big.dk

click images for larger view

Bjarke Ingels intends to write a thriller built on the unnatural deaths of Antonio Gaudi, Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn, with a climatic chase atop his proposed W57 tower in Manhattan, pictured above.
He is 37 years old.  He is the current pop superstar of global architecture.  His firm is named BIG.  His url is www.big.dk.  His work is confident and unspoiled.  When he thinks of the large projects on his drawing boards, he is haunted by the spectre of Santiago Calatrava's doomed Chicago Spire.  The Lego Towers, the spectacular model for which we wrote about with no small delight when the Graham mounted a great show on Ingels and his firm back in 2008, never got built, but he's found his Herbert Greenwald in Danish developer Per Høpfner.  Ingels is brash and brilliant and he always gets the almond in his rice pudding.  He has many girlfriends.  (And he was always quietly arrayed/And he was always human when he talked/But still he fluttered pulses when he said/"Good-morning"/and he glittered when he walked.)  He loves Charlie Kaufman, particularly the scene in Adaptation where Charlie's supposedly duller twin brother Donald observes, "You are what you love, not what loves you."  All these things and many more I learned in Ian Parker's 14 page, lightly illustrated profile of Ingels in the current New Yorker, which is, unfortunately, not universally available on-line, but worth shelling out the $5.99 if you're not a subscriber.

Lookalike

In a post we’d only get away with on Saturday here’s the inside story on Barbie. “I think it may be time” says Jason Freeny as he starts off on a Visible Barbie jag. The building of the Damien Hirst lookalike is shown in a step-by-step process on Frenny’s Facebook page which you can reach it via his website here.

Prentice on Landmarks Agenda "sometime". So why am I depressed?

Both Deanna Issacs of the Chicago Reader and Ron Grossman of the Chicago Tribune report that at Thursday's meeting of the Commission on Chicago Landmarks, chairman Rafel Leon said Prentice will be on their agenda by the end of the year. 

This should be a major victory.  Why does it smell to me like a death knell?

Consider:
1.  Issacs uses the phrase, "will be on the commission's agenda"; Grossman "will address the issue". If "address the issue" is what Leon actually said, it leaves open the possibility of something short of normal consideration.
2. Leon's statement was a stratagem to preface his announcement that he would again forbid any discussion of Prentice at Thursday's meeting.
3. No date for discussion has been announced.  Why?  If you're going to do it, why play games about when?
4. Explaining why Prentice was yanked off the agenda in June of 2011, Leon said, according to Grossman, "Mayor (Rahm) Emanuel was in office less than two weeks"  This is contradicted by a June 2, 2011 report where the Trib's Blaim Kamin wrote  . . .

Jonathan Fine, executive director of Preservation Chicago, said he got a call from Chicago's landmarks chief, Brian Goeken, at 10 a.m. informing him of the news. Fine said Goeken told him that Northwestern University requested that old Prentice be taken off the agenda.

5.  Grossman quotes Leon again claiming that the Commission, Northwestern and preservationists have been working behind the scenes, but a Tuesday report by Grossman quoted Landmarks Illinois President Bonnie McDonald that there was only one such meeting, over a year ago, and that Northwestern continues to refuse to consider alternatives to demolition.
6.  Grossman also reports that the manager of Purple Strategies Chicago office, Chris Mather, is a former Rahm Emanuel press spokesperson.
7.  42nd Ward alderman Brendan Reilly again on Thursday declined to take a stand on Prentice.

Brendan Reilly has surprised me before, when in 2008 he announced a deal that sidetracked Northwestern University from its stated intention of demolishing Jarvis Hunt's Lake Shore Athletic Club for a Lucien Lagrange highrise.

I'd like to be surprised again, but what I'm seeing in all the points above is that the fix is in.  All those "behind the scenes" meetings which McDonald denies really took place probably did take place.  Preservationists were not invited, and the agenda was not how to save Prentice, but to how best spin its destruction.

When Rahm Emanuel rebuilt the Landmarks Commission with his own six appointees, none were architects.  The closest he got was the re-appointment of the extraordinarily talented landscape architect Ernest Wong. who, the last time the Commission was faced with a contentious issue - all the way back in 2008 - abstained from the vote that defeated a proposal to demolish the landmark Farwell Building, and then when the matter was brought up again two months later, was one of three commissioners to change their vote to "Yes" to sanction demolition.

Emanuel's other appointments were a former alderman, a former assessor, a professor of obstetrics and a restaurateur.

Right now, here's what I'm thinking.  The reason that Prentice has been kept off the Landmarks Commission agenda is because Emanuel didn't have the votes.  Using the Landmark's ordinance criteria for qualifying for landmark designation, Prentice is close to a slam dunk, and with the grassroots effort to save Prentice in full flower, commissioners would have a hard time to vote, in good conscience, against preserving it.

I'm thinking that in those fifteen months of delay, the city has been working with Northwestern to provide cover for Prentice's destruction. 

I would not like to be a member of the landmarks commission right now.  My bet is that the screws are being put to those people big time.  The massive PR campaign being mounted by Northwestern (in Grossman's report, a "city hall source" makes a point of declaring they've gotten 1,200 emails and letters from that campaign) is diverting attention from what should be the legal focus (does or does not Prentice Hospital qualify for landmark protection) to absurd but time-tested apple-pie contentions that if Prentice isn't destroyed, jobs will vanish, Northwestern's new research center will evaporate, and thousands will die from cures never found.

