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Specifications of the new Samsung Galaxy S4 mini

A brief summary of the phone

Samsung recently released her new Samsung Galaxy S 4 Mini, which is a microcosm of the phone Previous  Galaxy S4 phone, which won the admiration of millions around the world. Keep your hands today in this thread the official specifications of the phone according to the official website of the company producer.

Phone Specifications

1. Touch Screen size 4.3 inches.
2. processor:1.7 GHz dual-core .
3.  RAM: 1.5 GB.
4.  Internal memory: 8 GB.
5. Port for MicroSD memory cards and supports an area of up to 64 GB.
6.  camera 8 mega-pixel high-resolution HD
7.  front camera1.9-megapixel for video calls Video Calls.
8. The phone supports wireless connectivity and available Bluetooth 4.0 and NFC
9. The phone have also GPS.
10. Contact the fourth-generation LTE networks, so that it has the support infrared IR LED.
11. Battery capacity of 1900 mAh.
12. Samsung Galaxy S 4 mini-backed Android platform 4.2.2.

Andy and 99 in 66

As Warhol hits Wellington here is an all but forgotten Warhol commercial job from the mid sixties that combines the Te Papa show’s interest in personalities, (Barbara Feldon as Agent 99 in the TV comedy Get Smart was a huge star) with popular culture. Felden’s clothes were designed by Gayle Kirpatrick and the photographs were taken by Roger Prigent. Even in the mid sixties and in spite of his growing fame and sales Warhol was convinced he had to keep the commercial work going. Thanks to assemblyplantmarietta for leading the way.

BIG's Bjarke, Spontaneous Sorkin, Cruz, Feldman, Gil, Manaugh, Pleasure Seeker's, ChiScape, Bucky, FLW, Burnham, Soleri and much more - its the June Calendar!

Get your running shoes on:

a.  There are already over 60 great items on the June Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.

b.  Almost half of them take place in the first week of the month. I guess everyone is rushing towards that summer break

This weekend, there's an extraordinary series of events scheduled in conjunction with Spontaneous Interventions: Design Actions for the Common Good, the great new show at the Cultural Center that was originally mounted at the 2012 Venice Biennale.  There are workshops, panel discussions, curator talks, show-and-tell's. and barn raisings, with the large roster of participants including Teddy Cruz, Stephen Zacks, John Preus, Nathan John, Cathy Lang Ho, Iker Gil, Douglas Burnham, Robyn Paprocki, James Rojas, Robert Feldman, Michael Sorkin, and more.

And then MAS Content has BLDGBLOG's Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley talking about Mines, Fruit, and Military Bases: A Year on the Road with Venue, Monday at Public Works on Damen. On Tuesday, AIA Chicago gives a look at the collaborative installation Grounds for Detroit, and Steve Pantazis, Nick Adams, Anna-Marie Panlilio and Ryan McRae are among the presenters at Pecha Kucha Chicago Volume #26 at Martyr's.

And if you're into sin, on Saturday the 1st at the Newberry Library, Paul Durica and Bill Savage talk about their new book, a reprint of the alternative guidebook to 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago by Day and Night: The Pleasure's Seeker's Guide to the Paris of America.  Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.

Wednesday, lunchtime at CAF, Don Macica of the Chicago Sinfonietta gives a preview of ChiScape, a newly commissioned four-movement work by four different composers with each movement inspired by a different Chicago landmark: Crown Hall, the Pritzker Pavilion, Aqua, and the Modern Wing.  AIA Chicago has a presentation on Saving Buckminster Fuller's Dome Home in Carbondale, and Urban Land Institute Chicago presents this year's Urban Vision Awards at the Bridgeport Arts Center.

Thursday, the Frank Lloyd Wright Preservation Trust has Diane Dillon talking about Nature in the Work of Daniel H. Burnham and Frank Lloyd Wright at Fourth Presbyterian's Gratz Center, while over at the Cultural Center, Friends of Downtown has Greg Borzo discussing Chicago Cable Cars, and back at CAF, the Chicago Architectural Club unveils the winners of its 2013 Burnham Prize Competition, Next Stop: Designing Chicago BRT Stations.

