A Triumphant Exhibition creates Time Machine to a Vanquished Architecture: Tim Samuelson's Mecca Flat Blues, at the Chicago Cultural Center

click images for larger view (recommended)

Friday, February 21, The Chicago Cultural Center, 78 East Washington,  will be hosting an opening reception for Mecca Flat Blues from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m.  The exhibition, in the 4th floor Sydney R. Yates gallery, runs through May 25, 2014

West of State Street, where 34th street once ran, stands Mies van der Rohe's Crown Hall, one of the world's most famous buildings.   The brawny steel-and-glass “one room schoolhouse” sits within an expansive island of landscaped grounds, nested within the insular urban ecosystem that is the IIT campus.

Stand on the campus today and look around you, and it all appears almost primordial.  You can imagine it rising directly from the marshy land that was Chicago's original terrain.  And yet . . . if you remain very still - can you hear it?  Can you sense it?  The sound of jazz and the blues, a lament, the quiet but insistent voices of a vanquished city, wiped from the earth as cleanly as Carthage after the siege.

Mecca Flat Blues, the new exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center curated by the city's Cultural Historian, Tim Samuelson, is - first things first - a spectacular show, hypnotic in both image and story.  Above all else, however, it is  a Proustian meditation on architecture as a repository of memory.  Of how we create buildings to reflect our ambitions, pretensions and vanities.  And how soon those buildings become unmoored from original intent and, over the decades, are transformed and consumed by the earthier realities of life as it is lived day-by-day.

At the end, Mecca Flats, along with the once vibrant community all around it, was sacrificed to create the tabula rasa Mies required for his new campus plan.  It represented a contagion of poverty and decay that had to expunged to make the neighborhood safe for Mies's pristine new world.  The beginning, however, was something wholely different.

“The Largest Apartment House Ever Planned in Chicago”

That was the calling card for the Mecca Apartments, as detailed in an 1891 article in the Chicago Tribune.  Occupying a full half block on 34th Street, between State and Dearborn, formerly occupied by streetcar barns, the project would cost $600,000, be four stories tall, and house 96 flats and twelve stores on State.

Architects Willoughby J. Edbrooke and Franklin Pierce Burnham (yes, even the worst Presidents had their name foisted on unsuspecting babies) created three street elevations of Roman pressed brick with stone and terra cotta trim.   The alley elevation, which held the servant's entrance, was of a cruder red brick.  Every apartment was designed to have its own bay window to draw in the light.  Each dining room was to have hardwood sideboards, each kitchen gas ranges and refrigerators.

This was a time when the rich lived in houses and the poor lived in tenements.  The word “apartment” carried a negative stigma.  Apartment buildings for the affluent were likely to be called “apartment hotels” to separate them from the housing used by the unwashed masses.

The Mecca was a pioneering effort to make the apartment block safe for the affluent, to enhance the return on a plot of land not just through increased density, but also elevated price points.  In addition to the elegance of the facades, Edbrooke and Burnham created the Mecca as two great wings on either side of a large, landscaped carriage courtyard, with an arched entrance and a handsome fountain.  There were five separate entrances, each shared by only a handful of families, enhancing the feeling of intimacy.

Most boldly, the architects drew on the commercial example of Baumann and Huehl's 1889 Chamber of Commerce Building, which featured a central court rising the full 13-story height of the building.
Lined with cantilevered balconies with ornate iron railings, the court brought light and air - in a time before electricity or air conditioning - into the interior offices.  At the Mecca, there would be not just one but two huge courts - one for each wing -  33 wide and 170 feet deep, wrapped in balconies with elegant railings and light pouring in from the glass roof.

It didn't take long for it all to start to unravel.  The developer decided to cash in on the upcoming 1893 World's Columbian Exposition by converting the Mecca Apartments into a 650-room hotel for fair visitors, “The Largest and most richly furnished Permanent Hotel in Chicago”.  It flopped.  It turned out the Mecca's location was in a kind of limbo, at a disadvantageous  midway point between the Loop's luxury hotels and the fairgrounds miles away. Not along after the close of the fair, the Mecca was reconverted to apartments.   Many of the rooms had never been occupied, and the hotel's furnishings were sold at auction for 25 cents on the dollar.

