One-Way Street

Sick Supertalls

The Chicago Spire, 2,000 feet of twisting metal, has sold 30% of its units, developer Garrett Kelleher of the Shelbourne Development Group announced today. This is a significant announcement for two reasons: traditionally, lenders require 30% precompletion sales in order to fully fund a project; and the developer missed a property tax payment deadline earlier this year, prompting speculation that the Spire will never amount to anything but a hole in Streeterville.

Still, the Spire faces an uphill battle, so to speak. The market already has a condo unit for sale or near completion for every man, woman, child, and Labrador Retriever in the city. Another supertall building under construction in the city, Waterview Tower, will top out at the parking garage until lenders provide more money. As for the third new supertall under construction, Trump Tower--well, let's just say that it's no Sex and the City as far as unit sales are concerned.  The 30% precompletion sale figure is standard during a normal real estate market; this is not a normal market, leading some to speculate that lenders may want more sales before they start investing in the project. They may also want Kelleher to pony up more money. Thus far Kelleher has been vague about the finances of the project.

The Spire has one thing going for it, though: the crummy dollar. Half of the buyers are from overseas. Besides their enhanced buying power, I can see the attraction of Santiago Calatrava's immense tower for foreign buyers: if they have trouble arranging visas to enter the US, they can still see the building from across the ocean.

Going Underground

In their recently completed Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies, Chicago architects Krueck & Sexton demonstrated that they were adept at integrating modernist buildings into historic contexts. Krueck & Sexton are attempting to pull off the same trick with the Chicago Children's Museum. But instead of placing a museum in a procession of stately early modernist buildings along Michigan Avenue, Krueck & Sexton will be burying their Children's Museum beside the underground parking garages in Grant Park.

Underground buildings are now all the rage in Chicago. Helmut Jahn, for instance, recently released his design for an underground library at the University of Chicago. But for a building style that tries to be unobtrusive as possible, unless you're a mole, underground buildings are meeting with stiff resistance from locals. Mayor Daley has been pressing for a children's museum in Grant Park, but residents in the neighborhood, or whatever you want to call the cluster of highrises springing up at the north end of the park, are objecting, loudly, about the increased traffic and congestion the museum would bring to an already crowded corner of the park. Yesterday the Chicago City Council's zoning committee took a bold stand and ditched a vote on the Children's Museum because not enough aldermen showed up for the hearing, no doubt fearing getting whacked by the mayor if they voted against the proposal.

There's an even more powerful figure opposed to the Grant Park site: Montgomery Ward. He's been dead now for 95 years, but he still has lawyers eager to enforce his wishes that Grant Park be free of buildings. Hence Krueck & Sexton's underground museum. The architects have had to throw a few more shovelfuls of dirt onto the building in order to comply with court orders. The entry pavilion, for instance, has been reduced to a quarter of its original size and moved to a spot that's technically outside the boundaries of the park. A sort of skylight pit has been reconfigured so that it's more of a terrace, partly to open it to the public, and partly to make it look less like a grave site.

Which leads to another problem with the site: the image of smiling children being led to an underground bunker. Blair Kamin is one of many people who have wondered about the effects of the museum on small children's psyches. "What would it be like for that child—a 3-year-old kid in a stroller, say—to be in a building that drops as far as 48 feet below street level, down where there is now a depressing, concrete-walled parking garage?" he asks. "Would it be inspiring or dreary? Uplifting or scary?" This is a valid question, but one that's hard to answer. My three-year-old son is convinced our finished basement is inhabited by dragons when the lights are off, but he likes to play down there when the lights are on. He also doesn't like the early morning sunlight filtering into our living room; he complains that it's too bright.

If Krueck & Sexton want to make the subterranean museum palatable to small children, they should place a large Hot Wheels track just inside the front door. That will get my son's approval, at least. I'm guessing nine out of ten three-year-olds will buy into the proposed museum site if the finished building has enough distractions inside. But getting to the museum is another matter: kids don't like crowds, and they don't like parents cranky about trying to find parking in Grant Park. Nor do they like to trudge across the Loop from the train stations. But Mayor Daley will be happy, and no one wants to be around when he's unhappy.

PS: Thanks to the Tribune for the photo of the proposed site in Grant Park.

Make New Plans

Next year is the 100th anniversary of the Burnham Plan for Chicago, created by Daniel Burnham with help from Edward Bennett, who couldn't up with a snappy slogan like Burnham's "Make no small plans,"so he's largely been forgotten. Bennett was probably a "devil in the details" kind of guy.

Anyway, next month the city will announce a big celebration for the plan, which, as every kid who grew up in the Chicago area knows, saved Chicago from becoming Gary, Indiana. According to Blair Kamin, rumors are the city will announce that two Pritzker Prize-winning architects will design buildings commemorating the plan. The buildings will be erected, for a while, in Grant Park, one of Burnham's legacies. But with Grant Park being readied for a new children's museum to be built underground, City of Lost Children style, the lakefront is getting pretty crowded.

But the Plan of Chicago of 1909 was supposed to create a Paris on the Prairies, not Miami Beach on Lake Michigan. Burnham envisioned a Chicago of broad boulevards connecting parks strategically placed throughout the city. Burnham had an eye for natural beauty and a firm belief in architecture as a vehicle for moral uplift. I wonder what he would think about the often discrepant state of some of the outlying parks, while Grant Park increasingly becomes a gleaming space reserved for corporate sponsorship. (Grant Park, incidentally, was as much Montgomery Ward's idea as it was Burnham's.) As a commenter on Kamin's blog points out,  Burnham's plan was for the entire city, not just the lakefront, and we're long overdue for a new plan for the city.

So here's a brief wish list for the June 24 announcement of the Burnham Plan anniversary.

1. If we have to have starchitects design some building sponsored by corporations not even based in Chicago, then place them in Garfield Park or Washington Park or some other neglected point in Burnham's plan.
2. Sponsor a contest to come up with a plan for the next 100 years. Or better yet, line up the appropriate people to implement a plan that has already been drawn up, such as UrbanLab's update of Burnham's plan for the green era, even going to so far to banish cars, just as Burnham ignored them.

Forget the 2016 Olympics--Mayor Daley prides himself on getting big projects done, but he needs to show that he can do something besides round up corporate donors for some short-term publicity event.  For their part, private industry needs to show some more civic leadership, just as the Progressive Era moguls did when they hired Burnham to redesign the city. But with more and more Chicago companies being bought out by out-of-town interests (bye bye Wrigley Gum Company), that seems unlikely.

Artropolis 2008

There's an old story, retold by Jacques Lacan, about a trompe-l'oeil contest between Zeuxis and Parrhasios. Zeuxis paints some grapes that are so realistic birds flock to them, mistaking them for the real things. Then Perrhasios takes his turn and paints a veil so realistically that Zeuxis wonders aloud what's behind the veil. Zeuxis quickly realizes his mistake, blushes in embarrassment, and concedes the contest to Perrhasios. The story illustrates how animals can be lured by a false surface, but humans are lured by what lies beneath the surface.

