RECOMMENDED

An ambitious retrospective of fin-de-twentieth-siecle art, architecture and design at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum illuminates the dreamlike nature of the “postmodern” moment, a dizzying refraction of hedonistic anarchy and abject terror. In her review of the exhibition, Artforum editor Elizabeth Schambelan sets “beguiling images of playful incongruity” against Fredric Jameson’s notion of “hyperspace” as an “anti-map, its incomprehensibility figuring the dark mysteries of global capital.”

All the more reason for another po-mo retrospective, this one being the exhibition showcasing the drawings and ephemera of contemporary Chicago architect Stanley Tigerman, now on display at the Graham Foundation, to adopt the Magritte-tweaking title “Ceci n’est pas une rêverie,“ or “This is not a dream.” Taking a cue from “The Titanic,” a 1978 Tigerman collage in which Mies van der Rohe’s ultra-rectilinear, ultra-Modernist Crown Hall sinks into Lake Michigan beneath a canopy of clouds, the grand Madlener mansion (which houses the Graham Foundation) is divided up into thematic “clouds” such as “utopia,” “division,” “identity,” “allegory,” “humor,” “death” and “drift.”   Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Gallery 400’s double exhibition of “Global Cities, Model Worlds” and “The World Finder Pocket Guide to Hell” is a heavy-handed but nonetheless powerful pair of explorations of mega-events and their unplanned impacts.

“Global Cities, Model Worlds,” the more striking of the pair, is more tongue-in-cheek than it first appears. Referencing children’s and science museums, with bright plastic models and timelines in primary colors, the installation visualizes the implications of mega-events through studies of the Olympic games and world expositions, or World’s Fairs, from recent history. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

The Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus, a core text of Renaissance alchemy, describes the structure of the cosmos thusly: “That which is Below corresponds to that which is Above, and that which is Above corresponds to that which is Below, to accomplish the miracle of the One Thing.” In the case of the show “Calculated Aesthetic” by Stephen Coorlas and Dominic Peternel at Alderman Exhibitions, the One Thing is a geometric form that looks kind of like an asymmetrical space-age boomerang made from jet wings, quite possibly balanced according to the Golden Mean. The gallery features two identical cardboard models that viewers can handle, a larger aluminum model that stands about five feet tall, and a monochromatic painting running around all four walls that is intended to suggest a view of the form from within, an image which made me think of what it might look like if Ellsworth Kelly did a mural for the Death Star airport. Read the rest of this entry »

"Convalescent Home"

“I’ve been to IKEA ten, maybe twelve times, for this project,” remarks Jeff Carter as we survey his current installation arching across the western corner of Crown Hall at the Illinois Institute of Technology. His gaze drifts over the modified IKEA products, and a small smile splays open his lips as he reflects on those trips, “I now know that modernist mecca far better than anyone should.”

While his current work, “The Common Citizenship of Forms,” isn’t Carter’s first use of the mega-store’s materials, it may be his most thoughtful. Carter establishes a formal dialogue between common representatives of modernist design—IKEA and the Bauhaus—through a series of large-scale architectural models, composing a microenvironment that represents the layout of demolished buildings from the Michael Reese Hospital Campus. Former Bauhaus director Walter Gropius had created a master plan for its 28-building campus in 1946 as part of a post-war urban renewal effort to revitalize its surrounding Bronzeville neighborhood, as well as designed the eight structures that Carter chose to recreate. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

The government has seemingly been left holding the bag in the recent disintegration of the U.S. housing market, owing to its gratuitous propping up of the highly unregulated financial intermediaries to whom it completely turned over the sheltering of the populace, while architects, designers, planners and community organizers have struggled to craft solutions that could be remotely considered responsible, relevant and practical. But an upcoming conference plans to approach the crises in both the supply of and demand for affordable housing by avoiding undue reliance on either the neglectful inefficiency of public agencies or the high-tech futurist utopianism of private firms (c.f. Bruce Mau’s “Massive Change” wankathon at the MCA in 2006), in favor of new connections between poor communities and academic institutions. Learning from, advocating for and being accountable to low-income housing residents, and creating economically viable and ecologically sustainable plans and designs, will be central issues in the discussions at this three-day event. UIC architecture professor and City Design Center director Roberta Feldman told me, “Many of the case studies will illustrate the strategies designers have used to challenge conventional assumptions; that is, the process, not only the resulting designed project.” New models of ownership (Teddy Cruz), research and evaluation tools (Bryan Bell), an existing net-zero affordable housing project (Sergio Palleroni), direct family consultation (Casius Pealer) and reforming zoning and building codes (Michael Pyatok) will be topics at some noteworthy talks and panels. Guided tours of unique design endeavors in West Humboldt Park, Roseland, North Lawndale and Rogers Park will wrap the event up on Friday. (Bert Stabler)

Wednesday, September 22 through Friday, September 24 at 1040 West Harrison, University of Illinois at Chicago. For more info: architectureforchange.aa.uic.edu/pages/index.html

Gage Building: Horizontal Ornament from the Facade., 1898-1899

RECOMMENDED

It’s hard not to romanticize the life of iconic Modern architect Louis Sullivan. Arriving in Chicago with nothing but extraordinary intellect, will power and desire, he quickly rose to the top of his profession, and almost as quickly sank to the bottom. It would be especially difficult for Chicagoans, who can regularly see and love his work, not to weep as he begs money off his famous protégé, Frank Lloyd Wright, or is reduced to designing decorative floor plates for a manufacturer of cast-iron stoves. He had a dream for a new, vibrant, democratic kind of American art and architecture, and that dream turned out to be a brief interlude between the dreary banalities of Neo-Classicism and the cool, elite severities of International Modernism. Read the rest of this entry »

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.