In rich detail, Mecca Flat Blues, traces what happens next.  The Mecca's troubles continued in 1895, as one troubled tenant became a firebug, setting blazes at the bottom of two air shafts.  Mecca's shifting portrait can be traced through the list of residents compiled every ten years for the U.S. Census, copies of which are on display at the exhibition.  The 1900 census lists 365 people, mostly blue and white color employees.  Some residents were already taking in borders to help meet the rent.  Despite the original design providing them a separate entrance, no live-in servants were listed.

The basically working-class character of the building remained even as the racial composition changed radically.  The “Great Migration” saw the neighborhood becoming primarily Afro-American.  In May of 1912, the Chicago Daily Defender announced that the Mecca Flats for the first time was  “Open for Inspection” for Negro tenants.  An “Upstairs-Downstairs” aura descended on the Flats.  The more affluent tenants lived in the larger units and held dinner parties, while crime among poorer tenants became an increasing problem.  By 1914, building managers were telling The Defender that they were “powerless to prohibit the commingling of the races [but] have not allowed any prostitution in their apartments nor have they countenanced any violation of the law.”

The new emigrants from the south brought their culture with them.  State Street became “The Stroll”, a strip of jazz clubs, theaters and ballrooms that was jammed with humanity night after night.  Transplants from New Orleans found the Mecca's ornate balcony railings a welcoming echo of those of Bourbon Street.

At the end of the 1920's, however, the opening of the Regal Theater and Savoy ballroom in Bronzeville began to draw the nightlife away from State Street, and by the 1930's, the Mecca suffered from poor maintenance.  The skylights over the atria becoming filthy and cracked.  The 1940 census showed the building's population as 670 building,  but after wartime housing shortages kicked in, other estimates put it at as many as 2,500.

Armour Institute

In 1938, the Mecca had been deeded to the Armour Institute, which was soon to become IIT.  The Institute had made the decision to stay in the city, and, hiring Mies, to expand their campus all the way down to 35th street.  Armour moved quickly to demolish the Mecca, but the residents fought back in a battle that galvanized the community.  A bill sponsored by State Senator Christopher Wimbish passed the Illinois house 114 to 2 and the senate, 46 to 1, only to be vetoed by Governor Dwight Green.  As detailed in Daniel Bluestone's essential history, Chicago's Mecca Flat Blues, Armour wound up being the worst slumlord of all, lowering rents and filling up the building with ever poorer residents even as it let the structure rot without essential maintenance and repairs.

The Mecca became the subject of pioneering efforts in the genre now known as “ruin porn.”  In 1949, Harper's Magazine hired John Bartlow Martin to document the “Strangest Place in Chicago”, portraying an alien, exotic world for edification of the magazine's middle-class readers . . .

Inside, a powerful odor assails the visitor at once, musty, heavy, a smell compounded of urine and stale cooking and of age, not necessarily an unpleasant odor but a close powerful one, which, like that of marijuana, once smelled is never forgotten . . . always the sound of distant human voices, women talking, a baby squalling, children screaming, men muttering, no words distinguishable . . . All day long, people stand at the balconies, leaning over the wrought-iron railing with hands clasped out over them, gazing out at each other people facing them across the well in silence, gazing down at the floor far below, spitting, small human figures in a vast place, two or three on each of the floors, occasionally calling back and forth to one another, but most of the time just standing silent.

In 1950, Life magazine repurposed Martin's text into captions for a photo essay, The Mecca, Chicago's Showiest Apartment Has given Up All But the Ghost Life, using images by Wallace Kirkland.  One account stated that the light filtering through the filthy skylights gave the atria an other-worldy quality, making it seem almost as if you were underwater.

