Saturday News: What Would You put under Block 37? Crain's opens up the Hole, and Wants to Know

photograph courtesy Crain's Chicago Business

          My money lies under pedway

       My money lies under the mall

      My money lies under the pedway

     Please bring back my money to me

The bad news: the millions the city dumped into a hole below Block 37 isn't coming back.  That's how much was spent on a "superstation" for a $1 billion express service to O'Hare that didn't exist and had no plan for existing, and a crossover to a Red Line that doesn't serve any airport, in probably the most expensive place in Chicago to do it.   After dumping $218 million into the project, the city decided cost overruns were so out of control the only thing to do was just abandon construction and seal up the whole thing. 

The good news:  thanks to Crain's Chicago Business, we now know what our money pit monument looks like.  On Wednesday, Greg Hinz and photographer Stephen Serio (no just handing the reporter an iPhone here) were given the first public access to Mayor Daley's batcave - 472 feet long, 68 feet wide, and an average of 28 feet high.  See all the photo's here.

Block 37 groundbreaking ceremony, 2005

The fun news: as Mel Brooks will tell you, ridicule is often the best revenge for pain, and Crain's is now offering you the chance to put your best sarcasm to good use  . . . 

Calling all architects, designers, urban planners, visionaries! What do you see in that space? Tell us in a paragraph or two, and, because we all know a picture is worth a thousand words, send a rendering, too. 

Best of all, there are no prizes and no money, just a promise that the best ideas will be featured in a subsequent article.   Of course, you could play it straight and come up with useful concepts, but why limit yourself?  Submit your most warped concepts to Crain's via email by next Friday, June 21.

Let me get you started . . .

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photo courtesy Crain's Chicago Business; sheep, not

Block 37 Sheep Monument to Chicago Taxpayers and Voters:  The space will be fitted out to house a large herd of sheep that will save money by replacing the current expense of mowing with grazing at Millennium and other nearby parks.  The sheep's passivity will commemorate the passivity of Chicago voters in electing and re-electing hacks, autocrats and actual criminals.  Waste from the animals, to be sent to the city's urban farms, will represent the oratory of elected officials, while ceremonial shearings will symbolize what gets done to taxpayers.  The resulting wool will be pulled over our eyes.

Update [6/28/13]: Here's Greg Hinz's follow-up with the proposals he got from local architects, including shown below, Grant Gibson's Embrance the Hubris, keeping the space useless but giving it patterned gilded interior . . .

More here.

. . . and talking about big abandoned holes and ideas about what to do with them  . . .

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Mine the Gap at the Chicago Spire Hole

More reading on Block 37:

Tales from the Crypt: City to Bury $300 Million Mistake under Block 37
Can Signage Save Block 37?
Block 37 - The Curse Lives!
The Entombment of the Plug Bug
Planning and its Disconnects: The Cautionary Tale of Block 37

Arets, Gang, Gamper, Ghost Facades, Airports, Crosstowns and Engineers Running Amuck - it's the February Calendar!

Oh, yeah, grab your Valentine (hey! - not there) - it's the February Calendar of Chicago Architecture Events.

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February starts off with Wiel Arets talking about his book Autobiographical References at the Graham on Friday the 1st, while Saturday the 2nd, Clare Lyster leads the second Archi-Salon - System Synergy at the Art Institute in conjunction with the exhibition Building: Inside Studio Gang Architects, where curator Karen Kice offers the last gallery talk on Thursday, the 21st.

February 17-23 is National Engineers Week, and CAF recognizes the work of engineers with this month's Wednesday lunchtime lectures: Joshua Freedland of Wiss, Janney Elstner talks about Engineering of the Washington Monument  on the 6th, Joseph Burns of Thornton Tomasetti provides A Look Under Chicago's Block 37 on the 13th, Tom Jacobs of Krueck and Sexton talks about Glass Engineering in Architecture on the 20th, and Terry McDonnell discusses The Revitalization of the (Sears) Willis Tower Skydeck on the 27th 

Of course, every week is Engineers Week at The Structural Engineers Association of Illinois, but this month SEAOI looks at the Wells Street Bridge Construction, Tuesday the 5th at the Parthenon (the timeless landmark, not the building in Athens) and at the Design of Low-Rise Reinforced Concrete Buildings on Thursday the 14th at UBS Tower.  It all leads up to Dr. Shankar Nair's lecture Skyscrapers-Past, Present, Future, sponsored by SEAOI at CAF on Tuesday, the 26th.

Elsewhere, Gensler's Elva Rubio discusses Ghost Façade: 618 S. Michiganfor Landmarks Illinois at the Cultural Center on Thursday, the 21st in the afternoon, while that evening Susan King of Harley Ellis Devereaux talks about the Living Building Challengeat the Chicago Center for Green Technology

Over at Fullerton Hall at the Art Institute, the School of the Art Institute is sponsoring lectures by landscape architect Martha Schwartz on Tuesday the 5th, and Martino Gamper on Monday, the 18th, while the people from the indispensable website Forgotten Chicago mark their 10th anniversary with a lecture at the Cultural Center for Friends of Downtown on Thursday, the 7th.

Remember the Crosstown, the proposal to cut a new superhighway all long the west side?  David Spatz does, and he'll be talking about Crosstown Expressway Politics and the Limits of Urban Power in Metropolitan Chicago at the Chicago History Museum on the 7th, and if you can't afford a car, Christopher Ziemann will be discussing Bus Rapid Transit in Chicago atAPA Chicago on Tuesday, the 26th

The Urban Land Institute Chicago has seminars on Airports, Infrastructure Investment and the Built Environment at the Ridgemoor Country Club on the 8th, and the Chicago Hotel Market in 2013 and Beyond at the Union League on the 28th. Dr. Chris Luebkeman of Arup discusses Designing for the New Normal in the Next Decade on the 13th at AIA/Chicago, which is also sponsoring a February 28th panel with Dan Wheeler, Susan Conger-Austin, Odile Compagnon and others on Architects Balancing Practice and Academic Work.

