Buildings in the Clouds

Posted on December 16, 2015 by admin

Ann wanted to borrow my camera during part of our walkabout on Saturday, so I lent it to her. She took some good images. Such as the Wrigley Building on Michigan Ave., just as the light faded for the day.
I’ve read that giant grasshoppers crawled on the building in The Beginning of the End (1957). “You can’t drop an atom bomb on Chicago,” protests a young Peter Graves. That does seem like burning down the house to get rid of the termites, but never mind.

Note the soaring structure beside the Wrigley Building, right up into the clouds. That’s the You-Know-Who Tower, with the name of the property mogul running for president — in classy 20-foot stainless steel letters — slapped on the side facing the Chicago River last year.

Also reaching into the clouds, as seen from State St.: Marina Towers.

They too have been in movies, notably The Hunter (1980), which was Steve McQueen’s last picture. I haven’t seen the whole thing, but in the age of YouTube, it’s easy to see just the part in which a car plunges from the towers — which have parking decks on their lower levels — into the Chicago River. The scene was so good that a similar one was created for an insurance commercial, though I have to add that if you’re running from the cops, I doubt that any policy’s going to cover the damage.

Wicker Park Details

Posted on November 19, 2015 by admin

There’s a junction of three major streets in the Wicker Park neighborhood of Chicago at North, Damen and Milwaukee avenues that (I’ve read) is being called Six Corners, to the consternation of those who believe that the junction of Irving Park Road and Cicero and Milwaukee avenues is the true Six Corners. I will note that the Irving Park-Cicero-Milwaukee Six Corners has been called that a lot longer than the North-Damen-Milwaukee Six Corners, but otherwise I don’t have a dog in that fight. Time will sort it out.

Near the North-Damen-Milwaukee intersection on Saturday I walked into a fire hydrant. The bruise on my right leg is still a little sore, but at least I didn’t tumble to the sidewalk. I wasn’t paying attention to the sidewalk, a foolish thing to do, because I was looking at some of the nearby buildings. Such as the former Noel State Bank, now a Walgreens at 1601 N. Milwaukee Ave.

The outside is stately (bankly?), but the interior — despite being a chain drug store — is gorgeous. A fine adaptive re-use that had a good design to work with.

At 1579 N Milwaukee Ave., is Chicago’s Flat Iron Building, which still seems to be an artists colony, in spite of articles saying that the gentrification of the neighborhood doomed that use.
This is 1954 W North Ave., a handsome building. Or buildings, it looks like two structures flush against each other, but I’m not sure.
From the vantage point of the Damen El Station platform, I took a look at the building that’s home to the Double Door, a well-known music venue in Wicker Park. I went there once ca. 1996 to see — who? The singer was a woman, and she spent part of the show bad-mouthing Tori Amos, for some reason; that’s what I remember.
Seemed like an ordinary enough building-top. Then I noticed something a little odd.
Someone has written T*REX! T*REX! T*REX! … near the top. Presumably from the roof. But why? An enthusiast for the band of that name? Or the prehistoric creature?

Hall of State, Fair Park

Posted on October 28, 2015 by admin

At one end of the Fair Park Esplanade is the Hall of State, a stately hall indeed. “The Hall of State, a museum, archive, and reference library, was erected in 1936 at a cost of about $1.2 million by the state of Texas at Fair Park in Dallas to house the exhibits of the Texas Centennial Exposition and the Greater Texas and Pan-American Exposition of 1937,” explains the Texas State Historical Association.
“The structure, designed by eleven Texas architects, is characterized as Art Deco… The front is 360 feet long, and the rear wing extends back 180 feet… The walls are surfaced with Texas limestone. A carved frieze memorializing names of historical importance encircles the building. Carvings on the frieze display Texas flora.”

I went inside for a look, and soon was face-to-face — or maybe face-to-plinth — with six statues of early Texas luminaries: Stephen F. Austin, Sam Houston, Mirabeau B. Lamar, James Fannin, Thomas J. Rusk, and William B. Travis. Here’s Lamar (1798-1859), second president of the Republic of Texas, among other things.
Pompeo Coppini did the sculptures. I’d run across his work before at the Texas State Cemetery in Austin. If it’s a monumental sculpture in Texas done in the early to mid-20th century, odds are he did it.

Then I entered Great Hall.
The TSHA again: “The Great Hall, or the Hall of the Six Flags, in the central wing, has a forty-six-foot-high ceiling. Murals on the north and south walls depict the history of the state and its industrial, cultural, and agricultural progress. These were painted by Eugene Savage of New York.” I’d run across him before as well.

