Hull House Again
Well, I took my grad students to the Jane Addams Hull House Museum and Director Lisa Lee did it again – wowed everyone with her enthusiasm and creativity in reimagining what a house museum is. Not that Jane Addams’ Hull House was ever a typical house museum – preserved under duress during the construction of the University of Illinois at Chicago, the house was sort of a shrine to Addams herself and the institution she created, which still exists elsewhere. It was also subject to an absolutely bizarre restoration – you can see my 2003 research on the subject at http://tigger.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/urbanexp/main.cgi?file=new/show_doc.ptt&doc=834&chap=32.
Yuck at UIC
I admit it. Back in the day (early 1990s) the committee I staffed at Landmarks Illinois refused Walter Netsch’s request that we try to preserve his UIC campus design, replete with double-decked concrete walkways and a concrete forum/agora/ampitheaters in the center of the supposed commuter campus. The center was replaced with typical 90s Vanilla Town Center but the basic brutalist buildings remained. And I liked them and I went to school in them for much of the early 2000s and I liked them more as I spent time in and around them.
I even referenced the buildings in my speech there last May (see the blogroll from May) and they had a clear elegance in concert with their material, the lancet lattices of beveled brut framing windows in a delicious evocation of gothic aspiration that did not detract from the atomic optimism of the campus’ 1960s conception.
So I am teaching a class there this spring so I went back to campus for the first time in a couple of years and found this crap Continue Reading