This story is helpful in understanding Artropolis, an annual art show held in the Merchandise Mart in Chicago. The Mart is a vast building consisting mainly of high-end interior design showrooms, along with a smattering of other businesses, including the software company for which I work. I don't know if it's because of the crowds in the Mart or the juxtaposition of artworks and displays of sleek Italian kitchens and faux-Second Empire living rooms, but Artropolis doesn't invite the sort of contemplation of formal elements one is used to in a museum. Rather, we're compelled to consider the art within a specific context, in this case images and objects of high bourgeois domestic idealism.

I didn't have the time to take in Artropolis on a systematic basis. I didn't even pay to see the exhibits (I snuck in to a few). But in my limited sample two artworks stood out as emblematic of the whole experience of Artropolis and whatever the exhibit itself is supposed to represent. The first was a life-sized unicorn set up in the lobby of the Mart. I couldn't get close enough to the sculpture to see the title or the artist. (In fact, it didn't strike me as a blog post subject until it was already removed.) It's pretty easy to imagine: an anatomically correct horse, whitish, with a horn sticking out of his forehead.  The sculpture made a direct reference to the image store of a fantasy world sometimes plundered for furniture advertisements. The horn also relieved the sculpture from being one of those hyperreal pop art objects, like Jasper Johns' Ballantine Ale cans, that retain the power to irritate precisely because they seem so artless.

Another take on the same theme--making the fantastic actual while de-actualizing the real--is  John Gerrard's Dust Storm (Manter, Kansas), reproduced above. Gerrard created the image using the virtual-reality techniques of video games, but the image itself is staged like a blend between painting and the cinema. The painting refers variously to The Wizard of Oz, Dustbowl photography, post-apocalyptic video game narratives, ecological disaster, widescreen mise-en-scene, and, most significantly, high-definition television. It's a highly detailed representational work (much of the artwork in Artropolis was representational), but any sense of trauma--an essential element of the real, as the Surrealists and Lacan have taught us--has been rigorously erased. Dust Storm has none of the visceral quality of Andy Warhol's early 1960s silkscreen images of blood car wrecks. It is reality filtered through a technologically-mediated way of seeing.

Dust Storm is an apocalyptic fantasy domesticated, while the unicorn is an oblique fantasy of eternal fecundity. Despite the care that went into creating a reality effect, neither of them, I think, refer to some reality out there some place. Instead, they refer ultimately back to the images from which we create domestic space. Gerrard's painting in particular is readymade for consumption: it's a stylish replacement for the flatscreen TV, accessible to anyone with a Best Buy credit card. It also resembles the current fad of photographs blown up to unreal dimensions, then hung in a family room. The unicorn sculpture is too big for display in a private home, but it also invokes and disavows a déclassé desire: no connoisseur of fine design would admit to harboring the treacly, pre-modern fantasy of tame white horses prancing around eternally green landscapes.

Similarly, the interior design industry is all about the lure of what lies beyond quotidian residential spaces. Designers don't try to exactly reproduce a medieval French chateau in a suburban McMansion. The illusion is more or less explicit. It consists of real, and very expensive, objects positioned between the owners' historical fantasies and the traumatic realities of economic competition outside the home. Interior design, and the artworks in Artropolis, highly alluring veils obscuring both the real and the fantastic.

Talking about the Disasters to Come

This has been a strange week in my small world. It started with a cougar roaming around near my CTA stop and ended with an earthquake. In between was a series of computer code crashes and server failures and all-night conference calls and impatient managers to placate the next day. This week hasn't been anomalous. Since last August my family and I have experienced the worst thunderstorm in at least half a century, the worst winter in 20 years, the worst real estate market collapse in living memory, the highest gas prices in history, and potentially the worst recession in 15 years--or worse, an actual depression. Lakes big (Michigan) and small (our own Birch Lake in Wisconsin) are at historically low levels. Twenty-four Chicago schoolchildren have been killed so far this year.  Throw in the collapse of the Cubs, the White Sox the Bears, the Bulls and, quite possibly, Barack Obama's chances at the presidency (thanks a lot, Hillary! May you get 3 AM calls every night for the rest of your life) and one starts to think that we're in the midst of some slow-motion, multi-faceted disaster. As a friend said to me last night, "This whole area is on suicide watch."

If it's hard to find solutions to many of these problems (one problem has already been solved: the cougar was shot later that day by Chicago police), it helps to make grim remarks about them. In The Writing of the Disaster Maurice Blanchot points out that the French word for disaster, désastre, literally means "from the stars." Because disaster is something that is thrown down, like dice, from indifferent gods, it's neither a catastrophe nor a tragedy. Blanchot says disaster "dismisses all ideas of failure and success." It "impoverishes all experience, withdraws from experience all authenticity." If Walter Benjamin is right, impoverished experience (Erlebnis) can't be effectively narrated and made meaningful in a larger sense. Impoverished experience is one damn thing after another. Confronted with startlingly high prices at the gas pumps or a cougar stalking the streets, people complain or trade fact and speculation, but no coherent narratives emerge, at least none that can be told by ordinary people have to live through these experiences. Disasters big and small don't conform to our normal means of constructing cause and effect. They're outrages, pure and simple; they're monstrous provocations.

"This whole area is on suicide watch"--what a telling remark. It's a point at the beginning, or the end, or a story. It's also a bit of black humor, an ironic twist on a cliché doubly ironic in the context of a notorious suicide of a local resident. In its multiple meanings, the remark is a literary meme. Blanchot would call the remark "skeptical gaiety." He cites Levanas's assertion "Language is itself already skepticism" to make the claim that to write about a disaster is to practice a happy skepticism, to set in play the As If in the face of the menace of disaster. If we can't tell stories to console ourselves, we can play with language, spinning out pregnant metaphors, implying stories that won't ever be told. This play is a way to avoid just throwing up our hands and accepting fate, for there is no refuge in fatality. That would assume we're the intended victims of disaster. "The disaster is not our affair and has no regard for us; it is heedlessness unlimited," Blanchot writes.

Indulging in black humor may seem like a futile or inappropriate gesture, but Blanchot would see it as countering dreadful ambiguity with a playful, even hopeful ambiguity. Read enough news stories on the web and in print about a failing economy and a deteriorating environment and after a while you don't know what to think or how to feel. Figurative language, the kind largely banished from journalistic writing, interjects the possibility of feeling differently about how badly things are going. It opens up the possibility that no matter what happens, we will learn from the experience.

Teardown Fatigue

Winnetka, Illinois is fighting back against McMansions--and not having much success. Winnetka is an affluent suburb north of Chicago along Lake Michigan. As it happens, it's next to my home town of Wilmette, which is plagued by the same problem: massive and ungainly houses are being dropped into mid- and early-twentieth-century neighborhoods, disrupting the their cohesiveness, blocking out the sun, and generally sucking the soul out of mature bedroom communities. One endangered Winnetka house is a 1910 lakefront home built for John L. Hamilton, a partner of the Prairie School architect Dwight Perkins. Popular outcry probably won't be enough to save even this historical home from getting super sized.  North Shore residents are well known for their sense of entitlement--just ask any beleaguered waiter or school teacher or my wife--but their assertiveness stops at their neighbors' property lines.