And that's just the some of the events scheduled for June's first week.  (Did I mention CGT's presentation on Backyard Chickens?)

Move forward a week, and it's NeoCon, with keynotes from Bjarke Ingels, Michael Vanberbyl, Holly Hunt, and Lauren Rottet.  There's a reception for SET OFF, SAIC's Graduate Exhbition on Monday the 10th, and the announcement of SEAOI's 2013 Excellence in Structural Engineering Award winners at its annual banquet on Saturday the 8th.

More?  the Graham screening of Paolo Soleri: Beyond Form; Peter Copeland on Tobey Furniture at Second Presbyterian, Martin Adolfsson on Suburbia Gone Wild, the Wells Street Bridge Rehabilitation, Pamela Robertson on Common Cause: Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Frank Lloyd Wright; Kristen Dean of the Foundation for Homan Square at CAF to talk about The ‘Original’ Sears Tower, this year's Illinois Statewide Preservation Conference, and much, much more.

I know we'll be adding still more stuff that we've missed, but for now, check out the over 60 great items already on the June Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.

A bit off

OTN will be taking a couple of weeks off and our last post for a couple of weeks will be tomorrow morning. We will start up again on 19 June from the Venice Biennale. Of course if there is any major news you need to know about in the meantime we'll post anyway. You can find the RRS feed for OTN on the right hand column of the blog.

Top Bill

If it has been hard for the New Zealand representatives in at the Venice Biennale to get any decent press Bill Culbert has broken the damn with this impressive slideshow coverage in Blouin Artinfo who describe Culbert's show as a "must see" and the artist as "an artworld secret for too long".  Four other New Zealanders will exhibit in Venice during the Biennale including Simon Denny who is in The Encyclopedic Palace, curated by the Biennale’s artistic director, Massimiliano Gioni. Denny’s work appears to extend another piece he did for the ICA in London last year.
Images: top Culbert and bottom Denny on show in Venice

Putting the fun into funding

The government's drive for new sources of cultural funding has a poster child in Boosted, the Arts Foundation’s crowd sourcing site. It’s been up for a couple of months now, so how's it going?

OTN joined up and in March chose to support the Christchurch Art Gallery’s effort to fund an outreach programme. The goal was $25,000 in 35 days. The first surprise (ok, we didn’t read the fine print) was that unlike other crowd sourcing sites Boosted banked our contribution a day or so after it was pledged. On other funding systems our dollars were claimed when and if the project reached its target. Of course the big difference with Boosted is that in reality you are donating to the Arts Foundation and not the project. It is the Foundation that decides whether or not to pass the money on to your selected project. OK they are almost certain to do so, but it is not guaranteed. As the Foundation has also undertaken to refund donations when projects don't reach their goal, it must be bracing for the heavy admin job of contacting hundreds of contributors (one unsuccessful project alone had over 55) when this happens. That's on top of providing tax receipts to the 600 plus donors (the average donation, not including Christchurch, is around $100) to successful projects

Back to Christchurch. By the middle of April nothing much had happened. Our project was only five percent funded and its prospects were looking grim. Suddenly a contribution of around $12,000 landed in the kitty via insurance company IAG. Hmmm, that was convenient. Then with three days to go, magic. Another $12,000 popped up, this time from the Christchurch Casino, and game over. It's hard to believe that the Christchurch Art Gallery didn't already have those large donations in its back pocket and was participating as an act of support to the Boosted concept. The downside was the danger of making the other smaller contributors feel rather surplus to requirements.

Tracking projects is definitely an issue for Boosted. There is nothing on the site we could find listing successful projects and unsuccessful ones just vanish in the night although you can cobble some information together from Facebook. We've been through the site but we're not quite sure what happens if a project is over-subscribed. There is some stuff about projects maybe being given more if the AF thinks they would do even better good things with it but it's wrapped in a lot of lawyer language.

And then there's the way the Boosted site stresses that projects have a limited time to raise their funds. Sure, it adds drama, but it's a little ingenuous as a number of 30-day time extensions have been allowed to projects that have only excited the smallest flutter of donor interest.

At the 50-day mark the Arts Foundation announced the funding of six successful projects. “We're thrilled to announce that, since launching, Boosted has raised over $50,000 for the arts! “ (this amount is now $70,000).  While Boosted certainly had raised $50,000 what was not mentioned was that over half of it came from two donations for one project.

