RECOMMENDED

The best-laid plans of city planners often go haywire, as this expertly curated exhibit, which traces the history of Chicago’s cityscape in five large eight-sided panels with photographs from a century of changing times and informative text, demonstrates. As we are shown, Daniel Burnham famously issued a Plan of Chicago in 1909 that envisioned a “beautiful city” that materialized only in part as other plans serving other interests successively offered up slums, el tracks, high-rise public housing projects rising out of intentional demolition of neighborhoods, expressways, O’Hare Airport, and the latest “Climate Action” for going green. Although each panel is worth a long look and a close read, “Remaking the South Side: 1946”—by razing communities and putting up projects—is the most telling. The text asks: “What did the planners imagine?” It answers: “Order out of chaos.” A shot of a thriving South Side commercial street in 1941 shows that they must have been blind. (Michael Weinstein)

Through 2010 at Chicago Architecture Foundation, 224 S. Michigan.

By Jason Foumberg

I’ve long romanticized the role of Old Man. Retired and happily pensioned, my time is my own. The long days return with childlike buoyancy, I drink bourbon for sport, and maybe write a memoir because, hell, I’ve seen it all. But old age is a destination, and like any long road trip there’s bound to be moments when the best mix tape gets monotonous. The journey is dotted with weird smells that creep in through the closed windows, rest-stop romances, cliché detours and midlife-crisis sports cars speeding fast toward metastasized tumor bumps in the road. If we reach the bald, wintry peak on all three legs (cane included), wise but weathered, we may find not keys to the kingdom but a death panel reaching for the plug.

Growing old is the topic of The Glue Factory, a new project initiated by the Museum of Contemporary Phenomena. When Helen Slade, Mike Newman and Rashmi Ramaswamy first collaborated under the banner of the Museum of Contemporary Phenomena they presented House of Fear. It was around Halloween, 2006, and they surveyed visitors at the Ravenswood Art Walk, asking, “What do you fear?” The national threat level was orange, unconvincing like a fake tan, and unreflected in the survey’s collected data, which was surprisingly terrorist-free. Respondents admitted fears of spiders, rats, strange dogs and heights. They expressed fears of rape and homelessness. Mostly, though, the majority feared growing old in America, with its attendant problems: obsolescence, loneliness, failure, loss of mental and physical health, “memories of youthful indiscretions,” poverty and, simply, the fear “that life is too short.” It’s a list long enough to prompt an existential binge. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Among the more than 300 objects in “Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe,” visions of dome-covered, climate-controlled cities, three-wheeled, bullet-shaped cars and hexagonal housing models might seem more like manna for sci-fi nerds than part of a blueprint for sustainability. The traveling exposition details the legacy of R. Buckminster “Bucky” Fuller from simplistic pencil sketches of futuristic, towering “lightful” houses designed for a rapidly growing population to Fuller’s geodesic dome from the 1967 Montreal Expo. A self-described “comprehensive anticipatory design scientist,” Fuller blended disciplines including geometry, engineering and architecture to design housing and machines that create more with less. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Relatively untouched by influence from the Western tradition of modernist architecture, Eastern European and Russian architects took flight during the last two decades of Soviet rule into wild and free experimentation, creating their own modernist/postmodernist styles based on the monumental aesthetic of Russian suprematism and often laced with extravagant decorative flourishes. French photographer Frédéric Chaubin travelled throughout the former Eastern bloc, bringing together in soft color images structures that were designed locally in a many-centered movement, without a central program, that permitted rampant individuality. For sheer bravado, look at Georgian architect Georgy Chakhava’s Roads Ministry Headquarters built on a steep riverbank with its concrete office modules jutting out in every direction from supports resembling the pylons of a highway overpass—an overpowering visual metaphor of a crossroads or an impossible traffic snarl. (Michael Weinstein)

Through October 3 at the Chicago Architecture Foundation, 224 S. Michigan. (312)922-3432. 

RECOMMENDED

Over thirty wall-hung elevations, floor plans, cutaways and architectural designs currently make up the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century pieces of “XIX: 19th Century Design.” This is a rotating exhibit; pieces are replaced after sale by a different work from the collection of gallery owner David Jameson. The collection now includes a Frank Lloyd Wright and plans for the original Art Institute roof. Most of the plans are Italian and French, with several incorporating variations on a fleur-de-lis. The most important design of this exhibit, according to Jameson, is that of Viollet-le-Duc who is to Paris what Daniel Burnham is to Chicago. About half of the plans on display are for buildings and the other half for functional items such as chairs, wallpaper and even candlesticks. Though it is helpful to have an interest and knowledge of architecture it is not necessary when enjoying the beauty and wonder of the creative process of design. John Gregory Crace’s “Design for Tile Floor” is a colorful pen, ink and watercolor so artistic and intricate one forgets that it is only a preliminary object, secondary to the tile. Owen Jones’ chair design incorporates the entire plan onto a single piece of paper—a typical way designs were sent to manufactures in the late 1800s. The wallpaper designs are beautiful and meticulous, much like the exhibit itself. (Rachel Turney)

Through August 30 at ArchiTech 730 N Franklin Suite 200, (312) 475-1290.