Winnetka wants to gently persuade developers to take it easy on the "fake Palladian windows, bulging turrets and oversize stone balusters," according to a Tribune report. At least one Winnetka resident would like curtains on her neighbor's bedroom windows. But other suburbs that have proposed design guidelines have seen them largely ignored. Peter Wall, a North Shore realtor who maintains a hit list of homes ripe for teardowns, shrugs at the voluntary guidelines Winnetka's taste police have proposed. He says, "We look at what we can build on the property and what we could sell it for, and that dictates what happens to it." So there.

In addition to an exuberant "if it looks expensive, let's tack it on" exterior design aesthetic, McMansions offer spiffy kitchens and up-to-date wiring. The neighbors' smoldering resentment comes for free. Mid-century modern homes are especially vulnerable to teardowns because the large lot served as a kind of negative space complementing the clean, simplified, and carefully-scaled house. Modernist houses also date back to a time when the common belief was that the most important element in a house is the people who live in it. Now the most important elements are the things inside the house. The starting point for designing a McMansion is the owner's massive furniture and electronics. It takes a lot of square feet to enclose them and, more critically, a big roof to put a lid on years of high-income consumption. That's why McMansions tend to have crazy roofs with all sorts of bump outs and dormers and such. Otherwise, they'd look like the Metrodome.

How much room does a family need? I've heard 2400 square feet is plenty of space for a family of four. My family of four lives in a 2400 square foot house, and it seems like enough room, except when the Thomas the Tank Engine track pieces are scattered all over the place.  But one day our mid-century modern won't seem so sensible when we have two North Shore teenagers in it.  Maybe by then some of the McMansions will be ripe for teardowns.

A Modest Proposal for Wrigley Field

Landmarks Illinois has just issued its annual list of most endangered historic places in the state. This year, for the first time, the list was expanded from 10 to 11 sites to accommodate the newly endangered Wrigley Field. Sam Zell, the temporary and reluctant owner of the Cubs and their home park, wants to sell Wrigley to something called the Illinois Sports Facilities Authority, a city-state agency created specifically to ruin the last appealing major sports venue in Chicago. David Bahlman, the president of Landmarks Illinois, warns that if Wrigley "becomes an urban country club like Soldier Field with $300,000 skyboxes, it's not going to have the same character."

But I have a solution: Instead of renovating Wrigley, tear it down. That's right--tear it down. Then let all the past Driehaus Prize winners compete to design an exact replica of Wrigley to be built in River North, somewhere between the Rock and Roll McDonalds and the Rainforest Café. The replica Wrigley will be called Macy's Park at Wrigley Field. (In view of Macy's troubles in the Chicago market since buying out Marhsall Fields, I recommend getting payment in advance for the naming rights.) Rescue the new Ernie Banks statue, then erect more statues commemorating events in recent Cubs' history: Sammy Sosa circa 1998, during his steroid-inflated, whiff at every slider period; Moises Alou screaming in rage at Steve Bartman (alternate statute: Alou rubbing urine on his bat); and a drunken Harry Caray nearly falling out of the WGN booth while singing "Take Me Out to the Ball Game." All the rooftop decks could be rebuilt on top of the highrise condo buildings--with no compensation paid to the current rooftop deck owners, as payback for their reluctance to split their revenue with the Cubs. I'm assuming that the phony Irish bars will take care of themselves. They tend to grow like mold in gentrifying neighborhoods, anyway.

I make this admittedly heretical proposal as a lifelong Cub fan.  One of my fondest childhood memories was my first visit to Wrigley Field. I must have been about six years old. The shock of stepping out of the tunnel and seeing the dazzling green field and the lush ivy is still seared in my memory. As I write I'm negotiating to buy tickets so that I can take my son to Wrigley. I'm acquiring them about the only practical way one can get Cubs' tickets these days: buying them from a season ticket holder.

Once upon a time you could decide around 11:00 AM that you'd already had it with your day and you could head down to Wrigley to catch an afternoon game. Prime box seats were sold out by then, but usually you could get decent grandstand seats up to game time. If you wanted to get a little rowdy or sunburned, you bought bleacher seats. Otherwise, you relaxed, drank a few Old Styles, and watched the Cubs blow it again. It was summer in Chicago.

Wrigley Field is now a holy shrine given almost entirely over to post-fraternity mobs and middle management types spending the entire game on their cell phones telling everyone they know how close they're sitting to third base. Meanwhile, everyone is fiercely protective of every brick in this giant saloon--as if Wrigley had any other purpose except spending a lot of money and getting very drunk. Real Chicago baseball fans migrated to the White Sox and their Brutalist stadium long ago. A night game at Wrigley doesn't make the top 200 cool things to do in Chicago during the summer.

So build a replica with more luxury boxes, larger beer stands, and restrooms that don't smell like they haven't been cleaned since 1945. Freed of the burden of preserving the Friendly Confines the Illinois Sports Facilities Authority or Mark Cuban or a faceless bunch of hedge fund managers--whoever ends up owning Wrigley Field and the Cubs--can tinker with the stadium with a clear conscience (assuming they have one to begin with). Cramming still more high-priced box seats behind the Cubs' dugout would be like swapping out a few booths at the Hard Rock Café. No more pesky preservationists to swat away.  The ivy would still be there, steel beams would block some views, bars would be within staggering distance outside. Everything would be the same as it is now. Because everything has changed already.

The Life and Death of a Suburban County

Michael Gecan has a long and thoughtful essay about DuPage County, a popular reference point for discussions about the general economic and political state of American suburbia. DuPage County, Gecan argues, is already showing signs of the type of decline that Chicago, New York City, and other urban centers underwent in the 1960s and '70s. "No longer young, no longer trendy, no longer the place to be, no longer without apparent limitations or constraints," Gecan writes, "these places, like people, have developed ways of avoiding reality."

One could take issue with some of Gecan's points. For one thing, he tends to conflate the city of Chicago with Cook County. They are two entirely different political entities, as my cousin, who works for a County Board member, reminds me in almost daily emails about the venality of the Board President, Todd Stroger. And like families, decayed cities are unhappy in their own ways, so one municipality's tale of decline and revival isn't neatly comparable to another's. Stranded in the Midwest, Chicago does not have New York's easy access to foreign capital and markets, not to mention the human capital of Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington. Milwaukee, St. Louis, and Minneapolis are very nice places, but they're not throwing off a lot of sparks.

A place like Bartlett, a suburb on the north western edge of DuPage County, would seem to be a counterexample to Gecan's argument. I grew up there, and the town is more crowded than when I was pedaling my Schwinn around town, but it has plenty of green space, a shiny new library, and an actual Cuban restaurant in the building where ill-tempered German immigrants used to sell stale candy and bad coffee. Everything looks better than ever, right? Well, Gecan has an evocative image from his childhood spent in near Garfield Park on Chicago's rugged west side.

There was no way to know, in the 1950s, that we were living at the city’s high point. The massive economic and political, civic and religious institutions had seemed as solid and stable as glaciers to those living with them or in their shadows. From the second floor of our double-brick corner house, we could see the tavern that we once owned, the then-modern building that housed Newark Electronics, where my father and I would someday work, and the row of houses that blocked a view of Tootsietoy Company, where my mother would be employed. Four blocks north was our parish, Our Lady of the Angels. Many thousands attended Mass each Sunday. Sixteen hundred children packed its classrooms.     

By the mid-1980s, it was all rapidly declining. Today, our home, along with thousands of others, is abandoned. A state social service center fills the old electronics plant. Tootsietoy’s products are mostly made in China. And the parish church and school have closed.