A site like Boosted that gathers good art projects that need funding and manages donations is a great idea. But it probably needs some fine tuning to make it a little more donor friendly given that increased philanthropy is the aim. For example a clearer connections between the projects and the cash (not every donor is just in it for the tax deductions), better tracking to show what happens to every project, a cumulative list of past projects and results that stays up for easy reference (at the moment Google seems to be the only way to old projects, so a search box might be good too) and a FAQ that answers potential contributor questions.

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Art in the workplace

Art hard at work in the foyers of the world

Thursday News Edition: AFH rebuilding Moore OK, Landmarking the Ashland Bridge, awards to Hartshorne, Gang

News and links recently received.  Please use the comments section to add your own rumors and gossip

Rebuilding Moore:  

Architecture for Humanity  is “working with local and regional construction professionals to begin
assessments and support rebuilding work after an F-4 tornado ripped through the heart of Moore, Oklahoma and surrounding communities.  Get more information and donate here.

Landmarking for Ashland Avenue Bridge?  

The Chicago Art Deco Society is drumming up public support for the landmarking of the 1937 Ashland Avenue Bridge over the North Branch of the Chicago River, whose striking art deco sculpted bas relief panels, by Scippion Del Campo, each depict a personification of Chicago. Del Campo's also designed the reliefs for the now demolished Ogden Avenue viaduct.  A selection of these panels can be seen at the architecture garden at St. Ignatius . . . 

relief from Ogden Viaduct, now at St. Ignatius

relief from Ogden Viaduct, now at St. Ignatius

CADS says the bridge will be recommended for designation at the June 6th monthly meeting of the Commission on Chicago Landmarks.

Hartshorne Plunkard wins AIA Illinois 2013 Honor Awards

Two projects by Hartshorne Plunkard Architecture (HPA) have received top prizes at the 2013 Honor Awards presented by AIA Illinois. The evening’s highest project honor, the Louis Sullivan Award, went to Randolph Tower in Chicago. This adaptive reuse project successfully transformed the landmarked Steuben Club Building into a mixed-use residential community within the heart of Chicago’s Theater District.

HPA won a second award, the Crombie Taylor Honor Award, for the Hairpin Lofts and Hairpin Arts Center in Chicago.  The Crombie Taylor Award recognizes a project that, through preservation and restoration, has enhanced the natural and built environments of a community.

Read: 
Baron von Steuben Refashioned - Randolph Tower: Restored Faux Gothic with a Candy Core
Would you walk a mile for a Camel?  Art Deco facade newly uncovered, quickly replaced.

Studio/Gang Architects  2013 National Design Award Winner

Cited in the category Architecture Design,  for how “each project resonates with its specific site and culture while addressing larger global themes such as urbanization, climate and sustainability.”  

Gang uses architecture as a medium of active response to contemporary issues and their impact on human experience. Each project resonates with its specific site and culture while addressing larger global themes such as urbanization, climate and sustainability. The firm’s projects range from tall buildings like the Aqua Tower, whose façade encourages building community in the vertical dimension, to the Nature Boardwalk at Lincoln Park Zoo, where 14 acres of biodiverse habitat are designed to double as stormwater infrastructure and engaging public space. 

The juried awards, now in their 14th year, are sponsored by the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum , and will be presented at a gala in New York October 17th.

Read:
Aqua refreshes the Chicago skyscraper
Reimagining Urban Eden: Studio/Gang and the Nature Boardwalk at Lincoln Park Zoo

Moves and More

Water Specialist Peter Mulvaney has joined the Chicago office of SOM. Brininstool + Lynch, which has just unveiled a new rendering for its residential project at 1333 South Wabash in the South Loop, has moved its offices to 1144 West Washington.

Spilling it

If you follow OTN with close attention you'll recall that on or around the end of 2011 we removed a Found post for Nick Spill, conceptual performance artist and curator at the National Art Gallery in the 1980s. Spill considered that his secret life as a bodyguard didn’t bear repeating given some of the agencies he worked for and we guess their high class clients.

