Chicago Evanston Under Construction - Northwestern's Bienen School of Music

click images for larger view

Northwestern University's new Bienen School of Music building had a rough time getting started.   In February, 2008, the university announced a small number of architectural firms, Murphy/Jahn among them, would be invited to compete to design the new building.  In October of that year, Goettsch Partners was selected for the $90 million project, which was to begin construction in late 2009, with a 2012 completion date.

Funding problems, however, intervened, and in November of  2011, the university put the project on “indefinite hold.”  Ironically, that “hold” proved far shorter than the previous delay.  On May 18, 2012, ground was broken on what, by then, had become a $117 million, 152,000 square-foot building shooting for LEED Silver.  (Although the Goettsch site says they're going for the Gold.)  The structure will consolidate Northwestern's music school, renamed to honor former University President Henry Bienen and his wife, Leigh Buchanan Bienen, from three present locations, including the 1874 Second Empire Building, designed by architect Gurdon P. Randall as the Evanston College for Ladies, that is the second oldest structure on campus.

The new building commands a spectacular lakefront site, just north of a beach, with striking views of the Chicago skyline in the distance to the south.  Thorton Tomasetti  is the structural engineer for the project, whose Z-shaped plan consists of what is essentially two buildings, north and south,  joined by a curtained wall, skylit entrance pavilion.  The poured-in-placed concrete of the main pavilions will be faced on the exterior with limestone.  Cantilevered glass will dominate at each end of the complex.

image courtesy Goettsch Partners

Among the facilities included will be a 150 seat opera rehearsal and 10 classrooms.  The top, fifth floor will be the home to the administrative offices of the School of Communication. 

The centerpiece of the complex will be the 400 seat recital hall, named the Galvin Recital Hall after a $6 million, 2013 gift from the Robert W. Galvin Foundation in honor of Mary B. Galvin, a 1945 Northwestern graduate.  Kirkegaard Associates is consulting on acoustical issues, and Schuler Shook on lighting.  The dominant feature of the wood-paneled hall with be a 50-foot cable-supported, double skin window wall offering dramatic views out to Lake Michigan.

Image courtesy Goettsch Partners

To the west, there will be a 120-foot-wide strip of ‘pedestrian-friendly’ landscaping, just east of the scarringly ugly Lakeside Parking deck,  linking to the rest of the university's arts center to the north, including Pick-Stager Hall and the Block Museum.

Image courtesy Goettsch Partners

Current completion date is 2015.  Status updates and a live webcam of the construction site can be found here.

Lohan on Mies, Burns on what's under Block 37, plus Architecture and Emotion fuse in extraordinary I Am Cuba

This week, on the February Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events . . . 

click images for larger view

Tomorrow, Tuesday the 12th, begins with the Chicago ACE Mentor Program Lunch, and ends at the Block Museum in Evanston with Dirk Lohan talking about his grandfather's Mies van der Rohe's Legacy and the Chicago Skyline.  Wednesday, the 13th, lunchtime at CAF, Joe Burns of Thorton Tomasetti will provide A Look Under Chicago's Block 37, including structure, foundations, and the unfinished CTA superstation, while in the evening Arup's Chris Luebkeman lectures on Design for the New Normal in the Next Decade for AIA Chicago.  The Structural Illinois Engineers of Illinois has a day-long seminar on Design of Low-Rise Reinforced Concrete Buildings at the UBS Tower on Thursday.

There are still dozen of arresting items to come on the February Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.

Capturing Architecture as it's Lived:  I Am Cuba

Meanwhile, over at the Gene Siskel Film Center, Tuesday the 12th at 6:00 p.m., is your last chance to see one of the most remarkable films ever made, Mikhail Kalatozov's I Am Cuba, which transcends its intentions as a propaganda film that made it a flop in both Cuba and the U.S.S.R during its initial 1964 release. 

First of all, I Am Cuba is a time capsule that captures Cuba at the cross point between the decadence of the mob-run luxury resorts under dictator Fulgencio Batista and the evolution into a vassal state of the Soviet Union, the period of hope that saw the creation of a native revolutionary architecture in the never-finished National Arts School, and the descent into the imposed degradation of now crumbling Soviet-style pre-fab housing towers.

It's all captured in stunning, hyper-expressive black-and-white cinematography by Sergey Urusevsky, including two continuous-shot sequences that put even Orson Welles' opening of Touch of Evil to shame.  The result is one of the most profound explorations of a built environment that you will ever encounter, culminating in this amazing sequence in which the camera - in one take - moves down, through, up, in and over the streets and buildings of Havana as it follows the funeral procession of a martyr through city streets.  It is the most amazing intersection of architecture, movement and human emotion as you're ever likely to see.

Next week, a true cornucopia awaits: National Engineers Week, Leos Carax at the Siskel, and films in 70mm at the Music Box.  Stay tuned.

Heavy Metal: chainmail on Clark, curves along the Mohawk

Truserve block, Halsted & Blackhawk, Valerio Dewalt Train Associates, architects, 175,000 square feet, 500 parking spaces.

Before . . .

click images for larger view

After . . .

 

 

Fletcher Jones Audi/Volkswagen, Clark and Maple, Gensler, architects, Thorton Tomasetti, structural engineers. 100,000 square feet.

 

 

A major renovation of three interconnected buildings, the oldest being a poured concrete structure dating back to 1928, with a new facing of Dri-Design perforated corrugated metal panel system of anodized aluminum. See a pre-renovation photograph here.