As Gecan points out, appearances can be deceiving. One can move to the suburbs, and then further out into the suburbs, as my family did, but one can't escape history. A town is a dynamic, living thing, and no amount of Chem Lawn is going to stop it from changing, for better or for worse.

One of our close family friends from Bartlett, a woman who was never a victim of crime in her life, has left the town. She now lives in a nearby gated community.

The Task of the Storyteller

Last Friday I was rereading Walter Benjamin's essay "The Task of the Storyteller" when a  highly successful advertising executive from my home town threw himself from a hotel window and plunged to his death. In the week that followed I heard or read several stories surrounding this unfortunate man's death, but no coherent picture of the man emerged. He was a beloved family man, a widely-admired executive with several high-profile advertising campaigns to his credit. He was an alcoholic bully despised by his underlings for his abusive management style.  He left behind a wife and two young daughters. He left behind a mistress. The stress of heading up the creative department of a major advertising agency killed him. Getting thrown out of his house killed him. Bloggers killed him.

One version of the story can be found here. Note the widow's terse and enigmatic comment.

A couple of nights ago my wife received a call from a friend of hers whose husband is also the head of the creative department of a major advertising agency and lives in a North Shore suburb very near where the dead man lived. The woman's husband was shaken up, as were a lot of people in the Chicago advertising community.  It was from this woman that I heard the first confirmation that all was not well with the suicide victim's life. Listening to her, I thought, any number of people had motive to kill him. From her we learned, for instance, that he threw himself from the Fairmont Hotel because he was living there after being thrown out by his wife when she discovered his affair with another advertising executive. In this version, his death was a kind of retribution for being a thoughtless, arrogant jerk. Advertising didn't kill him. Living amongst high-strung, fiercely competitive haute bourgeoisie didn't kill him. He lived recklessly. He was a drunk. In this version of the story his case was isolated--nothing to do with anyone else or the industry in which he worked.

Immediately after she hung up my wife and I Googled the man and found a maelstrom of recriminations and expressions of grief. An uncle of the dead man claimed attacks from bloggers drove his nephew to kill himself. In this version, the advertising executive was a blameless victim of a pack of hyenas bent on his destruction. The uncle made this claim in a blog.

In "Task of the Storyteller" Benjamin considers the state of storytelling in his time, a condition he links to the state of experience. Before the advent of the novel and the mass media, when stories were primarily passed on by word of mouth, the storyteller related "experience from afar" that nevertheless was instantly comprehensible to his or her audience because they had a common base of experience. The novel, according to Benjamin, doesn't have this shared sense of experience; a novel is a wholly self-contained world the reader must enter as an outside observer. The ability to exchange experiences is further degraded in newspapers, which convey information without wisdom, "the epic side of truth." We get news from all over the world as it happens, but our historical knowledge is paltry because none of this news is memorable. It's too far outside our experience, which has become so routinized that we'd rather forget what happens to us than explore it in depth.

What's interesting about the stories I heard about the advertising executive's suicide was that instead of trying to enter it, to appeal to a shared experience, people were trying to extricate themselves from it. The man's death was a chockerlebnis, a shock experience, for many people. In his later writings Benjamin placed shock experience at the center of Baudelaire's poetic practice and, by extension, at the center of modern literature and modern life. Every person effected by the suicide last Friday is busy trying to construct a narrative that places someone else besides themselves in that hotel room. As a shock experience, however, the narrative processing will never end because the experience itself is traumatic. Therefore, it can never enter language directly. It can only be approached again and again from different directions, but never cracked open. Each person tells their own story, but they can't get anyone else to believe it because we've lost our ability to share experiences and incorporate them into our memories.  "Only by virtue of a comprehensive memory," Benjamin writes, "can epic writing absorb the course of events on the one hand and, with the passing of these, make its peace with the power of death on the other."

The Rogue’s Gallery

Chicago Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin reviews what he calls a "rogue's gallery" of awful buildings constructed in the city during its recent building boom. Chicago has built 160 high rises since 1998, more than many major cities have in their entire skyline.  This boom should have brought about a renaissance of the Chicago Style, but instead the building boom has revealed how shallow the architectural talent pool is in the city. To take one botched section of the city, the cluster of new residential towers along Columbus Drive, Kamin finds one excellent building, Jeanne Gang's Aqua Building, currently under construction, and a cluster of embarrassing neo-classical towers called Lakeshore East. Kamin notes,

Lakeshore East speaks to the quality gap between the profession's stars and its anonymous rank and file. It's like a baseball team that has a couple of power-hitting .300 hitters, but everybody else bats .100. You may get a home-run building here or there, but the overall quality of the architecture is anything but all-star.

I can attest to the horribleness of the buildings in Kamin's rogues gallery. River North, the city's art and design district, has some of the most mediocre architecture in the downtown area. Architects like Jim Loewenberg have looked beyond the River North's trendy design boutiques to the neighborhood's origins as a warehouse district by designing buildings that look like packing crates.  Further east, closer to the Magnificent Mile, there are some dogs, too, as the photo gallery shows.  The Antunovich Associates' Bernardin building, named for a modest cardinal, is supposed to resemble a Florentine palazzo, but in actuality it evokes a Filene's Basement.

Kamin focuses on the city's lakefront showcase spaces marred by architectural junk, but he could also have found another rogue's gallery sprouting around Wolf Point, where the Chicago River splits into its North and South branches. This is the oldest part of the city and it's never been served especially well by its buildings. On the plus side there's Kohn, Pedersen Fox's excellent 333 W. Wacker Drive building (built, incidentally, on the site of the hall where Abraham Lincoln was nominated for president in 1860), and slightly further down the South Branch is Perkins and Wills' underrated Boeing Building. The best known building on Wolf Point is the Merchandise Mart, where I work. It's a dignified building, but not a thing of beauty or grace. Conjoined to the Mart is the Holiday Inn, a blunt modernist structure that now houses the Sun-Times, after its cool 1955 Naess and Murphy headquarters was torn down to make room for the Trump Tower.  The Holiday Inn is almost East German in its ugliness, but at least t it has the excuse of being a chain hotel. Across the river from the Holiday Inn, right at the head of the river, is perhaps the grossest misuse of a prime location in the city: DeStefano and Partners' Riverbend Condominiums, built in 2002. It's not actually a horrible building. It would sparkle in a place like Duluth. But what a wasted opportunity.  It's a building meant to be looked out from rather than looked at. I've photographed it through a filthy Merchandise Mart window using my BlackBerry camera without bothering to retouch the photo, because the promo photos I found made it look a lot brighter and stately than it really is. (The Holiday Inn is at the right edge of the frame.) At night, the building is outlined in blue neon lights, the kind of decorative touch Las Vegas hotels outgrew a decade ago.

Fortunately, I think, there are plans to drop three Cesar Pelli-designed residential towers onto the Holiday Inn's parking lot (in the foreground of the photograph). The dirt is owned by the Kennedy family, and they're working with Hines Interests L.P., the developer of a 75-story Jean Nouvel building next to MoMA, to develop the site. However, as Kamin points out, shoe-horning in small buildings on tiny lots (the Holiday Inn lot is an irregular-shaped four acres) has led to some buildings with all the design panache of a lean-to addition. And by the way, once the Pelli residential towers are completed, the river bend views, Riverbend Condominiums' entire reason for being, will be permanently obscured.