Now Spill has come out from behind the security fence and published The way of the bodyguard. According to Spill the book has been written for “those who are curious about the world of bodyguards, those who want to get into the profession” (and let's face it who isn’t? and who doesn’t?) and next week will be available at Amazon for $4.99.

There are many tips along the way. “They [potential bank robbers] looked at my suit jacket, probably worked out I was wearing a bulletproof vest under my white shirt and tie and that I had a large handgun somewhere.” Bulletproof vest, check. Large handgun, check.

And, “ According to verbal judo doctrine an uncocked tongue is more dangerous than an uncocked gun.” Tongue cocked, check.

And, “The way of the bodyguard is to lose your ego.” Uncheck ego, check.

And, finally, “If a new bodyguard shows up to work for me without a flashlight, and a pen and notebook, I send them home.” Pen, flashlight and notebook, check, check, check.

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Direct from Venice! Provocations for Chicago's Urban Future and Spontaneous Interventions, plus still more events for May!

Yeah, I know we're in the last three days of the month, but we're still adding great stuff to the May Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.

Today (Wednesday the 29th),  it's all about movement as DePaul's Chaddick Institute will be presenting a brown bag lunch with Jim Giblin, on A Railroad for the 21st Century:  The Illiana Rail

Bypass Concept.  5:30 p.m. at the Cultural Center, GOOD Chicago Studio is sponsoring a panel, Building the Future of Bus Rapid Transit in Chicago, with Ron Burke, Joseph Iacobucci, Steve Schlickman and Christopher Ziermann, with RedEye's CTA Reporter Tracy Swartz as moderator. Over at the Cliff Dwellers at 6:00 p.m., Friends of Downtown will be giving out their Best of Downtown 2012 Awards.  At 12:15 p.m. the CAF lecture on the Adaptive Reuse of the Viceroy Hotel, with Hume An and Jeff Bone, will also be streamed live here.

We should also mention that there are two new exhibitions open on either side of Randolph.  In the Expo 72 Gallery at - logically enough -  72 East Randolph, there's City Works: Provocations for Chicago's Urban Future, a collaborative effort by five teams whose members including David

Brown, Alexander Eisenschmidt, Studio/Gang Architects, Stanley Tigerman, and UrbanLab's Sarah Dunn and Martin Felsen, which . . .

. . . re-envisions a series of urban environments that are typical for Chicago in order to examine alternatives to the way architecture engages the city . . . [a collaborative effort] determined to find potentials for spatial, material, programmatic, and organization invention within the city.  Curated by Eisenschmidt, the installation involves large urban models of proposals for Chicago as well as an encompassing panorama drawing of historical visionary projects for the city.  Over the duration of the exhibition, the models will travel throughout the gallery, visit the different parts of the city's visionary history, and, finally, come together to create a new collective city.

 Meanwhile, over in the Michigan Avenue galleries of the Chicago Cultural Center, Spontaneous Interventions: Design Actions for the Common Good features 84 urban interventions . . .

. . . initiated by architects, designers, planners, artists and everyday citizens that bring positive change to neighborhoods and cities in addition to a pop-up installation in Millennium Park. Chicago is the first destination of the installation, which served as the U.S. representation at the 13th International Architecture Exhibition at the Venice Biennale (2012). The Chicago installation will recreate the lively exhibition design of

pull-down banners, created by Brooklyn design studio Freecell and Berkeley-based communication design firm M-A-D. The contents of the exhibition have been updated to include more recent and more local projects, more than a dozen from Chicago.

Organized by Cathy Lang Ho on behalf of the Institute for Urban Design, is devoted to the growing movement of architects, designers, artists, and everyday citizens acting on their own initiative to bring improvements to the urban realm, creating new opportunities and amenities for the public. The exhibition received over 178,000 visitors in Venice, and earned a Special Mention from the Golden Lion jury, the first time the United States has been honored in the history of the Venice Architecture Biennale.

Spontaneous Interventions will include a pop-up “outdoor living room” in Millennium Park, designed by Chicago-based MAS Studio, led by architect Iker Gil. The space will serve as an outpost for the exhibition and a venue for exhibition-related programs, including talks, panels, tours, workshops and more. The space will feature a colorful canopy and seating made of salvaged lumber by local artist/woodworker John Preus of Dilettante Studios.