In 1952, the building was finally ready for demolition.   Newsweek reported that the last tenants had been moved out, and the structure scavenged for bits of Italian tile and hardwood floors. In 1982, Chicago Tribune columnist Vernon Jarrett remembered The Mecca as “one of the more notorious slum dwellings in the history of modern society,” but he also interviewed a former resident who recalled that “One thing the poor were able to maintain in that slum building was a feeling for each other after they had been deserted by the larger society.” Members of The Mecca Prayer Band would make weekly tours to see who was ill or destitute.  “They would then take up a collection of what little they could afford and help the sick.  They would also volunteer to bathe the sick and clean their apartments.”  Lillian Davis didn't sugar-coat - “It was a violent building,” where the janitors wore pistols and derelicts slept on the balconies, “But my best memories are of those who refused to be crushed.”

IIT Master Plan, image courtesy Posad Spatial Strategies

That was not the story that anyone wanted to hear.  The official narrative was clear.  This was the early days of urban renewal.  With the federal government's help, America's great cities were to find their revival in the clearing away of slums.  As with the IIT campus, the decay was to be surgically removed, entire neighborhoods obliterated.   The South Side renewal plan projected razing everything from the IIT campus east to the Lakefront.

As Bluestone has written, a new mythology of progress was being put in place, in which Mecca Flats was the crime-ridden poster child of a contagion that needed to be purged.  Armour offered to help residents relocate, but only to a safe distance - the college fought the construction of the mid-rise Dearborn Homes public housing project at its northern border.

Dearborn Homes

And yet, one of the most moving images in Mecca Flat Blues is a life-size photograph of area residents at a meeting organizing against the Mecca's demolition.  The people are all immaculately dressed, the men in business suits and ties, the women in their Sunday best.  It is a portrait of human dignity that refutes the myth that provided cover for a land grab.

The world of the people in that photograph was destroyed for a vision of the future that had no room for their presence.  It is the triumph of Mecca Flat Blues that it retrieves that vanished world from the abyss of imposed forgetfulness.

You begin by walking through a small corridor, reading the blow-ups of early newspaper articles on the Mecca.  Then you walk through the doors, and you're confronted by a massive photograph of the Mecca's entrance, the glass of the doors broken out or replaced with cheap plywood, with a stark white sign centered at the bottom of the tympanum that's the real estate equivalent of Dante's inscription above the entrance to hell.

You begin at the end, but as you step past the photo, into the Tiffany grandeur of the Sydney R. Yates Gallery, the entire history of Mecca Flats opens up before you like an unfolded fan, with two massive images of the buildings light courts at either end of the half-block long gallery.

Architecture's dimension of scale is difficult to express in reproduction.  In books, we accept it being confined to the maximum size of a page.  In museums, to the dimensions of the frame.  With rare exceptions, trying to reproduce the scale of a building is absurd.   We simply accept the dislocation of a three-dimensional object large enough for us to inhabit down to a flat, passive representation that we lord over as if from aerial remove.  It is not only detail, but the essential character of architecture, how it constantly changes through the ever-shifting perceptions of our corporeal bodies as we move around and through it, that is lost.

Tim Samuelson has tackled this problem before in his 2010 exhibition (also at the Cultural Center) Louis Sullivan's Idea, in which, working with Chris Ware, he deployed ceiling high photographs of Sullivan's buildings in the double-height galleries to give the viewer a sense of the architecture's scale.

Mecca Flats Blues takes it a step further.  Again, there are the oversized photographers, but against the bordello riot of red, green and gold that is the Yates Gallery, the huge black and white images don't just pop, they seems to float in the front of your retina.  The huge space is broken up into a sequence of rooms, each telling a part of The Mecca's story, often with material rarely if every seen before, including some of the original photographs artist Ben Shahn took of the Mecca as studies for the illustrations he created for Martin's Harper's piece.  There's also Kirkland's photographs, and phonograph records of the various covers of the James Blythe and Alexander Robinson song Mecca Flat Blues, originally recorded in 1924 by vocalist Priscilla Stewart with Blythe on the piano.

The music  plays continuously as you walk through the gallery.

There's also a table where you can not only peruse those decade-by-decade census lists, but read the Harper's and Life magazine pieces, as well as Gwendolyn Brooks' epic poem,  In the Mecca, placing the building at the center of a tale about the search for a lost child. 