The King of the Nineteenth Century

Richard Driehaus, a Chicago investor, is an evangelist for outmoded design styles. He's best known as the money behind the Richard H. Driehaus Prize for classical and traditional architecture, awarded to the architect who can best ignore the last 120 years of architectural history. The most recent winners were Miami architects Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, founders of the New Urbanism movement.

Next spring Driehaus will open the Richard H. Driehaus Museum of Decorative Arts in the in the Nickerson Mansion, a brooding Italianate mansion marooned in a neighborhood of anonymous condo buildings and cheesy tourist traps. As a preview of sorts Driehaus gave Robert Sheroff of the New York Times a tour of his house a few blocks away from the museum. Standing in his 1887 Queen Anne mansion, Driehaus proclaims, "Modern architecture has become totally homogenized and uninteresting. We're losing our sense of who we are, how we developed and where we're going. One streetscape in Prague is worth all of Dubai, visually."

He's certainly right about Dubai, the world's first fully surreal city. And if all he sees of Chicago is the few blocks between the offices of Driehaus Capital Management on East Erie Street and his house near Lake Shore Drive, then he has a point about Chicago as well. That patch of the city is as affluent as it is architecturally vapid.  But in the context of the architectural scene in the city as a whole, his statement is startling at best and disingenuous at worst. The most homogenized and uninteresting architecture in Chicago is being built in its gentrifying neighborhoods, where low-rise condo buildings run the gamut from workmanlike vernacular to wretched eclecticism. On the other hand, there have been a number of recent buildings created in the city's modernist tradition of fusing technology and form. The most recent example is Ron Krueck and Mark Sexton's Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies, a brilliant reinterpretation of the transitional modernism of Sullivan, Root, and Burnham. The Spertus Institute is just one example of a return of daring and genuinely creative architecture in the city.

As for Driehaus's Victorian pile, Sheroff puts it as nicely as he can, calling it "overtly theatrical." The house is an exercise in rococo eclecticism. Besides reflecting the prima donna impulses of its owner, the guiding principle of the house is turn-of-the-century neo-classicism, a period that saw the first flowering of architectural modernism in Sullivan's Auditorium Building and Root's Monadnock, as well as the first anti-modernist backlash in everything from Jungenstil to the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. Driehaus's house is less a showcase for haute bourgeois style than an obsessive return to a traumatic moment in history. The house isn't quite the oppressively opulent Second Empire style that Walter Benjamin saw as the expression of a reactionary bourgeois consciousness, but Driehaus has a taste for a theme Benjamin saw in late nineteenth-century European culture. The house abounds in images of petrified nature, from the Baccarat chandelier to a bronze bust of the 19th-century French actress Rachel. As a cultural form, petrified nature was dialectical in that it expressed a desire to arrest progress and, at the same time, retrieve a forgotten image from the past so that it may become real in the future.  It's interesting to note that the centerpiece of the house is the most overtly modernist: its two-story Art Deco living room. The rest of the house reflects the desires of a bourgeoisie that wants to feel at home anywhere in the world. For a wealthy Chicagoan stranded at the edge of the prairie, that also meant forging a cultural connection to Paris, which Benjamin called the capital of the nineteenth century.

Despite Dreihaus's implacable resistance to modernism--to the century in which he's lived most of his life--his alternative is incoherent. His 21st-century neo-classicism re-enacts the revivalist wars of the nineteenth century. One resolution of those battles between the revivalists was Chicago's fusion of  vernacular styles and emergent technology. Before the 1890's, the city was a mix of crude wood frame houses and equally crude copies of European styles.  Surely Dreihaus doesn't want to return to this rough-hewn period in the city's history. His house is a wish image for a culture we never had to begin with. 

Office Space

Over the Christmas holidays the company for which I work moved to an open workspace environment. It was an idea hatched by managers who weren't going to actually have to sit in open cubicles, but I have to admit I don't entirely hate the arrangement.

Traditionally office spaces are arranged so that management offices line the windows and the peons are jumbled together in cell-like cubicles in the middle of the floor, deprived of light, air, and a reason to live. The new open workspace reverses this arrangement: managers' offices--dramatically reduced in number--are huddled around the central core of the building, while the cube dwellers get the windows and an extra level or two of managers dispersed among them to make sure the peons behave themselves. Cubicle walls are lower than before, or in some cases eliminated altogether, so that light and noise can flow freely over the newly emancipated cube dwellers. In effect, the cube peons gain sunlight at the cost of the last shreds of their privacy.

The cube dwellers' renewed connection with nature, however, is only a tangential benefit of the open workspace. Corporations sell the concept of open workspaces to skeptical workers and middle managers as enhancing Team Work and Open Collaboration (sic). (In corporate written English, capitalization indicates importance rather than a proper noun. Redundancy is another indicator of importance.) But the real benefit of open workspaces is that they save Money. Offices are expensive and wasteful, as are the people who inhabit them, and open cubes can be arranged in pods, which are, basically, cubicles for four people.  It's an efficient use of space, but horrible feng shui.

I'm a project manager, so theoretically the Open Collaboration environment should reduce the time and effort I need to browbeat people into doing work on the projects I manage. But as office environments have evolved, so have the people who work in them. My offshore development coordinator, who is responsible for making sure I know as little as possible about what's going on in Chennai, sits in one of the dark slum sections of our office, so I have to make my way through a warren of desks to find him--then I have to find my way back to my cube, which a week after we've moved here is still a challenge. Plus, I'm starting to believe he changes cubes every few days. One particularly ingenious developer has avoided the increased surveillance of the open workspace by packing up his family and moving to Indiana, so he now enjoys that other newfangled form of office workspace: the home office. Another member of my project team works remotely from North Carolina. One day, when she was complaining about not being able to hear attendees at a meeting over the speakerphone, her husband sneaked into her home office and snapped a photo, then sent it to us. It showed a glass of red wine next to her laptop.

Because I have to be physically in the office so my project stakeholders can harass me, I can't work from home, let alone sneak an afternoon drink. But I got lucky in my cube placement. I'm near a bank of windows that overlook Wolf Point, where the Chicago River splits into north and south branches. The photo above was taken from my cube. The big green building on the left is Kohn Pedersen Fox 's 333 West Wacker Building, one of my favorite buildings in the Loop. My cube is small and gray, but throughout the office space the walls are painted in tasteful and subdued tones of red, blue and green. There are halogen lights everywhere, even in places where they're not needed. Supposedly the space was created by the same people who designed Google's open workspaces, and the whole place has a high tech, loft-like feel to it. Our office space is supposed to be green, so we've been issued LEED-certified water bottles, so we can retire the planet-killing bottles we've been using. I still don't know where I'm going to display pictures of my kids and Walter Benjamin, but I'm working on that. Now, if I can just figure out how to get myself into an office.