Both of the shows are up for viewing now, and will have their official opening receptions Friday, the same evening the Graham Foundation has a reception with guests the ubiquitous Mr. Tigerman and Board President Hamza Walker to announce the Graham's 2013 Grants to Individuals.

S.I., as we initiates call it, will also be sponsoring an ambitious range of talks, workshops, curator walks, walking tours and symposia in conjunction with exhibition.  There are almost a dozen events this coming Saturday and Sunday, June 1st and 2nd, including but not limited to the participation of Teddy Cruz, Roberta Feldman, Michael Sorkin, James Rojas, Iker Gil, Robyn Paprocki, Douglas Burnham, Nathan John, John Preus, Stephen Zacks, Anne Guiney and others.  It's all on our June Calendar, coming soon, but if you can't wait, you can also check out all the details here.

Stickability

Generous to a fault Justin Paton, who is curating the Bill Culbert exhibition in Venice, devotes one of his blog news stories to the last Venice representative Michael Parekowhai. It seems one of the many stick down signs that were applied to the foot paths is still hanging on two years later. Not bad given that the practice is technicially banned by the Venice officials. You can follow progress via Justin and other members of the Venice team here on the CNZ site NZatVENICE.

Unboxing of the BlackBerry Q10-2014

In this video you can see the unboxing of blackberry Q10

its an amazing phone the blackberry Q10 

will kill Iphone 5 and samsung galxy s4

Living room.

When we were in Montreal we paid a return visit to one of the city’s most audacious buildings. Indeed given that the architect was 23 it probably set some kind of world audacity record. Habitat67 was constructed as a pavilion for the Montreal Expo of the same year. Its architect Moshe Safdie was only just out of architecture school and working with Louis Kahn in Philadelphia when he scored the commission.

The complex is astonishing, a twentieth century castle meets geometry. As the identical modules turn and reverse on each other they show how important the spaces between things and around things are to art and architecture. But so unnerving to to see though such a massive structure as it frames the sky and trees beyond. And it is massive. At opening it comprised 354 apartments and although some have now been joined together it has not affected the external appearance. Indeed it's hard to think of Habitat as a single structure so complex are its forms and the connections between them.
 
Initially it was intended to provide affordable housing but that was one ambition not realised. It is now a very private upscale housing complex with the expansive courtyards and natural stairs and its entry pathways tightly guarded. In 2009 Habitat67 was recognised as a heritage building but from what we could see Montreal's climate is not kind to concrete. There are many signs of stress and partial decay. Still the complex is an imposing achievement and still a powerful model for urban housing.

Just along the road is another structure built for Expo67 the Montreal Biosphere, Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome.  In architecture you would have to say 1967 was a very good year.
 
You can take a peek inside Habitat67 via this Leonard Cohen music video

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Looking up at the down

In Montreal we were thinking about Niel Dawson

What Should you do if your phone fell in water ?

This is some  of steps that you should undertake if your phone fell in the water or tea 

to avoid doing other things, will lead to the destruction of your phone follow the following steps ....

1. Do not try to run the phone to know if it works or not, this is the main reason for the destruction of your phone, what you have to do is scan your phone and try to dry the water.

2. If you can remove the back cover of the phone to remove the battery do so and if you can not no problem.

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Site specific

One thing you can say about NZ's museums and art museums is that we haven’t pillaged too much stuff from other countries - too late, too small, too distant. With strong Maori leadership we're also ahead in the repatriation of human remains although it’s estimated that around 500 Maori ancestral remains are still held overseas. And you do have to wonder why, say, a small university museum in Montreal needs to display the mummified body of an Egyptian or a treasured and sacred fetish figure from Africa. 

And then there's the works that will never be returned, the countless religious paintings and icons and sculptures that have been stripped from their context and narratives and put in museums. When you do get to see a great artwork in its original setting it's a startling experience. 