In the end, however, you're drawn back to the endpoints of the exhibition, to those lovingly-restored railings - rescued from a collector who had used them on his porch - and falling into those super-sized photos of the atrium.  You're back in Mecca Flats, standing on the balcony gazing at the people across the way, from another time, another, now lost world, looking back at you.  Mecca Flats, the building, absorbed the experience of its times until it was all used up and crushed by the accumulated weight.  Mecca Flat Blues, the exhibition, is a heroic rescue of a suppressed cultural history, and an epic expression of architecture's tragic suspension between power and impotence.

 Mecca Flat Blues runs through May 25th, 10:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m., Monday through Thursday, 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., Friday through Sunday (closed holidays).  There will be gallery talks at 12:15 p.m on February 27th and March 27th, and concerts at 12:15 p.m. on March 6 and May 3rd.  On April 8th, Thomas Dyja, author of The Third Coast: When Chicago Built the American Dream, will present a lecture, The Battle for the Mecca at 12:15 p.m.

Enquist at IIT, Rojo at UIC, Chattel at SAIC - still more for February!

Seriously, is it ever too late to be adding items to the February Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events?

The architecture schools at both IIT and UIC have announced their Spring lecture series.  IIT begins at Crown Hall this Wednesday, February 20th, with SOM planning guru Phil Enquist talking about The Century of Cities, while over at UIC on Monday the 25th, there's a lecture by Luis Rojo of Rojo/Fernandez-Shaw arquitectos of Madrid.  And over at SAIC, preservation consultant Robert Chattel talks about The Atomic Wild Wild West on Thursday, the 28th.  On Saturday, the 23rd, the Hyde Park Historical Society will award this year's Marian and Leon Depres Preservation Awards at their annual dinner, with Chicago Cultural Historian Tim Samuelson as featured speaker.

This coming week is loaded with great stuff, from Martino Gamper at the Art Institute's Fullerton Auditorium for SAIC on Monday, the 18th, and a special panel discussion: Food! - Design for Social Change at CAF the evening of Tuesday of February 19th, including but not limited to John Cary, John Edel, Robin Elmslie Osler and Fritz Haeg, who also lectures at the Graham on the 28th.

On Wednesday, the 20th, Tom Jacobs of Krueck and Sexton talks about Glass Engineering in Architecture at CAF lunchtime, while on Thursday the 21st, Gensler's Elva Rubio discusses the Ghost Facade at 618 S. Michigan for Landmarks Illinois at the Cultural Center.  Thursday evening is also the last curator's gallery talk by Karen Kice for the Art Institute's exhibition Building: Inside Studio Architects, which closes on the 24th.  Then on Saturday, the 23rd, CAF has Family Studio Saturday; Building and Testing, a National Engineers Week event for teens.

And there's a lot more.  Check out the nearly three dozen great items still to come on the February Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.

Saturday: Chicago Center for Green Technology celebrates 10 years; Kevin Harrington on Mies, Hilberseimer and Caldwell at Lafayette Park

This Saturday, June 16th, the Chicago Center for Green Technology marks its 10th anniversary with an all-day celebration featuring food, games, a raffle, a dunk tank and a Build Smart Expo with 40 product and service vendors.  It all takes place at the CCGT, 445 North Sacramento.  Check out more about Saturday's event, and the CCGT's ongoing mission of promoting and advancing "sustainable homes, workplaces and communities . . .  through Green Tech U seminars, guided and self-guided tours, the Green Building Resource Center, and more, here.

Also on Saturday, 3:30 to 5:00 p.m. down at Crown Hall on the IIT campus, 3360 South State, Kevin Harrington will be discussing Figure and Pattern -Mies, Hilberseimer and Caldwell at Lafayette Park, a talk held in conjunction with the Crown Hall exhibition, Lafayette Park: The Settlement Shape - running through July 27 - on the pioneering Detroit urban renewal project that is still thriving today.

Sounds interesting.  Even without a dunk tank.