Spertus on the Streetwall

The Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies is a flirty newcomer to one of Chicago's most architecturally significant neighborhoods. Designed by local architects Ron Krueck and Mark Sexton, the Spertus is located on South Michigan Avenue at the nexus of some of Chicago's best contemporary designs and its best designs from a century ago. From the Institute you can see Anish Kapoor's Cloud Gate and Jeanne Gang's Aqua Building, currently under construction. Frank Gehry's uneven Pritzker Pavilion and BP Bridge are also within eyesight. More proximate are the "streetwall"  buildings of the Historic Michigan Boulevard District, with important examples by some of Chicago's first starchitects, including Louis Sullivan, Daniel Burnham, and Holabird & Roche.

There's no overt iconography or anything else to mark the building as specifically religious, or, for that matter, as particularly studious. In fact, the Spertus wears its religiosity so lightly that it's staging an exhibition of what it calls "Post-Jewish" artists. On the other hand, the building offers a kosher café. (I didn't have a lot of time, so I didn't visit either the art exhibit with the perplexing title "The New Authentics," or the café.)  Like the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City, the Institute's three main divisions--Spertus College, the Spertus Museum and the Asher Library--are simply stacked on top of each other, like a department store. And also like the New Museum, the Spertus has an enigmatic façade with a paralogical relation to what's going on inside the building. 

On the day I visited the Spertus Institute, its computer-designed crinkles reflected the frigid mists on the trailing edge of an ice storm. Most other days the building's intricately folded glass front would certainly be more alluring. When the skies are clear this section of Michigan Avenue, which is open to Grant Park and the lake, is infused with an almost Tuscan glow caused by the reflected light of the streetwall buildings and the particulate matter hovering in the air.  The Spertus's façade looks softer and more organic in person, and less like a crumpled beer can. The three-dimensionality of the front echoes, in a slyly intelligent way, the muscular rhythms of proto-modernist buildings around the Institute.

Step inside the building and one is confronted with the mixed messages one expects to see in a cultural institution nowadays: both welcoming (a gift shop and that kosher café) and foreboding (metal detectors), culturally rarified and frankly pragmatic. This loaded space flows upwards for three stories. The lobby would have extended to the roof if the Chinese hadn't scarfed up the world's supply of building materials. Without a soaring atrium the lobby welcomes you in the same way an office tower lobby does: distilling the urban space outside so you can get your bearings and find the elevators. It's a palliative experience--and in a lot of office towers the only humane gesture you'll encounter--but it's not one you'd bother to examine too closely. Perhaps mourning the lost atrium, the architects carved the exterior's jaunty parallelograms on the far wall, a nice if predicable effect. More intriguing is the switchback stairway. 

The Spertus pays tribute to the great architecture around it while boldly announcing itself as the harbinger of better things to come.  Krueck and Sexton's deft act of contextualization neglects only one element: the building should have some sort of body piercing or tattoo in honor of the scruffy art students who live and work in the area. I'd like to return one sunny day when I have enough time to explore the upper floors and peruse the art exhibit to see what the new authenticity is all about.

Exurbia Is the New Urbanism

Yesterday the Miami architects Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, the founders of New Urbanism, were named the winners of the 2008 Richard H. Driehaus Prize.  If you haven't heard of it, the Driehaus Prize is the conservative, anti-modernist alternative to the Pritzker Architecture Prize, which is also funded by a rich Chicagoan. If you've never heard of New Urbanism, recall the eerily perfect small town in The Truman Show, with nary a blade of grass out of place. The film was shot in Seaside, Florida, the most famous example of New Urbanist planning.

Duany and Plater-Zyberk were responsible for laying out the basic principles of New Urbanism. Duany and Plater-Zyberk wanted urban space to look like a cross between Mayberry and New Haven, with a dash of the Upper West Side thrown in. Theirs is a vision of what small-city American life would be like if Wal-Mart had never happened. Some of the principles seem reasonable enough, such as the requirement that housing remain in close proximity to a commercial center. Others are just asking to be violated, like the prohibition against garages. Still others sound suspiciously like social engineering: the New Urbanist spaces, which can be found mostly in suburbs, are meant to prepare residents for full-on urban life. In short, the hearts of New Urbanists may be in organic culture, but their minds are as totalizing as Le Corbusier's urban schemes. 

I'm both a dedicated modernist and a bike-train commuter,so I'm of two minds about New Urbanism. The modernist in me is scornful of any aesthetic program that pretends the twentieth-century never happened. The bike commuter in me, speaking with the smugness of someone with a small carbon footprint, says everyone should live within walking (or biking) distance of their workplace and the businesses they patronize most frequently. The kinds of urban spaces the New Urbanists are trying to create very closely resemble the types of communities my wife and I have chosen to raise our children. But while our life right now is New Urbanist, it may not always be so. While I can ride my bike to a wine shop in downtown Wilmette and hop on the CTA to ride to my job in the River North section of Chicago, the reality of living in a large metropolitan area like Chicago is that I can only take a job in the North Shore suburbs or in the city. Naperville, one technology center in the area, is a hateful two-hour commute away. Even Schaumburg, where I worked during the dot com boom, is a traffic-clogged twenty miles from my home. One job change and my entire low-emission lifestyle goes out the window. I might as well commute in a Hummer.

Supposedly, Duany and Plater-Zyberk came up with the idea for New Urbanism while attending graduate school at Yale in the 1980s, and New Urbanism smacks of the self-contained--but nevertheless highly appealing--environment of the college town. A lot more of our urban and suburban areas should resemble Charlottesville, Virginia or Eugene, Oregon, but the reality of development in the 2000s, with the gravitational pull of new office complexes and Wal-Marts at the metropolitan fringes,  means that exurbia is the new urbanism.

Delirious Chicago

Rem Koolhaas's Delirious New York is a book specifically about New York City, but I think it goes a long way in explaining the architecture of irrational exuberance now infecting Chicago.  A depressed real estate market and an overburdened infrastructure haven't put a damper on some of the more delirious projects either active or proposed in the city, including the new Trump Tower, the Waterview Tower, the whirligig building, and most remarkably, the Chicago Spire.

Contrary to the popular belief that it takes a giant ego to build a skyscraper in New York, Koolhaas suggests it takes a bit of craziness. Koolhaas traces the origins of modern Manhattan to early twentieth-century Coney Island, which was inspired by "hopelessly obstinate desire to record and preserve a mirage." Luna Park, for instance, is the first city of towers.  The amusement park's towers, built in 1903, are pure illusion with no function other than to "overstimulate the imagination and keep any recognizable earthly realities at a distance." 

When towers finally migrate to Manhattan, they are, in a sense, functional illusions.  Their developers justify the giant buildings by claiming that businesses need them.  In this view tall buildings are inevitable, as if they were a plant native to Manhattan Island.  However, these giant climate-controlled machines for producing paperwork only appear to be rational.  Not only do skyscrapers exceed the human proportions of the Renaissance city, they also exceed the control of architects, who can no longer impose their individual wills on them.   Koolhaas sees the skyscraper as "the instrument of a new form of unknowable urbanism.  In spite of its physical solidity, the Skyscraper is the great metropolitan destabilizer: it promises perpetual programmatic instability."  The Empire State Building, for instance, has no real reason for being, and its hyper-efficient construction processes assumed a life of their own. The building is thoughtless.  "Pure product of process," Koolhaas writes, "Empire State can have no content.  The building is sheer envelope."