We've just been to St John’s Co-Cathedral in Valetta and met up with Caravaggio’s masterpiece The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist.  Ok, it's not exactly accessible, but an extraordinary visual reward is guaranteed. Painted for a side chapel in the Cathedral used by the Knights of Malta, this painting hangs behind the altar exactly where Caravaggio intended. It even witnessed the day the Knights of Malta gathered to defrock the artist after another unpardonable escapade. Like many other art pilgrimages it has its challenges but you’ll never see anything like it anywhere else.
Image: Sure it’s behind a sign and you share the space with a small crowd but there it is, Caravaggio’s The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist right where it belongs.

How Do You Get to AMA Plaza? High-tech, decline, and revival at Mies van der Rohe's IBM Building

click images for larger view

The second of what now looks to be three parts.  Read Part One - Apotheosis of the Skyscraper: The Rise of Mies van der Rohe's IBM Building 

The Cutting Edge Technology behind the IBM Building

Functionally, Mies van der Rohe's IBM Building was ahead of its time, and to a large degree, it was because of the client.   By the time construction began on its new Chicago Headquarters in 1969, IBM was booming.  Over the previous decade, its workforce had doubled to a quarter-million people, and sales had nearly quadrupled, to over $7 billion. With profits of nearly a billion dollars, there plenty of cash for a trophy tower like the one they hired Mies to design, which consolidated its 4,500 Chicago area employees from 15 different locations into one structure. 

After suffering criticism over how, in the glare of the sun, the almost floor-to-ceiling glass at the two towers of his path-breaking 860-880 North Lake Shore Drive heated up the apartments like ovens, Mies wondered aloud in who-will-rid-me-of-this-troublesome-priest fashion why someone didn't come up with a solution.  By the time IBM got going, they had.

At the IBM, the windows were bronzed-tinted both to color co-ordinate with the facade's bronze-anodized aluminum and to filter out UV rays.  Instead of the then standard single-glazed, metal

curtain wall, which leaked unwanted heat and cold into the interior, windows at the IBM were double-glazed, an insulating air pocket between the panes.  A plastic PVC thermal barrier was

photograph: Commission on Chicago
Landmarks Designation Report

inserted between the exterior and interior layers of the curtain wall, blocking the radiation of heat or cold along the metal.

One of the great enemies of all buildings is moisture.  Skyscrapers compounded the problem. As high winds rush along the facades, air pressure rises along the surface relative to the interior, forcing water through the countless tiny imperfect gaps.  At the IBM, the small holes were made  a deliberate part of the design, engineered into the curtain wall to direct the air to flow into the voids of the panels, equalizing  pressure and minimizing condensation.

The HVAC system, designed by co-architects and structural engineers C.F. Murphy, was equally innovative.  The IBM was all-electric, including the boilers.  Working with Carrier Corp., a state-of-the-art air conditioning system was developed that captured and recycled heat generated by workers and computers - including two full floors of mainframes in IBM's data center - and redirected it where needed.  A weather station on the roof and a series of monitors throughout the building streamed data to a central IBM 1800 series computer that continuously analyzed the feedback to optimize conditions floor-by-floor and space-by-space.  The series 1800 also ran the IBM's security system, described admiringly, if a bit anxiously, as ‘practically Orwellian.’

None of this came cheap.  “The building was . . . fairly expensive at that time,” recalls Dirk Lohan, who as Mie's grandson had come from Germany to Chicago in 1957 to work in his grandfather's office.  “I think it cost $33.00 a square foot.”  (The gold - bronze? - standard was Mies's Seagram Building in New York, which a decade earlier had come in at $45.00 per square foot.)  The curtain wall alone cost 35 to 50% more than typical single-glazed facades of the time.

It quickly paid off, however, especially after the 1973 Oil Embargo sent energy prices soaring.  In the three coldest months of the winter of 73-74, the IBM used 42% less energy to heat than the average of a sample of 13 comparable buildings.  The structure won the Federal Energy Commission's first Midwest Excellence Award for Energy Conservation.  The aluminum cladding proved much more durable than the painted steel of the Federal Center, which required expensive rehabs over the last decade.