And when - and only when - they know they have enough commissioners in their pocket, the city will put Prentice on the Landmarks agenda, and Leon will preside over a meeting in which landmark designation is defeated.  The Commission on Chicago Landmarks will again prove itself an empty shell, and reveal that it's purpose is not to save landmarks, but to provide cover for their destruction.

I want badly to be proven wrong. 

Astroturf and shady polls - the latest in Northwestern's battle to destroy Prentice

click images for larger view

It may get an "F" for truthfulness, but Northwestern University certainly gets an "A" for industriousness in its increasingly mendacious PR campaign to keep Bertrand Goldberg's Prentice Hospital off the agenda of the Commission on Chicago Landmarks.

On Thursday, Northwestern issued a press release, Poll Shows Overwhelming Support for Northwestern's Plans to Build New Research Center, with 72% of the 507 respondents saying "a new medical research center on the site of the old Prentice Women's Hospital in Chicago".

Except, of course, that the poll was anything but unbiased.  The press release says respondants were polled "after hearing arguments from both sides."  From whom?  Northwestern?  The words "Bertrand Goldberg", "potential landmark", "Frank Gehry", "Jeanne Gang" (or the names of any of the other 60+ world class architects who have spoken out on the need to save Prentice) appear nowhere in the press release, so forgive me for suspecting that "argument from both sides" is anything other than a sham.

But wasn't this an independent poll?

Ah, no.  It was commissioned by an entity called Purple Strategies.  Who is Purple Strategies?

Purple Strategies is a PR/lobbying firm.  The "People" page on their website is full of Beltway political operatives, but, tellingly, a client list seems nowhere to be found.  Could Northwestern be the first entity willing to publish the fact that they're using them?

Let their website tell the story:

Our approach is to personalize the issue. When constituents feel connected to a movement, they will energize around an issue. But this doesn’t happen overnight. We work with our clients to create the right grassroots infrastructure before a fight arises.

Sounds pretty much like astroturf, the practice of fabricating grass roots support, doesn't it?

And the polling?  This is from the bio of Doug Usher, Managing Partner, Purple Insights . . .

At Purple, Usher has developed custom research methodologies that provide complete integration between opinion research and successful communications execution.

Complete integration?  As in, designing the research to insure a predetermined result?

Of course, I could be wrong.  If Purple Insights releases the methodology and its question list, I'll be glad to post it here in full, and if it shows that the questions were, in fact, not a stacked deck, (plus or minus 4.4 percent), I'll be happy to apologize.

Until then, this looks like just another phony brick in Northwestern's increasingly massive wall of deception.

The "coalition" of architects supporting destroying Prentice lists only three names:  Jeff Case, Principal, Holabird & Root (H&R's website lists four principals and three associates - was Case the only one they could get?), plus Dan Mitchell and Todd Halamaka of HOK.  Fine people, all, but a rather poor counterpoint to Jeanne Gang, John Ronan, William Baker, Frank Gehry, Doug Farr, Ron Krueck, Brad Lynch, Joe Valerio, Dan Wheeler, Ross Wimer, David Woodhouse, Mark Sexton, Donna Robertson, Robert Somol, Bjarke Ingels, and many more at the same level of accomplishment, who oppose the demolition.  (Strangely enough, Crain's reported earlier that Jim Goettsch had also signed on to the anti-Prentice efforts.  He's a true heavyweight, and it's a mystery why Northwestern didn't use his name in the press release.)

The rest is a "good old boys" coalition of Chicago's power insiders, operating behind closed doors, free from public scrutiny, united in subverting due process - fifteen months and counting -  to keep the discussion of whether or not Prentice deserves landmark protection out of the one forum where it legally belongs:  The Commission on Chicago Landmarks.

The good old faker spirit

"I looked upon my activities as a contest of wits with world experts, it was intoxicating and I enjoyed every moment of it."

American art forger, Ken Perenyi

spam

unvarnished facts, reckless guesswork, insinuations and possible inventions that have landed in overthenet’s email:the new building for an art gallery next to te papa has been given the green light with a retiring te papa board member to be actively engaged in the project • tony de latour has had his name pegged to one of the glittering arts prizes • simon denny has been dropped from the exhibition showcasing the 'best of aotearoa’s young, mid-career and senior artists' funded by the nz ministry of culture as part of the frankfurt book fair • the labour weekend walters prize dinner is creating engagement conflicts for some of its patrons • another auckland dealer gallery is about to join the move west. any missed details, indignant denials or additions gratefully received, and any that makes us laugh out loud will be rewarded with a rare limited edition otn painting horse badge.

Reimagining Urban Eden: Studio/Gang and the Nature Boardwalk at Lincoln Park Zoo

 On September 24th, the Art Institute of Chicago will be opening its new exhibition Building: Inside Studio Gang Architects. As a run-up to the opening, this is first in a series of new and newly revised versions of pieces on Jeanne Gang and Studio/Gang Architects.. 

So, here we are. Over a century-and-a-half after we supplanted a millennia-long ecosystem by dropping the first corpse into the ground of a new City Cemetery, we've come back to where we began.  The Nature Boardwalk at Lincoln Park Zoo bills itself as a "multi-sensory, interactive ecosystem . . . (a) newly naturalized oasis in the heart of the city." Its goal is no less than to make the South Pond's 14 acres of land and water, plants, amphibians, fish and fowl into the kind of complex natural habitat that Chicagoans had spent the last century wiping from the face of the city . . .

 

 Read the full story and see all the photographs:  Studio/Gang and the Nature Boardwalk at Lincoln Park Zoo.