Last week for AIC Goldberg shows, plus Japanese 1960's projects, Kenneth Frampton, Re-Envisioning Navy Pier, Landscape Design with Lurie Garden staff and Roy Diblik - a dozen new items for the January calendar

See, we'd told you there would be a lot more.  We've just added over a dozen new great items to the January Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events, including two new exhibitions.

On Monday at Crown Hall, IIT opens a new show, Struggling Cities: From Japanese Urban Projects in the 1960's, which runs through the 31st.  The Metabolists are back with a vengeance, and Struggling Cities includes work by Kiyonori Kikutake, Kisho Kurokawa, Masato Ohtaka, Fumihiko Maki,  Noboru Kawazoe and Arata Isozaki, whose  “Cities in the Air” is pictured here.  In conjunction with the exhibition, there will be a lecture at Crown Hall this Thursday, the 12th,  at 6:00 by critic and historian Kenneth Frampton, Ware Professor of Architecture at Columbia.  (There will also be a February 25th appearance by Peter Frampton at the Chicago Theatre, but we're hearing this may be an unrelated event, more about music than an actual lecture.)

Over at the ArchiTech Gallery, there's a new show, Architectural Drawing: From Europe to America, that runs through April 28, 2012 and features work by Louis Villeminot, George Mann Niedecken and Alfonso Iannelli, among others.  Hours are Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday from noon to five, "or by chance or appointment on Monday or Tuesday."

Elsewhere, we've added this month's events from the Chicago Center for Green Technology, which is branching out with a morning session on Landscape Design Series: Part 1 featuring the staff of the Lurie Garden and Roy Diblik at the Chicago Cultural Center on Saturday the 14th, and a Wednesday January 25th session on Green Roofing for the Homeowner and DIY-er at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum, as well as its usual programs at the Center, itself.

Crain's Chicago Real Estate Daily has a morning panel, Residential Forecast, on Wednesday the 18th moderated by Alby Gallun and featured Stephen Baird, Andy Konovodoff, Buzz Ruttenberg and Steven Fifield.  If there's a Q&A, maybe someone can ask Steve Fifield if his projects, like the ironically named Left Bank, really have to suck so much.

On Friday, the 20th, DePaul's Chaddick Institute has a panel on Re-Envisioning Navy Pier with Larry Booth, Gerry Butler, Michael Emerson, Reuben Hedlund, Cherri Heramb and Larry Lund.

And lastly, this is the last week to see two essential shows on Bertrand Goldberg at the Art Institute, Bertrand Goldberg: Architecture of Invention, and the uniquely expressive Inside Marina City: A Project by Iker Gil and E.G. Larsson.  Both are must-see exhibitions, and you have only through next Sunday to catch up with them.

Check it out:  There are still over three dozen events on the January Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.

Bring Back the Airport in the Lake!: Aerotropolis discussed October 24, unknown Mies this Wednesday - new October events

According to Kenan Institute director John D. Kasarda, Korea's Songdo City is the new Eden, a "Smart City" in which the government of South Korean filled in nearly six square miles of tidal wetlands on a migratory bird flight path and turned them over to developers as a tabula rasa to create from scratch a massive city "built by companies for companies."

It's super green, and hyper-wired, and if the full-press PR blitz touting its wonders reminds you of the initial euphoria over George Pullman's 19th century versions of the perfect company town on Chicago's south side, you're not alone.  But don't worry yourself; resistance is futile.  In the time-honored tradition of academics who have found their own version of the future and can imagine no other, Kasarda sees the model of Songdo City as our future "whether we like it or not."

Kasarda, author of Aerotropolis: The Way We'll Live Next, will be discussing his work at an October 24th event sponsored by the Chaddick Institute.

It's one of two events just added to the October Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events. This Wednesday, October 19th, at Crown Hall, 11:30 a.m. IIT, Carsten Krohn will be discussing The unknown Mies, the "crypto-classical" houses of the architect's early career.

There are still over three dozen events to come this month. Check them all out on the October 2011 Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.

