about designslinger
designslinger library
follow designslinger
more posts
networks
designslinger
Friday Snippets 9.3.10
[North Market Hall, Criminal Court Building (1892) /Images & Artwork: designslinger]
Frank's blocks. [LA Times]
Old Faithful. [NY Times]
Smog eaters. [Architect's Newspaper]
Handiwork. [Design Observer]
Underground art. [Art Newspaper]
Pots, figurines and sacred vessels. [Art Daily]
16.7 million frames of color. [Rhizome]
Infoscaping blades. [NY Times]
Monday is Labor Day. A national holiday providing many a worker with a three day
weekend of freedom from the workplace. We're joining in the celebration, so see you Tuesday.
Federally Funded
[Chicago Federal Center (1959-1974) Mies van der Rohe; C.F. Murphy; Schmidt, Garden & Erikson; A. Epstein & Sons;
associates /Images & Artwork: designslinger]
It's 1955, and the U.S. economy is booming. After the Second World War, with Europe in
ruins, it was this country's turn in history's drivers seat. The American middle class became the largest economic engine the world had ever seen, and the federal government under President Dwight D.(Ike) Eisenhower, flush with cash, spent billions of dollars on the nation's infrastructure. Under Ike, we got our Interstate roadway system and a commitment by the federal government to modernize their institutional buildings around the country, which is how Chicago got its Federal Center, a group of buildings that were at the cutting-edge of contemporary design.
[Kluczynski Federal Building; Flamingo, Alexander Calder /Image & Artwork: designslinger]
Led by architect Mies van der Rohe's 1959 plan, an association of architects and
contractors built the three building federal complex over a period of years extending from 1962 to 1974. The Kluczynski Federal Office Building and the U.S Post Office Loop Station replaced the old Beaux Arts courthouse designed by Henry Ives Cobb in 1898. While many in Chicago's emerging preservation movement were against demolishing the old courthouse, federal employees were happy to see the antiquated building go. And in 1974 when Alexander Calder unveiled his Flamingo in Federal Plaza, the design was complete.
[U.S. Post Office, Loop Station (1973) /Images & Artwork: designslinger]
The post office is one of my favs. Mies' wide-open, rectangular frame, freed of internal
structural support and its walls of glass, was one more momentous step toward exploding the confining walls of the architectural box. I find it a real charmer. And this 3 building group, along with its Calder stabile, are a testament government's embrace of, and monetary commitment to, excellence in design.
designslinger: Word of the Week
[brownstone (1895, 1875) /Images & Artwork: designslinger]
brownstone [BROUN-stohn] n. a reddish-brown sandstone, used extensively as a building
material, primarily in the eastern United States, from the middle of the 19th century to the early 20th century.
[brownstone (ca.1893, 1875) /Images & Artwork: designslinger]
A dwelling faced with brownstone, often a rowhouse.
Last Row Standing
[1029 N. Dearborn Parkway (1875) /Images & Artwork: designslinger]
The streets of New York are lined with brownstones, in Chicago, well you can find the soft
sandstone material covering a building facade here and there.
[1023-29 N. Dearborn Parkway (1875) /Images & Artwork: designslinger]
That's what appeals to me about this little group of 3 houses barely hanging on but
somehow surviving, their wonderfully reddish-brown exteriors with beautifully carved details. Built in 1875, and once part of a line of 10 row houses, 1023-29 N. Dearborn Parkway are bookended today by sleek, 21st century condo blocks. Although number 1029 at the north end of the trio has been maintained with care, our middle number 1025 sits abandoned and forlorn while 1023 has barely survived, with its elaborate Italianate cornice torn off.
[1025-23 N. Dearborn Parkway, May 3, 2010 /Images & Artwork: designslinger]
The story goes that in 1875, #1023 was the home of Henry Field, brother of the retailer
Marshall. A few years later Stuyvesant Peabody, whose parents owned a large mansion up the street, briefly occupied the home. Like many of these grand, old residences the large rooms were chopped-up into smaller spaces and the building became a rooming house for men. But in 1934 after the repeal of Prohibition, a nightclub, Le Boeuf sur le toit opened its doors on the lower floors of 1023. And by 1950, Le Boeuf was serving meals out on their sidewalk cafe while inside patrons were listening to the songs of the one-named chanteuse, Poppy.