During my visit, the Great Hall happened to be sporting an exhibit about Texas musicians, and I will say that I learned that Meat Loaf was from Dallas, something I didn’t know. Actually I didn’t know much about many of the Texas musicians mentioned in the exhibit, such as various bluesmen and Western swing players and Tejano bands.

On the back wall of the Great Hall is a gold-leafed medallion with the Lone Star emblem of Texas surrounded by representations of the six nations whose flags have flown over the state.
The United States and the Republic of Texas are at the top; the Confederacy and Mexico in the middle; and France and Spain on the bottom. The six together are a persistent theme in symbolic representations of modern Texas.

A Stroll Down the Fair Park Esplanade

Posted on October 27, 2015 by admin

My afternoon at the State Fair of Texas wasn’t the eat-it-now experience that the Wisconsin State Fair was. I ate two things: a fried chocolate pie like the kind to be found near the Texas-Oklahoma border, and a cheese and jalapeño corn dog, the best corn dog I’ve had in years, maybe ever. It’s the thing to eat at the fair, which is one of the claimants for introducing the food to the world.

Mostly I looked around. I spent some time in the animal barns, for example.

I missed the pig races, but I did see some riding acrobatics.

I also saw a temporary exhibit at the former Museum of Nature & Science, which left Fair Park a few years ago to become the Perot Museum of Nature and Science. The exhibit was called Canstruction, featuring structures made of cans. Such as “Big Reunion,” a model of Dallas’ Reunion Tower by JHP and RLG, two Dallas architecture firms, made out of 3,064 cans — carrots, spinach, mixed vegetables, tomatoes, and beans — plus wiring and LED lights (all that info is on the sign).
I liked this one too.
“St. Basil’s Cathedral, Moscow,” by Humphreys & Partners Architects, using 2,090 cans: corn, jalapeños, tomato sauce, chilis, and mandarin oranges, among others.

I also got a good look at Fair Park itself, one of the deco marvels of the world. I’d been to the park before, but barely took the opportunity to walk around and gawk at the likes of this.
That’s the South Entrado of the Centennial Building, featuring a statue of the Republic of Texas, complete with the lone star and cotton flower. It’s part of Fair Park’s grand Esplanade, with buildings and sculpture on either side of a long reflecting pool. There are six monumental statues along the Esplanade.
Fairpark.org says of the Esplanade that “the principal axis of the Texas Centennial Exposition was developed along the existing layout of the State Fair grounds. [Head architect] George Dahl strengthened the formal axis by adapting existing, unrelated State Fair exhibition halls with new, monumental facades and projecting porticos on each side of a 700-foot-long reflecting pool.

“The porticos establish the visual framework of the Esplanade and accentuate the grand perspective leading up to the Hall of State. Monumental artwork deftly combines with additional site features to complete the visually complex – and dramatic – spectacle.”

Each of the six statues represents the six nations that have asserted sovereignty over Texas or parts of it — what the Six Flags Over Texas refers to — namely Spain, France, Mexico, the Republic of Texas, the Confederacy, and the United States. France, Mexico and the U.S. were by Raoul Josset, a French sculptor (remarkable how many Euro-sculptors were active in Texas), while Spain, the Republic, and the C.S.A. were by Lawrence Tenney Stevens.

The Esplanade also featured a lot of murals, such as this bas relief mural by Pierre Bourdelle. This was one entitled “Man and Angel.” One source tells me it symbolizes air transport. It’s one of many murals along the Esplanade, each about three stories high.

At the eastern end of the pool are two large figures, the striking David Newton replicas of Lawrence Tenney Stevens’s 1936 sculptures, “The Tenor” and “The Contralto.” The originals were lost, maybe melted down for their metal during WWII, but exact replicas were created in 2009.
As I was taking pictures of “The Contralto,” a group of boys came up to the statue. “Hey, is that a chick?” “Yeah, that’s a chick.” Some laughter. Yep, it’s an aluminum deco chick, companion to the aluminum deco dude nearby.

An American System-Built Home

Posted on October 7, 2015 by admin

There are only a handful of American System-Built Homes in existence, about 15 by one count, though others might be spending their days in anonymity. Because I’ve been slapdash in my approach to learning about Frank Lloyd Wright, it was a thing I’d never heard of until Sunday, on the architecture walking tour.