In 2002,  the IBM found way to become more sustainable when Thermal Chicago Corporation constructed their P5 water plant under the plaza, a 15,000 ton capacity facility that's part of what's described as the ‘world's largest interconnected district cooling system’.  Thermal Chicago provides a constant supply of 34 degree water to over 45,000,000 square feet of space in 100 buildings, via a 14 mile system of pipes connected to five different plants throughout the Loop and River North.  Heat exchangers are used to transfer the cold from the Thermal Chicago system to the pipes of the water systems of the served buildings.  Unlike the other four plants, which cool water with ice generated in the middle-of-night when energy charges are at their lowest, the 1,600-ton Trane chillers in the P5 facility under IBM Plaza pull chilly water from the Chicago River.

map courtesy Thermal Chicago Corporation

The final working drawings for the IBM were finished in July of 1969.  The following August 17th, Mies van der Rohe died at Wesley Memorial Hospital, aged 83.  On October 22, 1971, the first of 2,100 IBM employees began to move into the new building.   Less than a year later, September 20, 1972, a band played and a fireboat shot streams of colored water as a large crowd that included IBM Chairman T. Vincent Learson and Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley gathered on the plaza for the IBM Building's formal dedication and the unveiling of sculptor Marino Marini's bust of Mies, which remains on display in the lobby to this day.

IBM got away with not including the minimum of 402 parking spaces Chicago zoning required for a  new building the size of their's by developing a garage on a smaller site just across Kinzie to the north, originally purchased for a possible second future tower.   The resulting $3.5 million, 12-story IBM Self-Park, designed by architect George Shipporeit of Lake Point Tower fame, may be the perfect bustle - detached by a cross street. As we've written previously in The Ninotchka of River North, the structure, with its facade of closely-spaced strips of Corten steel, is reviled by many.  During the day it can look a bit monolithic.  At night however, when the Corten strips dissolve under the back-lighting into a delicate cage animated by the moving headlights, it becomes a stunning backdrop to the IBM.  As Mies hides structure behind an I-beamed curtain wall, Schipporeit reveals it framing voids of light.  To me, the artistry and the counterpoint makes this one of the most magical places in Chicago.

The Agony of Real Estate and the Years of Decline

In 1996, IBM sold the building to Blackstone Real Estate Advisors for $120 million.   In 2009, Blackstone turned around and sold it to Prime Group Realty Trust for $239 million.  Between then and now, Prime has been through a succession of actions  - some successful, some abortive, often accompanied by heated litigation - to sell, buy back or take back the company that make a fascinating story that's simply too dizzying to recount here.  Prime's continuing control of the IBM is the only constant.

At the dawn of the new Millennium, a negotiation between two of the new century's more energetic scoundrels saw Conrad Black, a/k/a Baron Black of Crossharbour,  a/k/a federal prisoner number 18330-424, capping his looting of the Sun-Times by selling its building to Donald Trump, who wasted little time in pulling it down to dust.

Chicago Sun-Times Building catching on fire during demolition

Suddenly, IBM tenants were facing the prospect of no longer gazing out their windows past the low-slung Sun-Times structure towards the gleaming, cream-colored elegance of the Wrigley Building, but into the rooms of and residences of the telescoping Trump International Hotel and Tower, soaring 40 stories and nearly 500 feet above the IBM's rooftop.  Before an office component was dropped from the Trump project, it was reported it was being marketed to IBM tenants by reminding them how the Trump would be blocking their views.

Gradually, IBM's presence at its namesake building declined.  In 2005, the last 700 employees relocated to the new Hyatt Center on Wacker, leaving behind 280,000 square feet of vacant space and a building now renamed after its address, 330 North Wabash.   Shortly thereafter, mega-law firm Jenner & Block, at 325,000 square feet 330's largest tenant, announced they would be leaving for a new skyscraper at 353 North Clark designed, ironically enough, by the firm of Dirk Lohan.  A deal with Mesirow Financial to become the IBM's new anchor tenant and assume naming rights also fell through when Mesirow decided instead to join Jenner & Block at 353 North Clark.

Prime Group, visions of doom dancing in their head, went through a succession of unsuccessful fixes.  First it toyed with selling off the building in pieces as office condos.   When that went nowhere, the plan became converting floors 3 through 14 into 275 condominiums, and switching more floors to residential as they became vacant.  When that went nowhere, Prime teamed up with Oxford Capital to turn the floors into a hotel.  In the fall of 2007, they launched an effort to get 330 North Wabash made an official Chicago landmark in order to qualify for the lucrative Class L  incentives, offering a partial 12 year holiday from property taxes.  Despite intimations from Landmarks Committee Chairman Alderman Anthony Beale that he would block designation until he received assurances that the hotel would be unionized, official designation was approved February 6, 2008, making 330 North the newest building in Chicago to ever become a landmark.

