CTA's Attack of the Street Walruses

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 This is what $100 million looks like.  It's a rendering of the replacement 8800-square-foot mezzanine for the Red Line Clark and Division subway station, originally opened in 1943 and largely unrejuvenated ever since.  That's up from the $86.6 million price tag quoted in a CTA press release just this past January.  If the new station lasts as long as the old one, and assuming half of those using the station will be boarding and paying a fare, it will cost 50 cents for every one of the 4,000 per-day passengers over the next 70 years.  (The CTA is projecting usage will double.)   But then again, a CDOT flyer distributed by 42nd ward Brendan Reilly this past weekend quotes a cost of $41.3 million, so we've already made over half of the expense disappear.

As with the Chicago and, most recently, Grand stations on the Red Line subway, the contrast between the old, dank and dreary stations and their replacements is like night and day.  The platforms, while constrained to the original size, appear more spacious and welcoming, and the mezzanines are, in physical fact, vastly increased in size and openness.  Below ground, everything is sleek and modern.  It's only when you move above ground that you get this . . .

Call it Daley retro.  Word got out during the reign of Richard M. Daley that the mayor was partial to "traditional" design, and while the rap wasn't entirely deserved, the result was a lot of unnecessary pandering with such things as the Botero-limbed bus shelters designed by Robert Stern, and the street enclosures for escalators and stairs up from the subway.

The best that can be said about them is that they're lighter than the box they came in . . .

Other than that, could anything be more maladroit for a city that prides itself on its design?  Encountering one of these objects is like walking down the street and finding a giant walrus lounging on the sidewalk, loudly braying at passersby.

Is this really the best we can do?  As proven by the recently opened Ross Barney Green Line stop at Morgan Street, and this design concept for the intended Loop L station at Washington and Wabash . . .

. . . the answer is, clearly, no.  The way they dominate the sidewalk view, these subway entrances are more than just enclosures - they're emblems, and brazenly dishonest ones, at that.  They misrepresent the bright, streamlined design to be found in the actual station below.  In this "less is more" city, they're like giant billboards refuting Chicago's pretensions to architectural excellence.  On pain of fines, you're expected to clean up after your dog no matter how big the turds, but these huge, stinking - and inescapable - excrescences seem to enjoy blanket immunity. to plop at will.

At these prices, the CTA and CDOT need to step up to the plate.  Chicago deserves better.

Tonight: Stanley Tigerman in conversation with Robert Somol at UIC

You may have noticed the August calendar isn't up - (Does anyone other those involved in the events covered even read the thing?) - but here's a heads up that tonight, 6:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. in Gallery 100 of the Art  and Architecture Building at UIC, Stanley Tigerman will confer, converse and otherwise hobnob with UIC School of Architecture Dean Robert Somol.

It's just the first of four conversations - same time and venue - "on topics that are vital to the success of making ideas happen in the city" that will see Martin Felsen in conversation with Alexander Eisenchmidt on Tuesday, the 14th, Sean Lally in conversation with program director Kirk Wooller on Monday the 20th,  and Andrew Zago in conversation with Eisenschmidt, on Tuesday, the 21st.

It's all part of a collaboration with London's Architectural Association  and UIC as the 2012 visiting school, Campaigning Architecture, a "10-day international design workshop that will expose, explore, and develop multiple ways for campaigning architecture – enabling participants to combine the potential of design intelligence with the strategic power of propaganda, in order to get things done in the city."

Batcolumn vs. Bridgecolumn

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batcolumn - 1977, Claes Oldenburg, sculptor, 101 feet high (600 West Madison)

bridgecolumn - 1908, William H. Finley, Assistant Chief Engineer, 170 feet high (Carroll Street at the Chicago River)

Burberry Facade Plaid - Limited Time Only!

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The metal framing that will carry the facade elements of the new Burberry store on North Michigan Avenue is being put in place.

Enjoy it now.  This tan, white and black polychrome plaid, with scaffolding overlays, will disappear as the structure nears complettion.

Already, highly reflective black tinted glass pieces are appearing within the frames.

They're not windows.  The frame is being affixed to the solid wall beneath.

The staircase on Ontario Street that will be a highly visible part of the completed design is already in place, in a well of wallboard whose own plaster geometrics will soon disappear under final finishes.

Eventually, the black of the window glass will take over the whole of solid portions of the facades, as illustrated in the rendering above,  taken from the invaluable skyscraperpage.com website.  The Dark Knight of Michigan Avenue descends.  Raincoat included.

Portrait of a City at Warp Speed: The Eighth Greatest Film Ever? Man With a Movie Camera at Doc Films tonight

The ten highest ranked movies of the just released 2012 edition of the British Film Institute's once-a-decade poll of The Top 50 Greatest Films of All Time is pretty much a list of the usual suspects: Rules of the Game, Tokyo Story, Sunrise, Passion of Joan of Arc, etc.  The big news was dethronement of long-time Number 1 Citizen Kane with Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo.  Discuss among yourselves.