If the Empire State building is a kind of empty rationalism, an ego with neither an unconsciousness nor a  superego, the Rockefeller Center is an irrational fantasy realized in small, rational steps. Combining a concentrated urbanism and an artificial nature, Rockefeller Center is a collection of towers incorporating pre-modernist layers.  The towers rise from "the fabricated meadows of the new Babylon, the pink flamingos of the Japanese Garden and imported ruins donated by Mussolini." They are perfect Benjaminian objects--the sedimented, mythic past at the core of the modern.

Rockefeller Center, the "Garden City aloft," is the epitome of what Koolhaas regards as the fundamental principle of New York City: Manhattanism.  Koolhaas points out that New York architects and city planners have never really been serious about reducing congestion.  In fact, "the real enterprise of Manhattan's architects" is a "culture of congestion," which is the final expression of the inner logic of Manhattan's grid, laid out in 1807.  The traffic-clogged streets become Venetian canals, while buildings are cities within cities, islands in a modernized Venice.  New York City, like Nietzsche's Venice, is a collection of solitudes.

Manhattanism is congestion for congestion's sake, along with a pragmatism so obsessive that it becomes a kind of poetry. Manhattanism explains why Le Corbusier, the great rationalist architect of modernism, failed to realize if any of his grand schemes in New York.  Corbusier's Radiant City, which Koolhaas describes as "a majestic flow of humanist non sequiturs," is a proposal to erase all the great, crazy ideas upon which Manhattan was built and replace them with a uniform set of towers evenly planted in green spaces. He wanted to purify the city, and give its residents light and air. But he failed to comprehend New Yorkers' neurotic attraction to traffic and pollution, offering only the efficiency of banality in exchange.

Koolhaas sees architecture as an essentially otherworldly profession.  Architects are always designing for the great flood that will sweep away all of the historical clutter of cities. This may explain why Santiago Calatrava was inspired to design a 2,000-foot-tall sliver of ice in Chicago just as the Great Lakes are receding because of global warming. His invocation of snail shells in the building's design resembles the petrified remains of prehistorical global disasters.  Possibly the building's tepid and incredulous reception so far is because there's something apocalyptic about it.  Furthermore, I'm not sure that Chicagoans are ready to admit that the pragmatism of "the city that works" has reached the excessive, crazy, and poetic dimensions of Manhattan.

Suffering for Art

The 150 N. Michigan Avenue Building may be one of the few 1980's buildings that has aged well,but the sculpture that stands in its small plaza has not. Yaacov Agam's Communication X9 is set to reappear in public in the spring of 2008 after a nearly three-year restoration process. A Harvard-trained art restorer was hired to repair the 43-foot column, which had suffered more than 20 years of harsh Chicago winters. However, the restoration isn't up to Agam's standards because there's "no  movement in the color," and if the tone of one panel is off by a little bit, the whole sculpture suffers, the entire city suffers, and most importantly, the artist suffers. "It's not an Agam," huffed the artist. "It's an abuse of the artist, and an abuse of the public, to misrepresent the sculpture as mine."

Agam has hired a lawyer who's waving around the 1990 Visual Artists Rights Act, which was intended to present the desecration of artworks. Agam may be out of luck, though, because his work was completed in 1981 and he doesn't own it any more. The law was intended to prevent the wanton destruction of public art, and Agam has a tough case to prove that X9 has been desecrated after the restoration, especially considering Agam was paid $18,000 for his contributions. As for abuse of the public, I don't recall the column looking like a new way of representing movement in art, as one of its supporters claims. Rather, it looked more like a bad 1980's sweater. The subtle changes in color as one walks by, Agam's signature effect, wasn't that arresting.

This isn't to say the artwork doesn't deserve a careful and professional restoration, but to invoke a law intended for real crimes against art for trivial matters of color matching is the real abuse of the public. Public works of art inevitably suffer some indignities, especially from the weather. An artwork worthy of public funding should take this into account. No one from Picasso's estate has hired a lawyer to remove the rust from his sculpture in the Daley Center plaza. Suing over the Pantone values of a minor work of art, especially since the color effects will be lost in a winter or two anyway, trivializes an important issue in American public space.

Pacific Gardens

Stanley Tigerman's new Pacific Garden Mission was dedicated last Saturday, becoming the Chicago's second new project, after Helmut Jahn's single-room-occupancy Near North Apartments, in which a high-end architect designs a building for the poor. Tribune critic Blair Kamin points out a couple of problems with the Pacific Garden, neither one of them necessarily Tigerman's fault. The new mission is too far from public transportation; in fact, the new Pacific Garden is even further from the city's core than before. Also, because budget constraints eliminated some of Tigerman's more elegant design touches, the exterior of the building has the red-brick functionalism of a warehouse. Tigerman's original plan, developed through his socially-conscious design school Archeworks, "had all the hallmarks of the German Bauhaus with a 21st Century twist: A blend of straightforward elegance and social purpose with sustainability," Kamin writes. Despite the compromises brought about by the project budget, the building evinces an "attention to human experience" in its interior design. Although the budget didn't allow for the custom-made greenhouses Tigerman wanted, landscape architect Peter Schaudt was able to create a green space inside the courtyard to go with some off-the-shelf greenhouses. The new Mission also has the obligatory green roof.

The Pacific Garden Mission, a homeless shelter, is an example of two historical themes in urban architecture: social reform through housing and the garden city. These themes represent differing responses to the problem of controlling urban masses.  German architects and planners of the 1920's and early '30's moved the working classes away from the centers of Frankfurt and Berlin in projects called Siedlungen.  Similarly, the garden city movement of the same period was also designed to eliminate cities, or at least their most doleful effects. Henry Ford was the unlikely originator of this concept, itself based on the idea of "organic capitalism," which proposed moving workers out of the urban centers into bucolic company towns connected by railroads and highways--thereby vitiating any kind of collective labor action.

This is why the red-brick exterior and isolated garden of the new Pacific Garden Mission are so pregnant with meaning. The Mission's exterior recalls the "warehousing of the poor" metaphor of the vast post World War II public housing projects, which were intended to limit the movement of poor people through the city. The Pacific Garden Mission's green spaces are similarly segregated from the rest of the urban fabric, hoping to suggest, in the figure of twelve birch trees, that neither the city or its poor exist at all.

The Googlization of Public Space

Today Google Maps adds Chicago to its "Street View" function, so that urbanites' activities in all their banality are memorialized until the next image refresh. No one cares that their phone may be tapped, but they get incensed if someone tries to photograph them unloading groceries.

The Street View is neither a panoptic intrusion into our private lives nor Walter Benjamin's utopian concept of a public space in which people feel as comfortable and as empowered as they do in private space. Rather, the Street View is a symptom of a reality deficit, in which everything is so indexed and classified that there's nothing left to discover. It's an anti-dérive.

Play Ball

A few years ago Philip Roth caused a stir when he announced that he was giving up rooting for the Mets and switching to the Yankees. "Why should I continue to feel obligated to schoolyard allegiances?" he asked.