The fashionable and very successful restaurant/nightclub suffered extensive fire damage
during Poppy's heyday, and never returned. Today a hair salon occupies the built-out ground floor and, this is hard for me to write, the brownstone facade of 1023 has been painted over since taking these pics a few weeks ago. Yep, we were walking past our little group last Thursday and the brown of 1023 was gone, replaced by a coating of a greyish-taupe colored paint with a coat of green covering the few remaining carved-in-stone details. It made me so sad, I couldn't take a picture so that I could show you. I guess, as the saying goes, C'est la vie. :'(
Trials and Deliberations
[Cook County Criminal Courts Building (1893) Otto H. Matz, architect /Images & Artwork: designslinger]
This very heavy looking, rusticated stone building decorated with Romanesque revival
details was once the home the Cook County Criminal Courts. Renovated in the mid-80s, the building is now known as Courthouse Place with offices and lawyers taking the place of judges, clerks and courtrooms.
[Courthouse Place, 54 W. Hubbard Street, Chicago /Images & Artwork: designslinger]
Designed by architect Otto H. Matz in 1892, the building occupies a site of historical
significance in the history of Chicago and the nation. The building is familiar to a lot of people because of the infamous Leopold and Loeb murder trial which was held here in 1924. The building and its occupants also provided the fodder for two Chicago newspapermen Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, who wrote the 1928 Broadway hit, The Front Page. The play was based on the daily shenanigans the authors witnessed during their time as reporters in the Criminal Courts building.
[Romanesque details, Criminal Courts Building /Images & Artwork: designslinger]
Matz was actually a finalist in the design of the original Court Building which was built
on the site in 1873 after the Great Fire of 1871, but he lost the commission to the firm of Armstrong and Egan. Their building was considered to be unusable just 15 years later and when the County finally found the money to tear down the old courthouse in 1892, Matz's design was constructed and served the Cook County criminal courts until 1929.
But our history at the corner of Dearborn and Hubbard Street goes back a little farther.
Prior to 1871 the site was home to the city's North Market Hall. Built in 1854, the Hall was used for a variety of purposes but most notably as the meeting place of Chicago's anti-slavery movement. In October, 1853 Frederick Douglass addressed a crowd of over 600 people on the subject of slavery. And in 1856, a group of northside residents formed the North Chicago Anti-Slavery Committee Extension Club to fight the expansion of slavery into the country's non-slave territories and states and held their meetings here at Dearborn and Hubbard Streets, in the Market Hall.
Friday Snippets 8.27.10
[Tuxedo (ca. 1890) /Image & Artwork: designslinger]
Views. [Architect's Newspaper]
Shoes. [Independent]
Eggs. [National Geographic]
Lights. [Wallpaper]
Openings. [Paper Mag]
Studios. [NY Magazine]
Moguls. [Culture Grrl]
Ready-to-wear. [ARTINFO]
Glass&Steel. [NY Times]
See you Monday!
Rathskeller on the Rialto
[Old Heidelberg Inn (1934) Graham, Anderson, Probst & White, architects /Images & Artwork: designslinger]
In 1934 when the Eitel brothers opened their Old Heidelberg Restaurant on Randolph
Street, the avenue was known as Chicago's Rialto. Lined with theaters, restaurants and nightclubs the lights along Randolph were as bright as the flickering bulbs and neon of New York's Times Square.
The Eitels got into the food service business in 1893 at Chicago's World Columbian
Exposition and became the proprietors of a chain of eating establishments and the city's famed Bismarck Hotel. When Chicago hosted it's second world's fair in 1933, A Century of Progress, the Eitels opened the 3,500 seat Old Heidleberg Inn on the fair grounds. The venture was so successful that when the exposition ended they took possession of this Randolph Street property and asked the very prestigious architectural firm Graham, Anderson, Probst & White to design a building with all the trappings of a traditional Bavarian lodge house.
[Argo Tea, July 1, 2010 /Images & Artwork: designslinger]
Today you can barely see the Old Heidelberg Inn since it's been enveloped in a towering
skyscraper. But in 1934 there was a free-standing building with a restaurant on the main floor wtih large murals depicting romanticized Bavarian scenes, a Rathskeller in the basement, a bakery, a dance floor and a carved figure of Gambrinus, the folklore monarch who is said to have created brewing, in the niche above the clock. I remember the building as the home of Ronny's Steak Palace, where we filmed a scene of Curly Sue in the then ticky-tacky looking dining room. Old Heidelberg is gone, so is Ronny's, Curly Sue is a distant memory, the Bavarian-styled building is just a facade, and the Rialto disappeared decades ago. But Randolph has made a comeback of a sorts. The neighboring Oriental Theatre is thriving with Broadway musicals, the Goodman Theatre is just down the street, the Joffrey Ballet is headquartered around the corner, and at the old Bismarck Hotel the shuttered Palace Theater has reopened as the Cadillac Palace. It's not quite the Rialto of the Old Heidleberg Inn era, but it's certainly a different street than it was in the Ronny's Steakhouse days.
designslinger: Word of the Week
[sconce (1924) /Images & Artwork; designslinger]
sconce [skons] n. an electric lamp resembling a candlestick, or group of candlesticks,
which is designed and fabricated for mounting on a wall.
