Also Tonight, at Crown Hall: Jean-Louis Cohen: Architecture at War 1940:1945

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We've just been given the topic for what sounds like a fascinating lecture by  Jean-Louis Cohen's  at Crown Hall at 6:00 p.m. tonight (Wednesday, the 14th): Dark Times, White Spots: Architecture at War 1940:1945.  If you can't make it to Crown Hall, you can also catch Cohen tomorrow at the Graham talking about The Russian Avant-Garde between East and West, part of what we've already written is a logjam of events Thursday the 15th including, but far from limited to, Karen Kice's gallery talk at Building: Inside Studio Gang Architects at the Art Institute, and the unveiling of the winners of the Future Prentice competition at the Chicago Architecture Foundation.

And if that's not enough, we've also been reminded that tomorrow at 6:30 at the Superior Street driveway of Ann and Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital, artist Mark Davis will be on hand along with Michael Pucker and other donors and dignitaries to official dedicate his new sculpture Healing Waters.

Check out the more than dozen a great events just through Saturday on the November Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.

Souls in Flight Amidst the Proud Towers

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 The heliport atop the recently opened Ann and Robert Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago, 24 stories and 444-feet-high, has been controversial ever since plans for the new hospital on Chicago Avenue were announced. Even after it was approved last fall by the Illinois Department of Transportation, the Streeterville Organization of Active Residents (SOAR) mounted a last ditch attempt to have the U.S. Department of Transportation block the heliport based on an anonymous letter from pilots claiming it was unsafe. Lurie's counter campaign cited wind studies by RWDI, "the most comprehensive . . . ever conducted by a hospital heliport applicant in Illinois" and included putting up this video on YouTube.

 Before approving the heliport, IDOT also commissioned its own study by Joseph F. Horn and Continuum Dynamics.  While calling for reform of regulations, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel expressed his support of the heliport last December.

The hospital is publishing regular reports on heliport usage, and for the first two months after the new facility was opened in June, the total number of flights was 20.  The hospital's estimate of the annual number of flights at its former Lincoln Park complex was under 80.  You can see an aerial view of 66-by-66 foot square heliport in this ABC7 Chicago report.


The shots you see here were taken this past Thursday.  A helicopter coming in for a landing on the roof of a tall building between even taller towers in the sea of skyscrapers along Chicago's lakefront is dramatic enough.  When you factor in the factors not only of aviation safety but of knowing the helicopter is transporting either a critically ill child or organs being rushed to a transplant, it pulls back the curtain on the indifferent skyscape of a densely constructed city, and intimates the life-and-death struggles, of both soul and of body, that are often taking place behind the blank facades.

Sometimes, architectural traditions aren't really worth continuing: Northwestern's OCP

In a presentation to SOAR this summer, this is actually how Northwestern described the design for it's new 25-story, $344 million Outpatient Care Pavilion, to be built at Fairbanks and Erie . . . .

"The OCP is a campus building continuing the architectural tradition of Feinberg, Galter and Prentice . . . "

Could they set the bar any lower?

This is the new Rush Presbyterian Hospital, designed by Perkins+Will, and the adjacent Midwest Orthopaedics building . . .

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This is the Zimmer Gunsul Frasca's new Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital . . .

. . . and this is Northwestern's new OCP . . .

Can anyone explain the logic of this design?  Why, on the Erie and Fairbanks elevations shown above, the precast concrete piers or fins are rendered as being continuous, while on Ontario street . . .

the concrete piers start, and then stop, and then the curtain wall is all steel-and-glass, and then it stops, and then the piers start again, and then they stop again, and then its steel and glass again, and then it's a steel penthouse like the top of a cheap medicine bottle.  And what's the deal with those metal louvers like hanging chads that cover over half the windows between the piers?  If they're venting the parking garage, why are they on only some of the parking floors?  Could there be any more graceless way to do this?

Could a design be any more jumbled and incoherent? If it were a patient, attention-deficit-disorder would be the easy diagnosis.  I suppose you could try to pass it off as a kind of Mannerist Modern, but I'm not sure even that would wash.

As someone who was recently there for an outpatient procedure,  I can attest that Northwestern's medical credentials are top drawer.  It's now embarked on a campaign to establish itself as a world-class institution, on the level of the Cleveland and Mayo Clinics.  So why does it insist on presenting itself through buildings whose profiles are relentlessly indifferent, so generic and forgettable?

And why is it so hell-bent on destroying the only truly distinctive work of architecture on its campus, Bertrand Goldberg's Prentice Hospital?