McMansion World
Morning news: McDonalds is suing the Oxford English Dictionary over the word “McJobs,” describing low-paying menial jobs without hope of advancement. This made me wonder if the golden arch attorneys would be heading after “McMansions” next.
McMansions are what follows the teardown. They are franchised, mass-produced homes that are “mansions” in size and price only. They are McMansions because, design-wise, they are collections of signifiers, generally assembled artlessly, like the eponymous sandwiches. Palladian windows. Curving front staircases. Quoined corners. Big flat warpy windows with fake muntins that look like scotch tape because people read “divided lights” as “classy”. Balustrades, columns and pediments, the bacon, lettuce and cheese of Classical style (heavy on the cheese). They also tend to be SUPER-SIZED. Entrances tend toward the subtlety of a streetwalker, with similar effect. Like the burgers, they have all the outward signs of taste but the inside is nothing but architectural trans-fats: pressboard and PVC. Continue Reading
Oak Park settles down a bit
Well, from the tenor of the panel discussion in Oak Park this morning, the Fox News-style polarization of preservation has died down a bit. This is a good thing. A developer, a village president/architect, a local architect and two preservationists made up a panel that was distinguished more by how much they agreed than by the false “Preservation or Development” dichotomy that was set up.
The biggest laughs came to Jonathan Fine of Preservation Chicago who said the title “Historic Preservation: Too Much of a Good Thing?” reminded him of “Women’s Suffrage: Too Much of a Good Thing?” or “Child Labor Laws: Too Much of a Good Thing?”. He is right that preservation has to keep justifying itself. Continue Reading
coal
I pull out my laptop on the elevated train and begin typing this. The train follows tracks curving right, leaving the solid viaduct for steep supports in the street. I look over at the remaining tracks on the viaduct and there are open-topped coal hoppers stretching from Central Ave to Cicero, mounds of black flecked with white snow. I ponder only momentarily that long stretch of railcars full of coal and how much my computer depends on them.
Certainty versus Reality
In the 12th century, as the French began work on Notre Dame, the Khmer king Suryavarman II constructed what is still the largest religious building in the world, Angkor Wat, 500 acres of walls, walks, peaks, passages and bas-reliefs. Like so many great works of architecture, Angkor Wat was full of symbolic meaning. Its measurements, from the initial approach across a bridge over the moat to the aediculated peaks of its five shikara, were determined by Hindu cosmology, and specifically by the need to prove that the current age of Suryavarman II was a return to the golden age. The sculptural program explicitly paralleled the king’s achievements with those of the Hindu pantheon, proving his devaraja (god-king) status. Continue Reading
Lying Liars in Oak Park
Next week – February 9 – a business group is hosting a breakfast about preservation and development in Oak Park. They are doing their level best to prove Santayana right – namely – forget history and be condemned to repeat it.
2004: Crandall Arambula do a downtown plan for Oak Park that calls for widespread demolition. People are mad.
Spring 2005: The ruling party is voted out of office for the first time in 50 years. Because of the bad plan. Westgate (a street in downtown Oak Park) makes Landmarks Illinois’ Most Endangered List.
Fall 2005: A broad community group redoes the plan for downtown Oak Park and their “consensus plan” recommends demolition of the Colt Building (see the picture) in order to save the other buildings on Westgate. Continue Reading
Facadeconomics
The Chicago Tribune today editorialized that the Commission on Chicago Landmarks should have approved the skin job on North Michigan Avenue’s Farwell Building, buying the rationalization that it needed the economic generator of the superhigh Ritz Carlton condo tower in order to save a very badly deteriorated facade.
Fact: facade is badly deteriorated and needs a lot of money to fix.
Fact: the proposal before the Commission was NOT DESIGNED TO DO THAT. Continue Reading
Fallingwater and the Case of the House Museum
Fallingwater – the iconic, death-and-decay-defying leap of Frank Lloyd Wright from one end of the 20th century to the other. A building that cannot be left out of architectural history. A building that almost too nakedly tries to say everything about the role of nature and artifice that everyone from Vitruvius and Alberti to Perrault and LeCorbusier tried to say.
Maybe I want to focus on Fallingwater because it has a built-in fire suppression system and Chicago is beset by idiots with blowtorches.
Beyond its iconic status, Fallingwater is also a house museum, which is a challenging thing to be. Continue Reading
“Right” Zoning
Jonathan Fine of Preservation Chicago spoke to my Preservation Planning class today and introduced them to an excellent phrase: “Right” zoning. This is more accurate than “downzoning” which is a phrase commonly used to describe what happens when a local alderman or city decides to reduce the allowable density in a district.
The recent book on the history of Chicago zoning describes the “downzoning” of the lakefront communities of Gold Coast and Lincoln Park in the 1970s and 1980s, which often followed landmarking of the area. Real estate expert Jared Shlaes opposed the downzoning in a 1980 report, and the book now judges that Shlaes was probably on the wrong side of history. Continue Reading
Sullivan’s Travails
Last night we had a panel on restoring Louis Sullivan buildings over at the Chicago Architecture Foundation, also sponsored by the Chicago History Museum and Graham Foundation. I was the moderator and our featured speakers were architects Gunny Harboe, who directed the restoration of the Carson, Pirie Scott & Co. cornice, and Mary Brush, who directed facade restoration at the Gage Building. Then to make everything wonderful, Tim Samuelson agreed to join us.
Tim is often said to know everything about Chicago and everything about Louis Sullivan. It would be impossible to disprove this.
We learned a lot about Sullivan’s ornament – how he played with figure and ground to eliminate those signifiers and make ornament one with the building. We learned about the challenges of replicating the incredibly detailed elements of the Carson’s cornice from a few bad photographs and a lot of comparable. We saw how his highrise ornament was designed to be seen from below (something the designers of the Parthenon’s Panathenaic procession knew, but has oft since been forgot) and we heard how Sullivan could think in three dimensions. I reminded everyone of how much of Sullivan’s architecture was lost over the last 40 years, which is really tragic. Continue Reading
I Don’t Believe You
Yesterday Chicago’s City Council – known primarily for outlawing multitasking (cell phones while driving, smoking while drinking, foie gras while dining) – passed a living wage ordinance for big-box stores by a veto-proof majority. There are political implications (they went against the Mayor, oh my!) and of course the Retailers Association and various big-box spokespersons predicted that the stores won’t locate in the city, depriving it of tax revenue, non-living-wage jobs, convenience, etc..
The next chapter in this story was suggested by another news item buried deeper in the paper. It seems that the Berwyn City Council has 17 offers for the re-use of the historic Berwyn Bank Building, a fact that allowed it to reject an offer from Applebee’s restaurant to rehab the building, spending $2.5 million. The Berwyn Development Corporation touted the emergence of developer interest caused by media attention and preservationist word of mouth. Continue Reading