Wind Bracing and Chicago skyscrapers, Rebuilding Together Metro Chicago today, Children's Memorial and Robert Krawczyk tomorrow - more for April

As the April calendar continues to gestate, we bring you the following:

Today, Tuesday, April 5th, the Ron Klemencic lecture we told you about yesterday is sold out, but there's also a lecture by Thomas Leslie on Built Like Bridges: Wind Bracing and the Chicago Skyscraper at AIA/Chicago, while the same organization's First Tuesdays Happy Hour, at Matilda on Sheffield, takes on ReBuilding Together, Metro/Chicago, "a national program to improve the homes of low income, seniors and disable residents."  Information here.

Tomorrow, April 6th, sees Bruce Komiskie of CMH and Martin Wolf of Solomon Cordwell Buenz discussing the new Children's Memorial Hospital at the lunchtime lecture at the Chicago Architecture Foundation, while Robert Krawcyzk lectures on Spirals, Fractals and Music: The Same Only Different at the McCloskey auditorium of the Campus Center at IIT.

Wong and Gates Monday, Ron Klemencic Tuesday - fragments of the April Calendar

Rumors of the appearance of the April Calendar of Chicago Cultural Events persist, even as we wish to apologize to those of you who may have wanted to hear architect Thomas Leeser, whose firm just completed a warmly received expansion of the Museum of the Moving Image in New York, when he spoke at UIC last Friday, but missed it because we didn't report it.

Here are two events for today, Monday, April 4th:

click images for larger view

At the intriguing start time of 5:50 p.m., in the lower core of Crown Hall at IIT, Ernest Wong of the Site Design Group, Ltd., whose work includes the striking and new Mary Bartelme park at Adams and Sangamon, pictured above, will lecture. Information here.

At 6:00 p.m. at Archeworks, 625 North Kingsbury, there will be a lecture by Loeb Fellow Theaster Gates "will talk about the relationship between his art practice, myth making and urban stewardship and how slippery these relationships are. He will engage the audience and discuss the challenges of the design industry with implications toward pedagogy and emerging practices. By the end of the night, he will create a new design firm with members of the audience." Followed by in-fighting over job titles. RSVP requested.  Information here.

Then on Tuesday, April 5th, [NOTE:  this event is now SOLD OUT] at the Chicago Architecture Foundation, 224 South Michigan, the Structural Engineers Association of Illinois will offer up How’d They Do That?!, a talk by Ron Klemencic, President of Magnusson Klemencic Associates, whose work includes such modern marvels as the Rem Koolhaas/Joshua Prince-Ramus Seattle Public Library, shown above, and Studio/Gang's Aqua.  Klemencic will "present a fast-paced, visual tour through the structural design of some of the more interesting and challenging structures in the world today. The advances in design and construction technologies, materials, and communication capabilities that make these projects possible will be highlighted." The evening begins with a cocktail reception beginning at 5:30 p.m., followed by the lecture at 6:30 and a QandA at 7:30. It's free, but registration is required. Information here.

Felsen and Solomon, Sou Fujimoto, Benjamin Marshall, Rapson in Hyde Park, Rain Screens and Paderewski at the Glessner - 6 Great events just added for February

See, we told you we weren't finished.  We've just added six great new events to the February Chicago Architectural Calendar.

IIT kicks off its 2011 lecture series with Workshopping Chicago: A Conversation with Martin Felsen and Jonathan Solomon, Monday, February 7th at Crown Hall at 6:00 p.m.  The following Tuesday, February 15th, again at Crown Hall at 6:00 p.m., Sou Fujimoto, of Sou Fujimoto Architects, Tokyo  Shinjuku, this years Morgenstern Visiting Chair, will lecture on the overview of his work, Primitive Future.

On Sunday, February 13th, docent and lecturer Steven Monz will present an illustrated talk, Benjamin Marshall, Architect, at the Northbrook Public Library.  The event leads up to a March 4th gala at the Drake Hotel to benefit the Benjamin Marshall Society, a fundraiser for the society's efforts to catalog Marshall's works and organize  an exhibition of them. 

Moving ahead about a  half century in architectural history, The Hyde Park Historical Society, at its annual dinner February 26th at the Quadrangle Club, will considering Preserving History in the Digital Age, with m.c. Jay Mulberry and featured speaker, the Trib's Ron Grossman.  This year's  Marian and Leon Depres Preservation Award will be presented to Leon and Rian Walker for the historic rehabilitation of Ralph Rapson's Willard Gidwitz House on south Woodlawn.