How do we choose which teams to root for? For many people, it's a matter of geographical fate. I was born and raised north of Chicago's Madison Avenue; therefore, I'm a Cub fan. Move my childhood only a few miles to the south, and I would be a White Sox fan. But I spent a good portion of my adulthood--eleven years--in Philadelphia, so I'm also a Philliies fan. When I walk around the Chicago area with my Phillies cap, especially downtown, I get a lot of mildly suspicious looks, as if I were flying the flag of a foreign nation. It's not quite like being a transplanted Chicagoan in Wisconsin, where Packers fans regard a Bears fan like he's in a terrorist cell, but the hostility pops up every so often. Walking around the Loop one day in my Phillies hat a grandmotherly type snapped at me, "You can't wear that around here."  Then my family complained when I gave my son a Phillies hat, a souvenir from a business trip to Philly. Finally, unwilling to interpellate my son into the vagaries of my own biography, I bought him a Cubs hat for his third birthday—interpellating him, of course, into another ideology. But I'm glad to see that he prefers wearing his Phillies hat.

My son knows what baseball is, but he has no concept of the Major Leagues or even teams. One trip to Wrigley Field will imprint the Cubs on his brain forever, just as it did me when I was six years old. But why should we get assigned our fandom identities before we choose a career or a life partner, and why can't we freely choose who we want to root for without having to explain our choice all the time? Why can't I be a Cardinals fan, a much more sensible choice given the histories of the Cubs and the Phillies? We think of America as a society of self-fashioning in which we freely create our identities in a particularly linear manner. Recall that Huckleberry Finn, generally regarded as the first truly American novel, is the story of a boy who leaves home and doesn't look back. So playground allegiances shouldn't be so hard to shake, but they are.

Maybe we need some identities that we don't choose, that are imposed upon us at birth and never leave us, for better or for worse. Maybe we all have a psychical bartering system that recognizes some immutable but unfortunate identities while allowing us to keep all of the other identities more provisional. I'm a Phillies fan partly to recognize a discontinuity in my life--the Chicago to which I returned a few years ago is different, and not altogether better, than the Chicago I left--and partly to keep open the possibility that I could move someplace else. To have the freedom to choose where one lives also means that there's always another, better, truer home someplace else. Sports team allegiances are a form of localized identity, and as such they're major markers in the narratives we construct about ourselves.

So yesterday was an interesting day: the Bears lost, badly, but the Phillies beat out the hated Mets for the Eastern Division crown. The Cubs clinched a few days ago in their typically diffident way, unlike the '93 Phillies, who charged right into the World Series. There's a realistic chance that the Cubs and the Phillies could meet for the NLCS, and should that happen, I'll suffer a lot of cognitive dissonance, but I know that my old playground allegiances will reassert themselves. Sorry Phillies.

Sprezzatura

My son and I are home with stomach flu, so I'm unable to process anything more complicated than Word Girl. Here are some links picking up on stuff I've been writing about recently:

Steven Clemons says we're not going to attack Iran, despite the current buzz in Washington that indicates we are. Bush is gun shy, for once, and he's dispatched Condi to find a third way between an aerial attack and "appeasement." Meanwhile, Cheney is plotting to force Bush's hand into an attack. Clemons' article is a rare account of Bush actually learning from his mistakes.

I'd rather see Stephen Greenblatt write more directly on Baldassare Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier, but he invokes the Renaissance concept of sprezzatura (nonchalance) in a highly personal reflection on sports, writing, and his own entry into college, complete with a sly contrast to Kaavya Viswanathan's more mercenary approach to making one's way through Harvard.

Salman Rushdie, with uncharacteristic brevity, crashed the National Book Critics Circle symposium on the future of book reviews and proclaimed, "I think it's rather unfortunate that some of the coverage tries to pitch print reviewing against the new media. I think they complement each other very well." By the way, the NBCC event shows that the newspapers v. blogs debate remains stuck in place.

Why didn't this collection stay home? It could have gone in the new Renzo Piano addition to the Art Institute of Chicago.

Musician

Filmmaker Daniel Kraus has just released Musician, the second installment in his WORK series. Musician features Chicago jazz musician Ken Vandermark, who can be seen most Wednesday nights at the Empty Bottle. The film presents the life of a jazz musician as one part artistry, one part cagey hustle, and one part pure drudge work. Vandermark is one of the city's top musicians in any genre, but he still has to devote a lot of psychic energy to managing his thin cash flow. Kraus keeps an anthropological eye on his subject as Vandermark gently nudges out a composition, expounds on the virtues of atonal music, and performs his blistering music on stage. Kraus, who thankfully avoided choosing yet another indie rocker to represent the travails of professional musicianship, clearly feels an affinity with Vandermark. Kraus says in an interview with ReelChicago.com,

Ken's work ethic is inspiring, but in truth it's a lot like mine. We're ambitious, prolific, to some extent control freaks, and we're both searching for new models that allow our work to function in more efficient, secure, and financially stable ways.

Musician can be read as a gloss on the life of an independent director as well. Some of the idealism of documentary filmmaking dictates the choice of subject matter for the series. The first installment was Sheriff, and future films in the WORK series include Truck Driver, Messenger, Professor, Preacher, Social Worker, and Cemetery Groundskeeper. There's something quaintly retrograde about the titles; except for preacher, these are job titles that could have been included in the WPA. They recall a time when labor, either intellectual or manual, had still had dignity and meaning in itself—concerned, in one way or another, with the real, like documentary filmmaking itself.

The Best 21st-Century Chicago Buildings, So Far

Chicago has always considered itself to be the birthplace of modern architecture, even though it's only recently bothered to preserve the important buildings in the development of modernism. After the Sears Tower was completed in 1974 the city underwent a prolonged aesthetic slump, but now the city is on a hot streak architecturally, notwithstanding a few duds like the fat man in the bathtub renovation of Soldiers Field.

The trio of supertalls currently under construction have been getting a lot of press lately, and Chicago Magazine looks at ten distinguished smaller-scaled buildings completed since 2000. Overall, it's a good list, although, of course, one could quarrel with some of the choices and oversights. One glaring omission is Rem Koolhaas's McCormick Tribune Campus Center at IIT. The more I see of  Perkins + Wills' Boeing Building, the more I like it.

Here are a few brief observations on some of the buildings on the Chicago list.

The Contemporaine (2006), Perkins + Will. This building is only a few blocks from where I work, and I must have walked past it a dozen times before I happened to glance up and saw what a remarkable building it is. It's the best residential building in River North, by far, but it doesn't relate well to the street. The exterior is forbidding, even a little grubby, especially on the Grand Street side. And the street-level store, which sells vintage Swedish modern furniture, is cramped and dark. But above street level, it's a great building. Judging from the profusion of plants that overflow the balconies, the residents really like living there. Ralph Johnson, the principal designer of the building, has another striking building at 1 N. Halsted.

The Spertus Institute of  Jewish Studies (2007), Krueck & Sexton Architects. I haven't made it over to Michigan Avenue yet to check this building out, but it's already gotten a lot of attention. Considering it's the premier street in the city, Michigan Avenue doesn't have much good architecture. Stanley Tigerman's Gap Store is an exception, and the Spertus Institute may be another, although it may also be an ordinary building with a quirky facade. It's worth checking out once it's finished.

The Sofitel (2002), Jean-Paul Viguier, architect. This building is the best of the new lux hotels, although I like the Park Hyatt more than some of the critics I've read. The Sofitel is clean and elegant, like Richard Meier's best buildings. The interior, though, is another matter. My wife and I looked at the Sofitel for our wedding recepti