In March of 2008 it was announced that a joint venture between LaSalle Hotel Properties and Oxford Capital was paying $46 million to acquire floors 2 through 13 plus a portion of the first floor for a ‘super-luxury’335-room hotel, which they expected to spend $185 million in creating.

You have to wonder.  Was the name the partners chose for their joint venture - Modern Magic Hotel LLC - a kind of Freudian slip betraying their actual appraisal of their prospects?  Modern Magic wasted no time in getting to work on the building, removing beams to create two-story public spaces for the hotel.  It was a time of record occupancy and room rates, but Chicago's hospitality industry was already working feverishly to remedy that prosperity with 9,000 planned, under construction, or proposed new hotel rooms.  The hotel at 330 was already late to the party, and when the great crash came, the development was put on ice.


So, are you still with me on all this?  Anyway, that's how things stood until December of 2010, when Langham Hotels actually thought they could see the magic in Modern Magic, and bought out LaSalle and Oxford for $58.8 million, an $8 million loss from what the joint venture had already spent on the purchase and build-out.  Oxford retained a minority interest.

And within a year, everything was coming up roses at 330 North Wabash.  Law firm Latham & Watkins LLP announced they were leaving Willis Tower to take up 160,000 square feet at IBM 330 North Wabash, and another 100,000 square feet was leased by association management firm SmithBucklin, leaving the Equitable Building at 401 North Michigan.

Then, in December of last year, le bon temps really started to roulé, when the American Medical Association announced it would be abandoning its namesake 1990 skyscraper designed for them by noted Japanese architect Kenzo Tange to take up to 300,000 square feet at 330 North Wabash, encompassing much of the space Jenner & Block had left empty.  When they officially move in this coming September 3rd, the building will take on its third name:  AMA Plaza.

The AMA may be the frosting on the cake, but the starting point for the turnaround at IBM Plaza, 330 N. Wabash, AMA Plaza was the Langham.  That's another great story, and it will be the third and final - we promise - installment in this series. With lots of pictures.  We promise.  And if you're thinking this series is really, really long, remember that War and Peace, in the Pevear./Volokhonsky translation, comes in at 1,273 pages.

Next: The Apotheosis of the Skyscraper - How Mies's Spartan IBM Gained New Life by Going Soft

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Part One -  Apotheosis of the Skyscraper:  The Rise of Mies van der Rohe's IBM Building.

Micromax A110Q Canvas 2 a new phone with high specification

The Micromax Indian Company announced  on  version of the new phone "Micromax A110Q Canvas 2", which comes with a big-screen size 5 inches of quality screens "FWVGA" where you view the contents of the graphics and texts written purity equal to

 (480 * 854 )pixels technology display the "IPS" which allows vision more clearly.Phone and quad-core processing unit of the type "MT6589" and comes with an internal memory capacity of 4 GB of RAM "RAM" with a capacity of 1 GB, the phone also supports the operating system software and applications Android "Jellybean 4.2"Has been providing electrical battery with a capacity equal to 2,000 mAh in addition to the rear camera accurately pictorial equal to 8 mega pixel camera with flash "LED Flash" to help capture images in places insufficient lighting in addition to the other front camera 2 mega pixel camera.

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IPhone5 come with price 99 dollar only

To every fan of apple  we quote you some rumors contained on the New iPhone 5 that   Made of plastic to be at a low price, which is expected to come in  a variety of colors, including gold, orange, white, gray, pink, green, and blue as well as yellow.This is based on the report, that come from  Japanese blog Macotakara and  apple working   to produce 1000 phone of low cost iPhone and will appear in next june  for tests , and scheduled to be announced officially by Apple in September 2013 and will be sold in markets including approximately $ 99 or $ 149.

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Model behaviour

‘It was like being a civil servant, except that you were naked.’
Quentin Crisp on his time as an artist’s model between 1942 and the early 1970s