On Thursday, February 10th, Häfele’s Chicago showroom will be sponsoring a seminar on Rain Screen Wall Systems,  and on Thursday, February 17th, the Glessner House Museum will feature a talk by Victoria Granacki on Ignacy Jan Paderewski - Artist, Statesman, Humanitarian: The Chicago Connection.  Paderewski was one of many prominent musicians who gave concerts in the Glessner's music room.

There was over three dozen great events still to come in February.  Check them all out here.

IIT Triptych: Where's Mies in each of These?

click images for larger view (recommended)

Tonight at IIT: Jiang Jun, Reading Urban China in Five Dimensions, plus Louis Sullivan back at the Cliff Dwellers

Tonight, October 27th at 6:00, the IIT College of Architecture is sponsoring a talk, Reading Urban China in Five Dimensions, in Crown Hall, 3360 S. State by Jiang Jun, editor-in-chief of Urban China Magazine, which was been described as "An Encyclopedia of Chinese Cities in a Time of Junk"  The magazine is currently the focus of the exhibition Urban China: Information Cities at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art through April 3rd,  organized by NewYork's New Museum, where it was on display last winter.  According to the MCA . . .

For the past six years, Urban China has been engaged in a unique multidisciplinary inquiry into the rapid state of change in China, presented in the format of a magazine -- the only one devoted to issues of urbanism published in and about China. With offices in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou, and a network of correspondents and collaborators around the world who work under the guidance of its visionary Editor-in-Chief, Jiang Jun, its photographs, texts, and diagrams, as well as a growing archive of artifacts and images have become a repository of knowledge about the fastest process of urbanization ever recorded in human history.

The lecture is free and open to the public.  Information 312/567.3312 or on-line.

Louis Sullivan returns to the Cliff Dwellers

Tomorrow, October 28th, there'll be a showing of the new documentary, Louis Sullivan: the Struggle for American Architecture, as the kick-off event for the Block Museum's The American Architect in Focus film series.  The screening will be at 7:00 p.m., tickets are $7.00 and will be on sale 30 minutues before showtime at the museum 40 Arts Circle Drive, Northwestern University in Evanston.

And if you move quickly you may still be able to get one of the last remaining tickets for a unique showing of the documentary at the Cliff Dwellers, the artist's club where Sullivan was a regular and where at the end of his life he wrote The Autobiography of an Idea.  A few years ago, the Cliff Dwellers was forced out of its original location atop Orchestra Hall, but it's now right next door, at the crest of the Borg Warner Building at 200 S. Michigan.  Tickets are $20.00 at the door.

Both screenings are scheduled to be followed by Question and Answer sessions with the documentary's director, Mark Smith, and its composer, Michael T. McLean.

Information on-line.

Jens Jensen vs Michael van Valkenburgh: Park Designer Deathmatch! September 29th.

On one level, it's not really a fair fight, since Jens Jensen, though he lived to 91, has actually been been dead since 1951, but Jensen's legacy and idea's remain very much alive, so why not put them up against those of one of the today's most prominent park designers?

click images for larger view

This Thursday, September 23rd,  there will be a 7:00 p.m. screening of a new documentary, Jens Jensen: Harmonious World, at the Garfield Park Conservatory, 300 North Central Park.

Jensen was actually born September 13th in dat ole Dybbøl, Denmark, coming to the United States in 1884, but at 6:00 p.m., on Wednesday, September 29th, there'll be a 150th birthday blowout at the Jensen-designed Humboldt Park Boathouse, 1359 N. Sacramento.  Park District Historian Julia S. Bachrach will lecture on Humboldt Park: Jens Jensen's Living Laboratory, and BauerLatoza prinicipal and Commission on Chicago Landmarks member Edward Torrez will talk on The Boathouse Then and Now, and his firm's Driehaus-award-winning 2002 restoration.