From Bauhaus to Rundhaus
[Prentice Women's Hospital and Maternity Center (1975) Bertrand Goldberg, architect /Image & Artwork:
designslinger]
It's hard to imagine that the architect of this building went to Germany in the early 1930s
to study at the famed Bauhaus under the tutelage of Mies van der Rohe. Leaving Germany in 1934 after the rise of the Nazis, he went to school at Chicago's Armour Institute, soon be become the Illinois Institute of Technology where the Department of Architecture would become world renowned under the directorship of one Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. This same architect would serve as Mies' translator when the German-speaking designer met Frank Lloyd Wright in the late 30s. So how did a young man of the hard edged lines of a Miesian upbringing give birth to these round lobes? In 1955, architect Bertrand Goldberg, "received this terrible shock when I realized that Mies was not a man of his time."
[Prentice Women's Hospital & Institute of Psychiatry /Images & Artwork: designslinger]
Goldberg burst out of the Miesian mold with his cylindrical Marina City Towers in 1959 and
never looked back. I've often seen Goldberg described as a poet architect because of his thoughtfulness and pursuit of the plastic nature of architecture. The cloverleaf of Northwestern Memorial Hospital's Prentice Women's & Maternity Pavilion contained an interior floor plan which allowed for the elimination of traditional hospital corridors with patient rooms clustered around a central core. When the Institute of Psychiatry took over a floor in the building, doctors found that the design played a large role in the positive treatment and therapy of their patient population. Although Goldberg placed the round, concrete lobes on a somewhat Miesian box, he did not design the very Miesian-inspired tower to the right. That was built a year before the Prentice building, designed by the Chicago firm of C.F. Murphy & Associates.
[Northwestern Memorial Hospital/Northwestern University /Images & Artwork: designslinger]
Goldberg's design served its purpose for a time. The hospital was designed to handle
3,000 births per year and by the turn of the 21st century, Prentice was handling more than double that amount. Plus technology had advanced beyond anyone's wildest dreams in the 25 years since the building had been built, so Northwestern constructed on a new maternity and physciatric care facility nearby which opened in 2007. Goldberg's concrete structure now sits empty. The building is set to become the property of Northwestern University and will probably be torn down in the next few years to be replaced by a state-of-the-art research facility, though preservationists are urging the school to work Goldberg's cloverleaf into the plan.
Garden Artillery
[C. Herman Plautz Residence (1877) /Image & Artwork: designslinger]
When C. Herman Plautz built his home in Chicago's Wicker Park area in 1877 he did not
place a cannon in his front yard. The large piece of military artillery arrived years later under different owners who had a new use for the house. It is one of the oldest homes in the neighborhood and one of the most ornate with all of its Second Empire detailing.
[Pulaski Post, No. 86, American Legion (1927) /Images & Artwork: designslinger]
Plautz was one of a number of successful German-American businessmen who settled
near the small green triangle known as Wicker Park who built large homes to show-off their newly acquired wealth. He served as the City Clerk and City Treasurer, owned a drug manufacturing company for a while, was the president of Northwestern Brewery and Vice-President of Garden City Bank. By the 1920s the neighborhood had changed from a predominantly German and Scandinavian immigrant community into Chicago's largest Polish community. So in 1927 a group of Polish veterans purchased the Plautz residence to serve as the home of American Legion, Pulaski Post No. 86, appropriately named for Casimir Pulaski the Revolutionary War hero.
[Sommers Residence, Hoyne Avenue, Wicker Park, Chicago /Images & Artwork: designslinger]
The cannon showed up in 1934, and believe it or not was requisitioned by the U.S. Military
for service during World War II. The Polish Post met in the 800 square foot living of the former Plautz place until 1972. By that time the members weren't getting any younger and the neighborhood was undergoing another huge change from Polish to Puerto Rican. So off went the Legionnaires, leaving their cannon behind. By the time Carol and Nick Sommers purchased the home in 1977, the once elegant mansion was a mess. Neglected and worn the Sommers gave the house the kind of love and care it deserved, and preserved Chicago's only artillery-decorated home.