By Michelle Tupko

 In an interview he gave to the New York Herald Tribune in the summer of 1959, Mies van der Rohe said two things history will likely never forget. “Less is more” and “God is in the details.” When heard in the context of Mies’ austere, stripped-down glass-and-steel structures, these words are linked to precision and streamlined form—the Bauhaus philosophy of pure functionality. But what happens when Mies’ words are set in dialogue with contemporary design? What if his “less” is a series of perforations in a structure; what if the details are flowers, curlicues and flourishes?

“Figuration in Contemporary Design,” curated by Joe Rosa at The Art Institute of Chicago, sheds some light—through a number of little holes—on the use of ornamentation in cutting-edge design and architecture. Displayed in AIC’s architecture horseshoe gallery, an intimate, curved space Rosa charmingly describes as a “necklace” off which works can be hung, the show presents the work of twenty-eight studios, architects and designers working today. New technologies have enabled better digital imaging, fundamentally changing the process of the conception of projects, and new fabrication techniques allow these digital visions to literally get off the ground. Rosa sees the represented works, which possess certain formal concerns that make the show at least partially cohesive, as “showing shift” and moving within a loose narrative, although a different phrasing of these formal concerns might be “Tattooing, Perforating and Fritting,” physical processes that recur numerous times across all the pieces on display.

In 2001, Rosa curated a show at the Heinz Architectural Center at the Carnegie Museum of Art called “Folds, Blobs + Boxes,” which looked at the way the standard unit of traditional architectural space, the box, has recently been changing form: folding in on itself, doubling, collapsing. The box’s mutations might reflect transformations in the human condition, fast-changing identities co-existing in the folds between numerous realities. In the “Figuration” show, Rosa has placed emphasis less on interior space than on the surface, the subject of much art that is called “Postmodern.” Rosa conspicuously never uses that term—he’s more interested in the specifics of technique—but it’s through an attention to surface that the work shown here most clearly breaks with its Minimalist past. With the exception of a few pieces, the emphasis is rarely on volume or space.

The show’s numerous surfaces each perform slightly different functions, presenting divergent ideological aims and conceived for different sites, running the gamut from public institutions to intensely private residences designed for individuals with a fear of, for example, West Nile virus. All of these surfaces, defined by the processes performed upon them and inscribed into them, possess certain functionality. Herzog and de Meuron’s Eberswalde Library uses a technique called “sgraffitto” to literally engrave into its exterior a kind of film archive of European history; 2×4’s way-finding wall adhesions for the interior of Rem Koolhaas’ IIT building in Chicago direct the visitor through the facilities; Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec’s “Algue” features a modular surface arranged by the buyer into new organic patterns; Demakersvan’s “Lace Fence” transforms the urban environment of limited-access and private spaces into prettier, more palatable zones.

The obsession with surface begs questions concerning deeper function. What, besides new industrial tools, is driving this return to ornamentation? Rosa agrees with my suggestion that it has something do with the current over-emphasis on productivity and performance. “Our culture has gotten to such a saturation point of analysis and productivity that there’s nothing left to chance and random thinking or just discovering beauty that hasn’t been highly rationalized,” he explains. In fact, for Rosa, the show began as a meditation on the appearance of flowers in contemporary aesthetics. “It’s antithetical to the modernist way of thinking. This is exactly what they <I>hated</I>. So why is it being embraced?”

Is the flower, then, a new political icon, signifying an urge to move into a changed space where there’s more time to think, less work, more nature, more honest play? The pink, curved, perforated walls of Kivi Sotamaa’s “Flowers” playground proposal for P.S.1’s annual Young Architects Project suggest a yes. This yes, however, is still struggling to free its voice from a Minimalist past. Many of the surfaces in this show about surfaces still rely on Minimalist principles of seriality, repetition and the grid, and, by default, on the factory production that make them possible. Utopian dreams of open dialogue and freedom must carve out a viable space for their realization. Aranda/Lasch’s appealing “Log Cabin” prompts the viewer to think about the pace of contemporary society: Whatever happened to the log cabin, symbol of the American wilderness and the solitude of the woods? What if we returned to building unique and inviting structures, forfeiting our obsession with repetitive condos and subdivisions? Wouldn’t it be nice to get away for a while?

“Figuration in Contemporary Design” shows at The Art institute of Chicago, 111 South Michigan, (312)443-3600, through June 8. 

RECOMMENDED

Founded in Chicago in 1929, the Hedrich Blessing architectural photography firm revolutionized the genre by incorporating the most advanced forms of modernist photography to capture—in a perfect fit—the magnificent Art Deco buildings that were rising in the decades between the two world wars. Curator David Jameson has chosen for this alluring exhibition images from the 1930s—taken mainly by founder Ken Hedrich—of elegant and imposing interiors that often work as abstractions that stand alone, apart from any commercial motive. A master of chiaroscuro and composition, Hedrich transcended the document, adding a photographic aesthetic to the sleek yet complex forms that he found before his lens. In the banner image of the show, Hedrich transforms the St. Paul County Court House into a spectacular cathedral that dissolves into ribbons of bright white light and deep black shadow; only a tiny minimalist clock at the bottom center of the image reminds us that we are not in judicial heaven. (Michael Weinstein)

Hedrich Blessing, “Interiors: Architectural Photography of the 1930s,” shows at Architech Gallery through March 8.