November Calendar, devoid of Turkeys: Zils, Gang, Goldberg, Jahn, Dimenberg, Pond (x2), Gruen, CTBUH - nearly 50 great events

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Even though I know we'll be adding more, there's already nearly 50 great items on the November Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.

It begins on Tuesday the 1st, with Arturo Vittori at Columbia College, continues on Tuesday at CAF, with Kate Keleman's curator talk for Design on the Edge, and Alexander Eisenschmidt on Chicago's unbuilt visionary projects, and Sheila Kennedy at IIT, and then explodes on Thursday the 3rd with no fewer than eight events, including John Ronan talking about his new home for Poetry Foundation for Friends of Downtown, the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat's star-studded 10th Annual Best Tall Buildings Awards Symposium at IIT, Stuart Cohen discussing Howard Van Doren Shaw's residential designs at Second Presbyterian Church, and the release of Jeanne Gang's new book, Reverse Effect, on possibilities for the Chicago river at the fundraiser for the Natural Resources Defense Council that also includes a one-time-only performance of Carpocalypse! by a troupe from Second City.

On Tuesday, November 8th, there'll be a lecture by great structural engineer John Zils at CAF, where on Wednesday the 9th, Art Institute architecture curator Alison Fisher will talk about The Houses and Housing of Bertrand Goldberg, in conjunction with the museum's blockbuster retrospective on the architect. On Friday, the 11th, a group of architects discussing Irish Architecture Now goes up against Helmut Jahn lecturing at the Instituto Cervantes, and Ed Dimendberg, author of Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity at UIC, where RSAUD's Roger Sherman lectures on the 14th.

Want more? How about Dale Gyure lecturing on the work of Minoru Yamasaki on the 13th at the architects North Shore Congregation Israel in Glencoe, a reception for Stanley Tigerman at AIA Chicago on  the 14th marking the publication of not one but two new books, Tom Jacobs of Krueck + Sexton talking about their net zero environmental impact building for the GSA in Miramar, Florida on th1 15th, and Terry Tatum discussing the work of Irving and Allen Pond at Glessner House on the 16th. Dennis McClendon talks about movable bridges for Landmarks Illinois at the Cultural Center, while Jeanne Gang is back discussing her new book at the Harold L. Washington Library, with the month ending on the November 30th with Greg Peerbolte discussing the new book on Victor Gruen and Randhurst center at CAF.

Even with things shut down for the Thanksgiving holiday week, things are jumping, and we've only scratched the surface. Check out everything on the November 2011 Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.

Beyond the dogma: The Myth of Pruitt-Igoe, at the Gene Siskel next week

It's the Zapruder film of the failure of modernist architecture, playing in a continuous, hypnotic loop, like the razor to the eye in Un Chien Andalous, the imploding, to the music of Phillip Glass, of the buildings of the Pruitt-Igoe Public Housing complex in St. Louis, designed by architect Minoru Yamasaki, looking as they fell more than a little like a Frank Gehry building on the rise.

click images for larger view. historical images: State History Society of Missouri

It's said to be a prototype of toxic architecture, taking residents from hope to despair in little more a than a decade. What could they have been thinking?  What could anyone have expected with those kind of residents? Better to have left them in the slums.

H.L. Mencken once said: "There is always a well-known solution to every human--neat, plausible and wrong."  In the case of Pruitt-Igoe, that applies both to the original conception and its subsequent interpretations.

An acclaimed new documentary, The Pruit-Igoe Myth "debunks the myths and searches out the true causes of the project's failure."  The 83 minute film directed by Chad Friedrichs will have two showings at the Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 North State, at 5:15 p.m. on Sunday, August 7th, and at 6:15 Thursday, August 11th.

In St. Louis as in Chicago, the forest of high-rises was not anyone's first choice.  Just as Richard J. Daley had resisted the idea of relying on high-rises for public housing, Yamasaki's original conception was for a mixture of high-rise, low-rise and walk-up buildings.  But in St. Louis as in Chicago, in an early supply chain experiment, the Feds mandated that high-rises were cheaper and more efficient, just as in St. Louis, they decided to save money by only having the elevators on three of the eleven floors of the high-rises, and to "value engineer" by making the units too small to be livable.

In Chicago, as in St. Louis, public housing followed a usual trajectory.  At the start, it was a major step up from the slums, and residents were drawn from all races, a large percentage holding steady jobs.  Management screened applicants, and operated the buildings professionally.