An even greater jump, however, was a film that went from 27 in 2002 to number 8 this year.  Dziga Vertov's Man With a Movie Camera is a wildly ambitious 1929 silent documentary that is nothing less a picture of what it is to be alive as captured through documenting a day in a great city (in this case mostly Odessa, but some other cities used, as well.)  Coupled to long stretches of conventional montage are bursts of the avant garde techniques that would come to define cutting edge cinema: multiple exposures, jump cuts, freeze frames and more.

Streetscapes, storefronts, racing trains, planes, trams and fire trucks a beautiful woman dressing, trams emerging from their sheds, shooting galleries, dancers, symphonies, posters, advertisements, a walking tripod -  all the forms of urban human life, and all the stages birth to death.  In 68 minutes.

And we also see both endpoints of the story - the intrepid cameraman as he seeks and sets up his shots, and the audience watching him on film as he shoots film while riding a motorcycle.

It's a remarkable study of architecture inhabited.  Not the carefully composed hero shots of individual buildings, but the fabric of buildings placed within a city, engaging with the human beings who designed them, and use them, if only as a backdrop,  Vertov's restless camera often moves through the streets just as we as pedestrians move through the streets. 

While you can view the entire film on You-Tube, tonight you also have a rare opportunity to see Man With a Movie Camera as it was meant to be scene, on a large screen - where the images of buildings can scale life-size - and with an audience, so you can be a spectator in a theater watching an audience in a theater watch Vertov's film.  It screens tonight at 7:00 p.m. at doc films. in the Max Palevsky Cinema at Ida Noyes Hall at the U of C, 1212 West 59th.  $5.00.

Full Stop: Wiel Arets new Dean at IIT

As we reported on Friday that Edward Lifson had reported on Thursday, IIT has now made the official announcement that Wiel Arets is the new Dean of the College of Architecture.  As the press release reads:

Illinois Institute of Technology Provost Alan Cramb announced today the appointment of Wiel Arets as the new dean of the IIT College of Architecture. Born in the Netherlands, Arets, an internationally acclaimed architect, educator, industrial designer, theorist, and urbanist, is known for his academic progressive research and hybrid design solutions. He is currently the professor of building planning and design at the Berlin University of the Arts. His architecture and design practice, Wiel Arets Architects, has multiple studios throughout Europe and its work has been nominated for the European Union’s celebrated ‘Mies van der Rohe Award’ on numerous occasions.

Arets, who was dean of the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam from 1995-2002, will join IIT this fall and will lead an academic program originally shaped by the vision and work of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Considered by many to be one of the founders of modern architecture and design, Mies chaired the IIT architecture program from 1938-1958 and  designed the IIT Main Campus, home to many of his iconic structures including S.R. Crown Hall.

Arets currently has projects under construction throughout Europe and Japan, including the Allianz Headquarters in Zürich, Switzerland, Amsterdam Centraal Station’s IJhal, the Schwäbischer Verlag in Ravensburg, Germany and the A’ House in Tokyo. His many distinguished projects include the library on the Uithof campus of Utrecht University, the Academy of Art & Architecture in Maastricht, the Euroborg Stadium in Groningen, and the Hedge House in Wijlre, the Netherlands.
“The College of Architecture at Illinois Institute of Technology has a global reputation and attracted outstanding candidates for dean from leading programs worldwide. It is indicative of the position of the IIT College of Architecture that we have found such an accomplished architect to lead the school in a new direction,” said Cramb.

Arets has been a guest professor at many of the world’s preeminent architectural universities, including the AA London, Columbia University and Cooper Union—and served on the Advisory Council of Princeton University from 2003-2012. He graduated from the Technical University of Eindhoven in 1983, where he obtained his Master of Science in Architecture . . .

Facebook killer trick : How to find your facebook Account ID?

Do you know , how to get your facebook account id? Dear Facebook users, this is an awesome way out to find out your account id. 

Now , before we move, lets find out what is a facebook account id. Each user is unique and has an unique id in facebook. A facebook account id is the system generated numbers that is unique. It is automatically created when you create your face-book account. This is uniquely stored in the server. It identifies the name of the user. This id is shown in the url of the facebook account when you log in the website.

The ways that you can use to find out the unique face book account id are: 

1. Just simple way. In your web-browser type an address "http://graph.facebook.com/user.name" and you will see the string "id": "XXXXXXX"
   XXXXXXX - is Facebook account ID.  
2. In your Face-book profile page. Have a look at the address bar or the URL in the browser. It displays in this manner, "http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=XXXXXXX" The "XXXXXXX" is your unique account id. 
3. There is one more way out, just try this awesome way out. You will love it. Just type "http://

whatismyfacebookuserid.com" in your web browser. You will get directed to this website and here you can click on "Find out how". Then you will have to login to your account and the result gets displayed, showing "Your Facebook User ID is:XXXXXXXXXXXXX".