One-Way Street

From the Lake to the River: Santiago Calatrava's Retreat

"Architect of defunct-Chicago Spire to design riverfront sculpture" reads the headline to Blair Kamin's story about the announcement of a Santiago Calatrava sculpture to be placed between the Chicago River and a new skyscraper. The headline places the story in exactly the right context. In the days before the Great Recession Calatrava designed a 2,000-foot-tall tower to be constructed along Chicago's lake shore.  The building, known as the Chicago Spire, was more big than beautiful, but it was undeniably ambitious even though no one had a plausible plan for constructing it. 

The red sculpture is a retreat from the Spire in every way possible. The artwork is set in a void on the river instead of commanding the lake front. As an aesthetic object, it's not much. It's all flourish and no presence, like a necklace from Kay Jewelers. Calatrava has given up his pristine white in favor of a red that makes no sense in the context, unless the intent is to make sure the architectural boat tours don't overlook it. Perhaps the sculpture doesn't need to be beautiful, only noticeable.  Calatrava likes similes, and one may be at work here: It's as if the Spire had actually been built, then someone set fire to it and a single red ember floated up the river and came to rest. 

So far Calatrava can't even bring himself to name the sculpture. In the meantime, the owner of the Spire site is preparing to unveil the design for another building to be erected over the round hole over which the Calatrava's tower was supposed to rise.

One day the docents of the architectural boat tours on the Chicago River will point to the red sculpture and say, "This sculpture was designed by Santiago Calatrava, the architect of the Chicago Spire, which was never built."

Crossing Out the John Hancock Center

The generic city is a city without names. The great city, on the other hand, is a collections of names. London is not just “London.” It is also Big Ben and Trafalgar Square and the Shard. 

Many of Chicago’s names are buildings named for corporations: The Sears Tower, the Wrigley Building, the Tribune Tower, the John Hancock Center. Many of these names are being replaced or they are being removed from their original position in the production of meaning. In the middle of the 2008-09 real estate crisis the Sears Tower became the Willis Tower. Soon the Tribune Tower will no longer contain the Chicago Tribune newsroom. Even though no newspapers will be produced there, the building will still be called the Tribune Tower because brand names have become commodities in their own right.

Now the John Hancock Center will lose its name. The John Hancock company, no longer an independent entity, has asked that its name be removed from the tower, years after vacating it. The tower’s identity will revert to its position on the grid and assume the name 875 North Michigan Avenue. You will look at the building but you are prohibited from saying its original name. This may seem odd considering how much effort corporations give to insert their brands into our speech. Yet the prohibition against its proper name is really another example of how corporations try to own language.

The tower’s anonymity may be temporary. The Hearn Company, which owns the office and parking parts of the building—the visual unity of the building as a single property is an illusion—is actively seeking an “important identity” for the tower, as if it were a newly divorced woman. The new identity may come from a local corporation. More likely, it will come from nowhere, like the Willis company. 

After the tower receives its new name, no doubt many people will continue to use the old John Hancock name, partly out of habit, partly from reluctance to give up a piece of Chicago history, and partly from resistance to becoming a shill for a brand. 

A Species of Hunger Native to the City

One night not long ago my wife and I attended an Arcade Fire concert at the United Center in the West Loop neighborhood of Chicago. I will have more on the concert itself in a separate post. Today I want to take a look around the restaurant at which my wife and I met for dinner before the concert.

We chose a restaurant near the United Center in a former warehouse district on Randolph Street in the West Loop. The bars and restaurants along this street are mostly large establishments, many of them located in converted warehouses and factories.  Urban Belly, the place at which we agreed to meet for dinner, was the quick service side of a restaurant with the rather inscrutable name of BellyQ, as if there is a species of hunger native to the city.

Urban Belly offers a “tour of the world” consisting of “the radically delicious and the curiously familiar.” The “delicious” part of the equation rests in the Asian dishes on the menu, centered around dumplings and bowls, while “familiar” refers to the borrowing of service concepts of casual fast food chains like Chipotle. To avoid Chipotle’s mass-market cultural appropriation, Urban Belly’s website features a narrative of its chef, Bill Kim.