As time went on, management became more political.  Funds for maintenance were at a premium, and not adequate for keeping the buildings in repair.  (The same Federal Government that approved the building of Pruitt-Igoe somehow forget to include funds for maintenance.) People who had good jobs fled as soon as they could, and the projects increasingly become a dumping ground, with screening going out the window, and fewer and fewer residents employed.  According to a review by Chris Barsanti . . .

One particularly harebrained housing authority policy prohibited able-bodied men from inhabiting apartments of residents on welfare; essentially dynamiting the project's family structure. In short order, elevators stopped working, broken windows weren't fixed, and a bleak air settled about the place, followed by the inevitable lawlessness and what one resident termed "a prison environment."

When cheap suburban land and the expressways opened up the floodgates for white flight, the projects re-segregated with a vengeance.

The tabula rasa approach detached the projects from any sense of historic continuity with the city around them.  The massive scale and homogeneity of Pruitt-Igoe's design, 57 acres and 33 11-story buildings, made it difficult for a resident to find anything to cling to.  The buildings were all the same, one after another, a gulag of warehouses where residents became human widgets, stuffed side by side into identical cells,  whether they were a family struggling to build a future, or those already lost to drugs, gangs and crime, rotting the buildings to get through a single additional day.

At the beginning, residents made the projects a real neighborhood, proudly festooning their units with Christmas lights.  Now, as in Chicago projects like Cabrini-Green, as the districts re-gentrify, all evidence that they had ever existed has been clinically removed.  

34 of Pruitt-Igoe's acres remain vacant, overgrown with wild shrubs, and trees that have now lasted longer than the buildings they replaced.

 photograph: Daniel Magidson

The Pruitt-Igoe Myth, Gene Siskel Film Center,  5:15 p.m., August 7th, and 6:15 p.m., August 11th, as part of its 17th annual Black Harvest International Festival of Film and Video.  More information here.

Chicago's Sacred Spaces portrayed in handsome new Guide

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In conjunction with PBS's recent series, God in America, Chicago-based Sacred Space International, has created a City Guide to Sacred Spaces for eight American cities, from all corners of the U.S., from New York to Atlanta to Portland and Santa Fe.

The Chicago guide includes 14 places and, like the rest, it's highly ecumenical, including not only the democratic, personified by the Chicago Cultural Center, but even the pantheistic, represented by the Alfred Caldwell Lily Pool.

Each entry includes an informative essay with excellent photographs, as well as maps for locating the sites. The usual suspects are there: the Chicago Temple, Holy Name Cathedral, Fourth Presbyterian, Harry Weese's Seventeenth Church of Christ, Scientist, Frank Lloyd Wright's Unity Temple in Oak Park, and the Baha'i House of Worship in Wilmette.

There are also some lesser known spaces, including the Downtown Islamic Center, making a Loop home for Chicago Muslims above a storefront in a former automobile showroom on State Street, purchased in 2004. "A mosque requires nothing more than a clean, unobstructed floor space and an indication of the qibla, the direction of Mecca," which here becomes a simple space carved out of - and reflecting - the loft-like structure of a commercial building.

Only blocks away from each other near LaSalle and Division are two very different expressions of faith. On the outside, the building at 927 N. LaSalle looks like a traditional neighborhood church. Built in the late 1880’s as an Apostolic Catholic Church

. . . In the mid 1920’s LaSalle Street was being widened into a boulevard, and the church had to be moved back about ten feet to allow for the new right of way. The building was picked up on giant rollers and moved eastward, while the front steps had to be redesigned and integrated into the church.

 In 1996, after a long period of decline, the building was donated to the Orthodox Church of America, and after extensive renovations, it was rededicated on May 17, 2008 as the Christ the Savior Orthodox Church.

A high contrast can be found a few blocks to the north at St. Paul's Evangelical Lutheran Church, home to the city's oldest Lutheran Congregation, founded in 1843. In 1969, they turned to architect Edward Dart to design their new church, and the result is a strikingly modernist composition, marked by an unornamented rounded brick exterior and a spare interior with an alter bathed in light.

Also  included is the Moody Church, further up on LaSalle, GracePlace in Printers Row (illustrated in the photo at the top of this post), and the North Shore Congregation Israel designed in 1964 by World Trade Center architect Minoru Yamasaki.  The  49-page City Guide to Sacred Spaces is both an important work of scholarship and an engaging guide to Chicago's spiritual spaces.  Download it here.