint still holds valuable lessons for today’s architects and planners.
June 22, 2008
2 architects to design Burnham pavilions
By Blair Kamin
Two internationally renowned architects, including Pritzker Architecture Prize winner Zaha Hadid, will design temporary pavilions in Millennium Park to serve as focal points for next year’s regionwide celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Burnham Plan, the visionary document that changed the face of Chicago.
The Iraqi-born, London-based Hadid, who in 2004 became the first woman to win the Pritzker, is best known for fluid, dynamic forms that pack swirling energy, such as her new covered-bridge pavilion at an international exposition in the Spanish city of Zaragoza.
Ben van Berkel, who heads the Amsterdam-based firm called UNStudio, has turned heads with structures such as the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart, Germany, a striking showroom for cars and trucks that consists of two spiral ramps in the form of a double-helix.
How these two paragons of the avant-garde will come to terms with the late Chicago architect and planner Daniel Burnham, a committed classicist who sought to transform rough-edged Chicago into a civilized Paris on the Prairie, is anybody’s guess.
But the outcome undoubtedly will add sizzle to next year’s celebration of the Burnham Plan and may ensure that the centennial events—educational programs, arts events and open space projects—do more than take a nostalgic glance in the rear-view mirror. Notably, the groups behind the pavilions are not commissioning a classical statue that puts Burnham on a pedestal.
‘Top-flight designers’
“We just decided we were going to go for top-flight designers and open it up, rather than make it seem like we’re just hearkening back to the past,” said George Ranney, co-chair of the Burnham Plan Centennial Committee, a group of civic leaders that is coordinating the efforts of 250 Chicago-area civic groups to celebrate the plan and envision the region’s future.
In conjunction with the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs, Millennium Park Inc. and the Art Institute of Chicago, the committee will announce the selection of the architects Monday.
Unveiled in 1909 and formally known as the Plan of Chicago, the Burnham Plan led to the creation of such local landmarks as Navy Pier, North Michigan Avenue, double-deck Wacker Drive and the city’s continuous chain of lakefront parks. Also cited as a key generating factor in the creation of the Cook County forest preserves, the Burnham Plan is widely credited with founding the field of modern city planning.
The pavilions, which will be the site of exhibits and events about the Burnham Plan and current visions for the region, are to be located on the south side of Millennium Park’s Chase Promenade, not far from the Crown Fountain and its raucous reflecting pool.
They are each to measure roughly 60 feet wide by 90 feet long and won’t be higher than Anish Kapoor’s jelly bean-shaped “Cloud Gate” sculpture, said Joseph Rosa, the Art Institute’s architecture and design curator. “Cloud Gate” measures 33 feet high.
No need for arm-twisting
It was Rosa who contacted the two architects on behalf of the centennial committee and won their agreement to come to Chicago. “There was very little arm-twisting. It was refreshing,” he said.
No designs have been prepared yet. The architects could not be reached for comment.
The budget for the pavilions is expected to be tight. Organizers, who stressed that fundraising is in progress and that the scope of the project could change, put the cost at roughly $500,000 per pavilion. Rosa estimated $250,000 to $300,000. But he predicted that the temporary nature of the structures, which won’t be fully enclosed, would keep expenses down. “It’s almost like a tent,” he said.
John Bryan, the centennial committee’s co-chair and the fundraising whiz for Millennium Park, added that raising more money should not be difficult, given the high caliber of the architects.
“It’s a sexy enough thing,” he said. “If the product’s good enough, somebody will sponsor it.”
Centennial committee leaders were at pains to defuse the potentially explosive issue of whether their temporary structures would become permanent, repeating the saga of the Petrillo Music Shell, which was built in Grant Park in 1978.
Plans called for the Petrillo Music Shell to be disassembled and stored each year after the concert season. Instead, the Chicago Park District reneged on its promise to take down the shell, claiming the job would cost too much.
“This has got to be temporary,” Ranney said. “I felt betrayed on the Petrillo band shell.”
Plans call for the pavilions to open in June 2009, shortly after the May opening of the Art Institute’s Renzo Piano-designed Modern Wing. The pavilions will remain in place through the fall, probably until late October, after which plans call for them to be disassembled and recycled into public art by Chicago artist Dan Peterman.
Thrilling and buildable
Initially renowned for her visionary drawings, Hadid has in recent years shed the criticism that her avant-garde designs were thrilling but unbuildable. Her completed commissions include a contemporary art museum in Cincinnati and a science center in Wolfsburg, Germany. Earlier this year, it was announced that she will design an art museum at Michigan State University.
Not everyone is pleased
Hadid taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago in the 1990s and was a finalist in the 1998 design competition for the campus center at the Illinois Institute of Technology. As part of the pavilion project, she will return to IIT to conduct workshops and presentations.
Van Berkel, who will have the same responsibilities at the University of Illinois at Chicago, has completed projects including a department store in Seoul, and has designed a 20-story condominium tower in New York City.
Not everyone is pleased that two avant-garde architects were selected to design the pavilions.
Classically inclined educators, such as Michael Lykoudis, dean of the University of Notre Dame’s School of Architecture, would have preferred that the pairing include someone such as Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, the Miami-based architects and urban planners who are leaders of the New Urbanist movement of traditional town planning.
“It’s a missed opportunity,” Lykoudis said. “I think it’s not very interesting to have two people who are fairly much on the same side talking to each other. What’s more interesting is to posit one position and then have a dialogue with the public about … how do we value Burnham’s inheritance.”
Materials Monthly in The Architect's Newspaper! · 06/24/2008
JUNE 11, 2008 Architect’s Newspaper:
...collection of innovative themed volumes…a highly accessible library.
Order your 10 issue subscription today!