Kim’s story is a quintessentially American one that dives into the melting pot of cultures and experiences to create an identity that is uniquely his own. He started urbanbelly in 2008 to bring together his wide-ranging passions. Asian + American. Fine-dining techniques + neighborhood comfort. Classic dishes + joyous creativity.

The sudden hastening of language toward the end of the narrative, with text-like plus signs reconciling opposites, hints at a structure of feeling experienced by young urbanites. It is globalist, hybrid, and aspirational, but also anxious to move on to the next experience. The general vibe is cool and a little harassed.

The structure of feeling hinted at on the website is expressed most fully in the dining area of Urban Belly. The quick-service Urban Belly space is differentiated by a transparent partition from the full-service BellyQ, which has conventional booths and four-place tables. The Urban Belly space was dimly-lit, with exposed brick and concrete floors. You sat at long, shared tables fashioned from massive pieces of wood-like material. You sat on heavy wooden blocks of similarly indeterminate manufacture. They weren’t chairs. They weren’t stools. The dining area was arranged like a grade-school cafeteria situated in a gymnasium—exertion and replenishment in the same place. Like a cafeteria, the Urban Belly space is convivial but the clock is ticking. There’s no escape from the schedule.

It was a chilly night, the first truly cold night of the season. We ate pork and cilantro dumplings, ramen and pho using disposable wooden chopsticks. The soups were warming and the dim lights soothing. Still, the experience didn’t feel very intimate, and not just because two men were sitting on the not-quite stools next to us. The open spaces, high ceilings and concrete floors made it seem like customers were being warehoused themselves. Just like a grade school cafeteria will revert back to a gymnasium after lunch, after dinner Urban Belly looks like it’s designed to be an easy-to-clean industrial space. I don't think they actually do this, but the space could have been hosed down every night after closing.

The Wicker Park Urban Belly is actually in a residential neighborhood, but on Randolph Street you don’t disappear into the fabric of a neighborhood. It’s a warehouse district, close to highways and rail lines. The few residences in the area are also carved out of industrial spaces. After dinner in the West Loop you get into your car or an Uber and head someplace else. Despite its urban trappings, the West Loop is a transactional space like any commercial strip in the suburbs.

We walked around the corner in the biting wind to our car to hurry to the United Center for the concert. More on that here.

Parallax Sounds Now Available to Stream

 

Parallax Sounds, a film I wrote about in this space in 2011, is now available for streaming. The film is a documentary about the post-rock movement in Chicago during the 1990s.  Director Augusto Contento has a unique visual style, heavy on tracking shots. Parallax Sounds is as much about Chicago as it is about the musical movement. Although post-rock petered out around the turn of the century, but looking at the current state of rock music--stuck in place, ceding all creative energies to rap--it's a movement worth looking at again. 

When Pigs Fly by Trump Tower

New World Design Ltd., a Chicago design company, has hatched a plan to have giant inflatable pigs hover beside Trump Tower in Chicago, hitting Trump right where it hurts the most--his brand. A couple of summers ago Trump plastered his name on the façade of his namesake tower, defacing a handsome building and irritating nearly every citizen of the city. In retrospect, it was a harbinger of things to come.

Anyway, the design firm is still working out the details of the installation, which is planned to be only for one day. It would be brilliant if the pigs could be permanent, but the Chicago River is busy at that point, so it's unlikely the city, despite its animus toward the president, will permit a barge to disrupt boat traffic for very long. The design inspiration comes from the concert props for Pink Floyd's Animals tour, which came to Chicago in 1977.

Dodger Stadium Is the Third Oldest Stadium in MLB

The grandstand's massive concrete superstructure contrasts sharply with outfield seating areas that exhibit a breezy nonchalance, courtesy of their hexagon-shaped scoreboards and wavy corrugated metal roofs. Views of nearby Elysian Park and the distant San Gabriel Mountains (provided they're not obscured by smog) give the stadium an Edenic feel.

