windows windows more windows
After a very good article about window replacement not long ago, today’s Your Place section of the Tribune slipped back into bad habits with a cover story arguing that old drafty windows are “so last winter.”
Catching Up and Staying Warm
Photo is copyright Felicity Rich, which explains its quality compared to most of the ones I post….
Okay, three weeks on the road plus the pressures of moving both our program studios and my home left me a little winded and even ill late last week so the blogs are a little behind, hence a few brief bits of catch-up:
All that air travel tempts one, despite good upbringing, to read airline magazines and one had a listing of wacky tourist attractions like the largest ball of twine and guess what – two Illinois sites which Landmarks Illinois has supported, were pictured! The Collinsville Ketchup bottle water tower, which we gave a grant to a while back, and the Berwyn Car Spindle, which is now threatened… Continue Reading
New Orleans IV
I’m here at the National Trust Board meetings in New Orleans, which is as potent and colorful a mix of culture as the drinks being swilled from plastic billabongs along Bourbon Street. I always thought Mardi Gras was a day, but here it is a couple of weeks. We have, of course, toured Holy Cross and the Lower Ninth and Lakeview to see the excellent work the Trust and others have been doing restoring houses partially wrecked in the man-made disaster following Katrina, and while many of my colleagues were impressed by the progress after 2 1/2 years, I – not having seen it before – was still amazed by how wrecked some of it looked. In 1874 no one noticed the fire that had burned down Chicago in 1871, but in 2008 the path of aftermath Katrina flooding is quite clear in this landscape. Continue Reading
steal this blog
The premise of the internet blog is the same as the premise of the 1960s pirate radio station, the 1910s literary journal or the 1770s broadside: you can say whatever you want, partially cloaked by relative anonymity and fueled by the rapid-fire immediacy of the medium. I had this impish thought about podcasting the meeting I was in a week ago Tuesday, but the fact is that I can’t say anything about it to anyone until next week. This is not unusual –more than occasionally I possess embargoed information or insights, and their confidence is kept by human, not technological means. Continue Reading
Saved By Technology II
I have taught Preservation Planning for more than a dozen years and I always include a lecture called “Churches, Theaters and Other Difficult Buildings”. These buildings are “difficult” because they are functionally obsolescent: They were designed for large public assemblies in a pre-automobile era, and nowadays assemblies don’t happen so much. Vaudeville movie theaters combined live and cinematic entertainment and we don’t do that anymore either. Movie theaters today need to have lots of screens for maybe 200 people each, and even big markets like Chicago can only support a handful of live performance venues of 4,000 seats or so. Churches become obsolescent when denominations change, as they have in Chicago neighborhoods for over 40 years, and despite the lingering religiosity of Americans, many people are in exurban superchurches or use religiosity as a wedge against preserving historical features of their buildings. Continue Reading
illusions of difference
In Germany they speak German and in China they speak Chinese. You can have romantic fantasies about how languages and countries are superior or inferior to your own. Or you can just see them as different – with their own advantages and disadvantages. I feel the same about technology. I have become a digital professor, using Powerpoint and the Internet instead of slides, despite the fact that I still have 15 linear feet of slide notebooks at home. In 1994 you used slides and in 2007 you use Powerpoint. You can have romantic fantasies about how these media are superior or inferior to each other. Or you can just see them as different.
There is a gulf, a chasm that we have all crossed, and we can call it modernity. We crossed it the moment we left tribal, village-based society, handicrafts and oral folklore and joined global, interconnected society, industry and mass media. Modernity has a lot of cohorts, conditions that accompany that transition. One is the impulse to preserve the pre-industrial, pre-Modern past. Another is Romanticism, that wistful apprehension of times and places removed and thus desirable. So we see the past and foreign countries through a romantic lens, believing they have something we have lost. Hence David Lowenthal said the Past is a Foreign Country. Continue Reading
iDon’t Need iT
When I was much, much younger I wore watches but quickly tired of the habit – they would either break or get lost, like umbrellas and sunglasses. Living in a city at that time obviated the need for a watch, since every bank had a clock and there were office buildings with clock towers and you rarely had to look for long before you knew what time it was. It was like finding a Starbucks today. I haven’t worn a wristwatch in 20 years – I think the kicker was a digital watch I bought in Bangkok for $2 in 1986, which fell apart in two days. I also didn’t like having one on my wrist – the leather straps were smelly and I didn’t like the stretch bands much more. Continue Reading
Modern Mischief
Jack Hartray was one of five “Mid-Century Modern” architects who spoke at the opening event of the Illinois Preservation Conference last week. Always an enjoyable speaker, Hartray mentioned that Gropius and the modernist masters of the Mid-20th-Century created a lot of “mischief” with a seemingly mischief-free command: make the building do what the client wants.
In a sense, this is the restatement of Louis Sullivan’s “Form Follows Function” and a central tenet of all modernist architectural thinking from the 1890s to the 1960s. But the “mischief” identified by Hartray was a classic failing in the hyper-aware three-dimensional art of modern architecture: the failure to appreciate the fourth dimension: Time. Even in the Time-Life Building. Continue Reading
Sustainability vs. Architecture
This building was built for Lord Vishnu – The Preserver.
You hear a lot about sustainability in architecture and “green” design. Sustainability has become a holy word in urban design and architecture circles. If you wanted to build something in the 1960s, you talked about Progress. If you want to build something in the 1970s or 80s you talked about Community and Diversity. If you want to build something today, invoke the goddess Sustainability. 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.