Chicago Streetscene: Veined Lantern

click image for larger view

Getting Chicago Culture's Light out from under the Bushel - One Word, Benjamin: Streaming

If you're one of the people who actually check out my monthly calendars, you know - both of you - that there's always a wealth of great lectures, forums and presentations going on.  Like fireflies, they light for a moment and then disappear.  If you live anywhere else in the world other than Chicago, or if you just couldn't make it downtown that day, well, too bad for you.

It took cultural institutions a long time to figure out that whole internet thingy.  And they're still catching up to basic idea that public events needn't be disposables.

At one time, the Graham Foundation was making its lectures available online, but that seems to have fallen by the wayside  To best of my knowledge, the great Art Institute creates custom-made videos, but no streaming.

click images for larger view

Now, the Chicago Architecture Foundation has taken the reins and gone where its more monied brethren have dared not tread.  I knew that last Wednesday's CAF lunchtime lecture with Lesley Slavitt of Roosevelt University and VOA's Christopher Groesbeck discussing the school's spectacular new dorm building was likely to be a good one.  Unfortunately, I couldn't get away (and it sounds like they had a full house), but, picking up on a CAF Facebook post, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that I could also take in the lecture on my computer as it streamed live.

It wasn't anything fancy - just a single camera covering both the speaker and the projected slides, and there was, truth to tell, some major audio distortion problems - but it meant that even those who couldn't be there in person didn't have to miss out.  More to the point, a recording of the lecture is now available on the CAF Facebook page to anyone in the world via on-line streaming.

The technology - in this case via Ustream - isn't expensive.  In its basic form, including ads, it's actually free.  Surely Chicago's other great cultural institutions can afford free.  For a bit more money and effort, you could load the slides beforehand and actually show them in full screen with occasional cuts to the speaker.  You can go High Def or have multiple cameras.  You can even do green screen effects.  Think Alison Fisher lecturing on Bertrand Goldberg while appearing to be hanging by her thumbs off a Marina City balcony. (ok, maybe some bells and whistles you don't really need). 

The point is that the technology is manageable and it's inexpensive.  How long before Chicago's major institutions transcend the 20th century and enter the 21st?

The Chicago Humanities Festival is already on the ball, posting YouTube videos of many of its lectures, including such speakers as Dan Savage, playwrights Tony Kushner and Sam Shepard, as well as the lecture by Jeanne Gang you see below.

Tonight, Tuesday, February 28th, the Chicago Architecture Foundation is offering the latest in its series of Chicago Debates: Beating the Odds: Designing a Casino for Chicago - Lakeside Resort or Bling Bingo in a Box, an all-star event moderated by Edward Lifson with Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, the Reader's Mick Dumke, CNU's John Norquist, Kimbel Goluska and Dennis Judd.  (Apologies for the montage below.)

 It starts at 6:00 p.m., it's free with registration, and it's at the fabulous Chicago Theater.  If you can, you should go.  If you can't, the CAF is streaming it for you, off of their Facebook page.  There's no link for it yet, but I'm betting there will be by 6:00 p.m. Tuesday.

If the CAF and CHF can do it, why not everyone else?  Chicago's riches shouldn't be a local secret.  They should be available to the world.

Erleichterung im Winter

click images for larger view

It's been there,  inverted subversive flowering from the dead branches of Winter, since just before December's longest night, and, as the endless chill darkness finally begins to ebb, blushes our impatience for Spring.

A collaboration between the GSA, Portraits of Hope, and young artists from Comer Children's Hospital at the U of C, and Kenwood Academy, in the empty building at 212 South State.

Chicago Streetscene: Odalisque on State

click image for larger view

Mies to Stop Flowing at IBM lobby?

 click images for larger view

The architecture of Mies van der Rohe is all about openness and sweep, but try to tell that to the current owners of his classic IBM Building, now known by its address, 330 North Wabash.

The preliminary report from the Commission on Chicago Landmarks. issued just before the property became officially designated, referenced "first-floor lobby interior" as one of the structure's historical and architectural features meriting protection.  Apparently something got lost in the translation.  On Monday, I took these pictures of metal framing and drywall going up to partition off the north end of the lobby, where doors and windows have been covered in brown paper to avoid prying eyes.  The Landmarks Commission has been reviewing and approving multiple noncontroversial renovations to 330, mostly on the upper tenant-occupied floors, but also including the recently completed accessible ramp to the plaza off of State and a future additional canopy for the hotel finally going into the space.  I was unable to find any authorization of this construction in the most recent permit review reports.