The mid-century modern touch is also evident in the pastel palette of the grandstand seats, which shift from yellow to tangerine to aqua to blue as seating tiers rise above the field. The idea, Smith said, was to evoke a sunset.

via www.chicagotribune.com

Blair Kamin, architecture critic of the Chicago Tribune, also known as tronc (pause for laughter), compares Wrigley Field to Dodger Stadium, the only hipster stadium in Major League Baseball.

A few weeks ago I took in a game at the newly renovated Wrigley. My eye was drawn more to the dual Jumbotrons than the 1937 scoreboard, which I checked mainly for the pitch could because the Jumbotrons couldn't be bothered to track anything so mundane. I noticed the undersides of the suites still had the netting to prevent crud from falling on the fans below. Apparently there wasn't room in the $575 million to fix that. And the concession area under the grandstands is still cramped and dark. I hear the Cubs' locker room is nicer, though. The food options are marginally better and the beer gardens outside the stadium are better organized. In short, the Cubs have updated Wrigley Field with a competitive team and improved spaces for consumption.

Looking at Your City Like a Tourist

Today may be one of the last nice days before chilly weather sets in, so I got up from my desk and took a morning walk. I work a block from Calder's Flamingo and I totally forgot it was there.

In "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" Walter Benjamin noted that people who live and work in buildings experience them in a distracted manner. You pass through your workplace every day. You know the touch of the elevator buttons, the feel of the door handles, the sounds in the lobby. You don't give much thought to these sensations. Why would you?

A tourist, on the other hand, contemplates a building like it's a work of art. I sat for five minutes in the Federal Building Plaza and saw five or six groups of tourists photographing the sculpture. I took the shot above from the place where moments before a pair of French (or maybe just French-speaking) tourists had taken pictures.  This photograph looks like thousands of other photos of the Calder, but that doesn't matter. It's my photograph, taken on a pleasant morning in October.

Sometimes it's good to look at your city like a tourist.

Looking Over the Shoulder of the Chicago Tribune

A massing study of the proposed development of the land around the Tribune Tower in Chicago. A massing study is a sort of rough sketch in 3-D, so the tower looking over the right shoulder of the Tribune Tower will look very different. The proposal isn't objectionable, at least not yet. The space around the Tower is mostly parking lots and awkward plazas. However, density is a concern. How many more tourists and conventioneers can be crammed into Michigan Avenue?

Thumbs Down to the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art

The proposed Lucas Museum of Narrative Art has caused a huge controversy in Chicago. Objections to it vary, but right now there are no local advocates for building the museum as designed by Ma Yansong.  

My objections centered around the whole idea of a Star Wars museum. I question the films’ enduring impact on American culture. Arguably Independence Day (1996) was the last film to be directly indebted to any of the Star Wars films. Lucas’s political view never really evolved much past the late Cold War era ethos of ascendant liberal values and murky Eastern mysticism. His primary source material for the Star Wars films, science fiction serials of the 1930s, no longer resonates. 

Lucas assures us that the Lucas Museum won’t be devoted exclusively to Star Wars. Yoda will be there, to be sure, but so will Indiana Jones and The Lord of the Rings—along with some Norman Rockwell paintings and “digital art,” whatever that might be. The actual content of the museum has yet to be determined, but Lucas’s remarks have indicated the museum will showcase narrative of a regressive and narrow kind. I fear that the only kind of narrative art exhibited in the Lucas Museum will be those forms that validate Lucas’s storytelling strategies in the Star Wars films. If the purpose of a museum is the care, preservation, and display of a shared heritage, then I don’t think the Lucas Museum meets that requirement. As currently conceived, it will showcase the obsessions of a small coterie of aging nerds. 

Other objections to the Lucas Museum fall into two categories: people who don’t like the location of the museum and people who don’t like its design.