Architect Stuart Cohen does double duty,  discussing Incremental Architecture, with Julie Hacker, at AIA/Chicago on the 7th, and on the 27th, lectures on The Architecture of Howard Van Doren Shaw for the Institute of Classical Architecture and Art at the Driehaus Museum (a/k/a Nickerson Mansion.)

And finally, early morning on the 29th at the Central Music Hall, Dr. Vladimir Fragile will discuss  This is NOT a Leap Year (You All Need to Go Home Now.)

I'm sure we'll be adding even more, but for now, check out the nearly 50 great items on the February Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.

Time to Kick 2012 Down the Stairs: Our Top Ten Stories of the Year

I really wasn't planning to do this, but I just got a stern letter from the U.S. Department of Blogs, Memes and Spam reminding me that at the end of each year, every blog on the internet must publish some kind of "Top Ten" list or face stiff fines for falling below federal recycling minimums.

So, to keep me free from grand jury consideration, let's start the countdown on our ten most popular posts for 2012:

Number Ten:  An Open Letter to Rahm Emanuel on Bertrand Goldberg's Prentice Hospital - a few truths versus One Big Lie. (10/16/2012)

Number Nine: The Mummy of River North:  Chicago has gone New Hotel Crazy (Just not at LaSalle and Huron)(1/10/2012)

Number Eight:  I've Got You (1913) Under My Skin:  Virtual Restoration at 618 South Michigan. (8/29/2012)

Number Seven:  Can Signage Save Block 37? (7/23/2012)

Number Six: The Invention of Dreams - The Themes of Martin Scorsese's Hugo - Part I (I guess I should finally get around to finishing Part II.) (3/9/2012)

Number Five:  Two Gated Communities:  Will the Lathrop Homes be Drowned in a River of Gentrification? (7/23/2012)

Number Four:  Future Prentice: ideas for saving endangered Betrand Goldberg building subject of Chicago Architectural's Club 2012 Chicago Prize competition. (8/21/2012)

Number Three:  The Architects behind the Architects:  Anne Tyng dies at 9. (1/7/2012)

Number Two: Frontier Outpost:  The Roosevelt Collection and the Future of the Viaduct District.(10/29/2012)

And now - drumroll please - our most popular story of 2012:

Number One:  Four Buildings and  a Funeral - Wrigley: The life and death of a great Chicago corporation as seen through the buildings William Wrigley created for the city in which he made his fortune. (2/8/2012)

There were also several posts from previous years that actually got numbers in 2012 that would have placed them among this year's ten most popular . . .

Two Cats Ponder the Tax Cut Deal:  yes, pictures of cats are what keeps the Internet spinning, and this portrait of my late cat Dante and his companion Chet was our second most popular post in 2012.  (12/6/2010)

Gary Comer College Prep, John Ronan Architects.  Ran the cats a very close race. Our third most popular post in 2012 (9/20/2010) 

On the great stair of the Art Institute, fear and hope stream  beneath your feet in color and light.  The story of Swami Vivekananda's speech at the 1893 World Parliament of Religions.  January 12, 2013 will mark the 150th anniversary of Vivekananda's birth.  Our seventh most popular post of 2012. (10/3/2010)

Caedemon: The End of Cabrini Green  Our tenth most popular post in 2012.  (3/29/2011)




Triskaidekaphobia be damned:  on to 2013!

Can Signage Save Block 37?

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In his email newsletter to his constituents Monday, 42nd ward alderman Brendan Reilly released renderings of proposed new signage for Chicago's beleaguered Block 37.  Apparently, it requires a zoning variance, so Reilly is scheduling a public meeting to invite comments.

The proposal, backed by the Chicago Loop Alliance, hardly seems radical, but it's probably not entirely adequate to the stated objective of securing new tenants to the substantially empty, 300,000-square-foot mall - only 35% leased, and continuing to hemorrhage tenants.  Just this month, Beard Papa closed its pedway cream puffery.   Alternative Shoes pulled out in August and Andy's Custard shut down in July.  Block 37 was acquired for $84 million by Los Angeles real estate firm CIM Group this past April from Bank of America, which had worsened the mall's problems by blocking a lease to the Muvico chain for a multiplex proposed for the hard-to-rent upper-floor space.

Early in the design of the mall, it was to include a wrap-around digital art work, quickly eliminated, leaving reflections of the  Ford Oriental marquee across the street the only animator of Block 37's woven metal facades . .  .

The greatest excitement Block 37 has yet experience remains the over-the-top groundbreaking ceremony then-owner Mills Corporation put on in 2005, complete with quick-change artists . .  .

. . .  dramatic interludes stranger than anything in O'Neill . . .

. . . and a grand finale with Mayor Daley, lame-clad dancers, golden shovels, and a burst of confetti . . .

In September of 2003, when Block 37 was still an empty lot,  Marshall Field's, on the other side of State Street, put on a vertical fashion show, with models rappelling down its Burnham-designed facade. It attracted 12,000 spectators, most of whom flooded into the store afterwards.  The event was named the PR event of the year.  You can see video of it here.

photos courtesy Fancy agency

More than signage, perhaps a little theatricality is what can differentiate what is now a mall without personality.