Meanwhile, across town the same evening, also at 6:00 p.m., Michael Van Valkenburgh, who has been chosen to design the renovation of North Grant Park, will kick off the IIT College of Architecture's fall lecture series by discussing Recent Parks and Projects in the Public Realm.

It would have been great to hear these two men square off against each other - where's Dr. Brown's DeLorean when you need it?  - but unless you're able to teleport yourself, you're going to have to chose just one.  Both events are free and open to the public

And a reminder that this Saturday, September 25th is  Preservation Chicago's fall benefit at the spectacularly restored Sears Power House, now Charles H. Shaw Technology Center, including a silent auction for such goodies as 5 days/4 nights at a luxury Californian Tower Home, Power House Photos by Darris Lee Harris, Laura Lombardi Jewelry, and an original negative of a Richard Nickel photo of ornament from Louis Sullivan's Carson Pirie Scott building.

These events are among two dozen still to come in the last nine days of this month.  Check out all the details in the September Calendar of Chicago architectural events.

Visionary or Fraud? David Fisher lectures at IIT Monday

Just added to the April calendar of Chicago architectural events:

Community Interface Committee, Wednesday, Visiting Schools. April 21, 6:00 p.m., AIA Chicago. Jennifer Masengarb, education specialist from the Chicago Architecture Foundation, will discuss her pathbreaking publications, Schoolyards to Skylines: Teaching with Chicago’s Amazing Architecture and The Architecture Handbook: A Student Guide to Understanding Buildings

David Fisher: The Creator of Dynamic Architecture, Monday, April 19th, 12:30 p.m. at Crown Hall, IIT: In June 2008, at New York's Plaza Hotel, a man identified as Dr. David Fisher, "futurist architect" unveiled plans for a spectacular $700 million, 80-story, wind-powered, pre-fab Dubai skyscraper in which each floor would physically rotate a full 360 degrees. And he was going to put up another one in Moscow. The idea was so striking it was listed 16th on Time Magazine's Best Inventions of 2008. In November of that year, the "Renowned Italian architect" was named global Architect of the Year by the Developer & Builders Alliance.

Like Jay Gatsby, however, things soon revealed themselves to be not quite as they first appeared. Fisher's bio claimed he had received his honorary doctorate from the "The Prodeo Institute at Columbia University in York." When WCBS reported no such institution exists, and Columbia denied ever awarding Fisher a degree, Fisher's publicists responded that he actually had been awarded the degree by "the Catholic University of Rome" at a 1994 ceremony at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, which, while opening its doors to all faiths, is actually the center of the Episcopal Church in New York. The reference was soon removed.

Fisher's bio on his own Dynamic Architecture website proclaims:

He cannot be considered an architect in the traditional sense. Dr. Fisher has a 360 degree experience in the world of construction – from project development to construction management, from teaching to designing.

There is no record of Mr. Fisher building anything, but he is apparently the owner of the Leonardo da Vinci Smart Bathroom Company, and has extensive work experience in innovative bathroom design. In an interview with The National, he admitted to never having heard of Buckminster Fuller. The Developers and Builders Alliance (or "DBA", which is a completely appropriate acronym on more than one level) is reported to be the former Florida Builders Association. It's heavy on "Honorary Members" such as Donald Trump and Evangeline Gouletas. Its on-line brochure lists the Advantages of membership as including the "robust backing" of Visual Media Productions Group and AC Graphics of Hialeah, "the first triple-certified Green printer in Florida."

Master promoter? Definitely. Master architect? Form your own judgement on Monday when Fisher lectures at Crown Hall.

Also on Monday:

Jesse Reiser + Nanako Umemoto, 6:00 p.m. Gallery 1100, Art & Architecture Building, 845 W. Harrison, University of Illinois at Chicago. Lecture by Jesse Reiser + Nanako Umemoto, Principals, Reiser + Umemoto, New York, which, in collaboration with ARUP, has just won the Taipei Pop Music Center Competition.
There are over a dozen and a half great events on the calendar just this week, including the SEAOI Bridge Symposium, the Society of Architectural Historians national conference, David Swan on Irving K. Pond's autobiography. and more. Check them all out here.