The site of the museum is just south of Soldier Field in Grant Park. The site is occupied by two parking lots, but it’s on a critical stretch of public land maintained by the Chicago Park District.  The Chicago Tribune editorial board would rather have the parking lots than the Lucas Museum. The proposal was announced without any input from the public and the board doesn’t trust the Chicago Plan Commission to make an intelligent decision. After all, the CPC signed off on the Soldier Field renovation. While George Lucas will pay for the construction of the museum itself, taxpayers will be stuck with the bill if the museum fails to meet expectations—a likely prospect, I think. 

The first proposed design for the museum was revealed last week. Lucas personally selected Ma, a 39-year-old architect with some very good work in his portfolio. Interestingly, he’s the same age as Helmut Jahn was when he designed the Thompson Center, now regarded as an immature work. The Tribune’s architecture critic Blair Kamin tries to be fair to Ma while objecting strongly to the design on contextual grounds.  Ma drew up a massive blob structure to house Lucas’s outsized ambitions for the museum. The Chicago museum is four times the size of the museum Lucas wanted to build in San Francisco before that city told him to take a hike. Kamin describes Ma’s Chicago proposal “jarringly off-key” and a "fumbled essay in 'blob architecture.'" If built as designed the Lucas Museum would be  a Jabba the Hutt squatting amongst much more refined museums like the Field Museum and the Shedd Aquarium. “In its present state, it resembles a movie stage set — an abstract outline without convincing details, a representation of a city rather than the real thing,” Kamin writes, adding, “the burden is on [George Lucas] to demonstrate that he's enhancing the lakefront, not just luring tourists.”

 I agree with both of these objections, but mostly the first one. The real estate along South Lake Shore Drive in the city’s showcase park is too valuable to squander on a vanity project. Ma’s design isn’t awful, and I can see what he's trying to get at; he's just not there. The litte space ship on top of the building suggests he will never be allowed to get there. His residential tower in Mississauga, Ontario was striking because of its bland suburban setting. The Lucas Museum, though, is the wrong building in the wrong place. 

Why Are Chicago Bicyclists Such Jerks?

Why are Chicago bicyclists such jerks? Maybe because for years Chicago bicyclists engaged in a Darwinian struggle for existence against cars, taxis, trucks of all sorts, and potholes—leaving only the most fearless to dare to commute by bike. Or maybe its because the riding season is so short that everyone is in a hurry to get to where they’re going. Or maybe people are letting the adrenaline of bike riding get the best of them.  

Whatever the reason, it’s fair to say there are a good number of assholes riding the streets of downtown. Approximately 20,000 Chicagoans commute by bicycle on a regular basis. Let’s say one percent violate traffic laws so flagrantly that they endanger pedestrians. That’s two hundred sociopaths zipping through the streets of the city ready to flatten anyone who gets in their way. If you’ve walked around downtown you’ve encountered one of them. At Lake and Canal one morning a female cyclist came within inches of hitting me as I stepped into the street to cross with the light. Her expression said, “I would rather we both suffer horribly painful, disfiguring injuries than I should brake for a stoplight.” 

At least she didn’t flip me off as she zoomed by, as another cyclist (also female, by the way) did to Chicago Tribune reporter Ron Grossman in a similar incident. He asks a good question: “When is the last time you saw a cop write a ticket for a bicyclist who failed to heed a red light or a stop sign?” Even New York City police will ticket bike riders. Not Chicago cops. 

Grossman goes so far as to propose a bike-free day in Chicago just so pedestrians can enjoy the sights and sounds of the city without worrying about getting a bike tire tread up their back. I don’t know how effective that would be considering how 99% of cyclists already ignore every rule of the road. But even if it worked, there would still be other, equally noxious irritants for pedestrians: people who smoke while walking down the sidewalk, tourists who walk six abreast on the sidewalk, drivers who ignore pedestrian crosswalks, and all those damn razor scooters. 

In any case, Grossman's point shouldn't be dismissed as just another complaint about ill-mannered urban bicyclists. As cities devote more public funds to support urban biking there will be--and should be--more demands for greater accountability for bicyclists who violate the rules of the road. Otherwise we will be trading less car congestions and marginally cleaner air for a further deterioration of public space.