In December of 2010, Hong-Kong based Great Eagle Holdings announced that they had acquired floors 2 through 13 of 330 N. Wabash for a new 216 room Langham Hotel.  The office portion of the structure is also doing well, on track to being 84% leased after recently landing some major new tenants, including the American Medical Association, in a deal - according to Crain's Chicago Business - that includes naming rights to the building.

Please, someone tell me these new lobby walls are only temporary protection, or that the drywall will be replaced with glass, but I fear they look a little too solid to be anything less than permanent.  Give it a decade or two and another owner will rediscover the value of putting it all back to Mies's original vision.

Creative Placemaking, 5 Big Ideas, North Grant Park Revised, plus Lifson on Prentice, Uhlir on Netsch, Aquilino, Doug Reed - lots more for February

Yeah, I know - I thought we'd be done by now, too, but I was wrong.  We've just added several great new items to the February Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.

This Thursday, the 23rd, in the Millennium Room on the 5th floor of the Chicago Cultural Center, the Great Cities Institute is sponsoring Creative Placemaking: How, Why, Outcomes, presenting the results of a national scan of successful creative placemaking efforts. On Tuesday the 28th at the Chicago Hilton and Towers, the Local Initiatives Support Corporation Chicago will present Building the 21st Century City: 18th annual Chicago Neighborhood Development Awards, with Rahm Emanuel scheduled as keynote speaker, and an afternoon forum 5 Big Ideas for the 21st Century City.  And on Wednesday the 29th, at the Daley Bicentennial Fieldhouse, the Grant Park Advisory Council will both be electing officers (who knew?) and presenting the latest revisions from Michael van Valkenburgh for the North Grant Park Renovation Project.

From Edward Lifson discussing Those Mysterious Curves of Bertrand Goldberg's endangered Prentice Hospital at Häfele on the 23rd, to moderating a session of CAF's Chicago Debates - Beating the Odds: Designing a Casino for Chicago on the 28th, to Roman Catholic Art and Architecture and VOA's Roosevelt Tower, Marie Aquilino at the Graham, and Doug Reed at Crown Hall, all this Wednesday the 22nd,  

Rebecca Graff on Urban Archeology at Charnley-Persky, and a lecture and booksigning for Barbara Lanctot's A Walk Through Graceland Cemetery at Glessner House, all on Thursday the 23rd, Merritt Bucholz at IIT on the 27th, and the Structural Engineers Association of Illinois all-day seminar on Wind Loading and Wind Engineering on Tuesday, the 28th, and a Wednesday, the 29th crammed with Connecting Digital and Physical Space at DePaul, Randolph Tower at CAF, Ed Uhlir on The Legacy of Walter Netsch at the Cliff Dwellers, and a Pocket Guide to Hell at Gallery 400 . .  .

There are still over two dozen great items to check out on the February Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.

Chicago Rediscovered in a Luminous Field, at Cloud Gate only through Monday

click images for larger view

Ever since its unveiling at the opening of Chicago's spectacular Millennium Park in 2004, Anish Kapoor's  Cloud Gate sculpture, more popularly known as Da Bean, has been casting its funhouse reflections of cityscape and observers alike, but this week for the first time the amoeba-like sculpture was turned over to artists to exploit its mirroring potential.

Luminous Field, created by Chicago artists Petra Bachmaier and Sean Gallero of Luftwerk, is an installation of patterns of light and color projected down on Cloud Gate and its plinth by 10 projectors mounted on high towers, to a soundtrack of music composed by Owen Clayton Condon of Third Coast Percussion.  On certain nights, the installation also included concerts, and performers from the Collaboraction theater company.

"We create the stage for you to be there," says the team in this video.


The video shows the projections as a visual whole, which you'll probably have difficulty seeing as the installation has proven immensely popular, filling the "public playground"with people.  Since projectors don't discriminate, the crowd itself becomes a screen, with the presentation existing in three dimensions - on the plinth, in reflection on Cloud Gate, and on the spectators, themselves.

Luminous Field is a compelling demonstration - at once amazing and gentle - of the convergence of art, theater and architecture in the living dynamic of a great city.  Bathing it in striking patterns, Luftwerk helps us see and feel the city which we inhabit, workaday, often unseeing and unfeeling.  A benign bug-zapper for human beings, Luminous Field's light and sound draws in the politely jostling crowd, a flash mob of interacting strangers, individual personalities whose lives may never intersect again, for a small succession of moments finding common purpose in an exercise of the delight of being alive.

Luminous Field runs only Saturday, February 18th, from 6:00 to 10:00 p.m., and Sunday and Monday, the 19th and 20th, from 6:00 to 9:00 p.m.