Tourdeforce360VR has this description: “Between 1915 and 1917, Wright designed a series of standardized ‘system-built’ homes, known today as the American System-Built Homes, an early example of prefabricated housing. The ‘system’ involved cutting the lumber and other materials in a mill or factory, and then brought to the site for assembly; thus saving material waste and a substantial fraction of the wages paid to skilled tradesmen.”

World War I interrupted production, and it never started again. Turns out there two in Chicago, and one of these is on S. Hoyne Ave., and known as the Guy C. Smith House.
The owners of the house, David and Debbie — or was it John and Jill or Mark and Margo? I forget, but the names began with the same letters — came out to tell us about the house.
Then we went inside. It was very nice of the owners to let us shuffle through their home. They’ve done right by Wright, too. This is the dinning room, for instance.
It’s a fine house, but I could never live in such a place and have it look like this. Soon, papers and books and other items would start to appear on the tables and other flat surfaces. Then they would take over, like kudzu.

A Few Beverly Houses

Posted on October 6, 2015 by admin

This was one of my favorites on the Beverly walking tour on the Southwest Side of Chicago, 10340 S. Longwood Dr., also known as the Hilland A. Parker House.
Note the enormous yard, sloping upward, which we were told continued quite a ways toward the back. The area was wide open when the house was built in 1894, so there was no reason to build on small lots. An architect named Harry Hale Waterman did the design. He did a fair number of houses in the neighborhood, but this one was for himself.

The AIA Guide to Chicago says: “Site and style combine here for high drama. The base of the huge rusticate brownstone blocks rises on the hill to form huge arches on the big semicircular porch. The tall roof, pierced with steeply pitched gabled dormers, exaggerates the height.”

Not far away is this charmer by Walter Burley Griffith, the Harry N. Tolles House, 10561 S. Longwood, which was built in 1911, with some later additions, such as the glass bricks.
Good old Walter Burley. I learned about him when I visited his signal creation, the city of Canberra, during the warm Christmas season in ’91.

Before the Australians tapped him to build their capital, he “designed more than 130 designs in his Chicago office for buildings, urban plans and landscapes, half of which were built in Illinois, Iowa, Michigan and Wisconsin,” PBS says, in the years before WWI.

At 10616 S. Longwood: the house that’s now home to the Ridge Historical Society, dating from 1922 and designed by John Hetherington. Not this fellow, though.
The organization calls it the Driscoll House on a sign in the front; the Graver-Discoll on a plaque around back; AIA calls it the Herbert S. Graver House. Hope no one has come to fisticuffs over the nomenclature. Graver, it seems, commissioned it, while Driscoll was the last owner before the historical society. More about it here.

The oldest house on the tour was the Chambers House, 10330 S. Seeley, dating from 1874 and designed by that prolific architect of previous eras, Unknown (who also did the Irish castle mentioned yesterday).

AIA says: “The remarkably well-preserved house [indeed] is a classic suburban villa, complete with ‘French’ tower.” Maybe a French tower is a vantage from which to taunt passing Britons clapping coconut shells.

Beverly on a Sunday Afternoon

Posted on October 5, 2015 by admin

The leaves are turning. Here’s the scene at the 103rd St Metra Station, on the Southwest Side of Chicago, early Sunday afternoon, under a gray but not rainy sky.
We were at the station not because we rode the train that day — we drove, and parked nearby — but because Yuriko and I took a Chicago Architecture Foundation walking tour of the Beverly neighborhood, which started at the station. Beverly is on the Southwest Side of the city, and distinctive for a number of reasons, but one that stood out while walking around is its hilly contour. A glacial ridge just west of S. Longwood Dr. is easily visible near the station, which is on 103rd just east of Longwood, among a knot of small retail shops, including a local bank that tells one and all:
“Known for its spacious homes, tree-lined streets, and racially integrated population, Beverly has retained its reputation as one of Chicago’s most stable middle-class residential districts,” notes the Encyclopedia of Chicago. Originally part of the village of Washington Heights (1874), the area was annexed to Chicago by 1890 but remained sparsely settled for decades.

“In 1886, real estate developer Robert Givins constructed a limestone castle at 103rd and Longwood Drive in the Tracy subdivision of Washington Heights, but the surrounding neighborhood did not achieve residential maturity for decades. The situation was the same north of 95th Street, where Civil War general Edward Young and W. M. R. French, the first director of the Art Institute, had built homes along Pleasant Avenue in the 1890s. Vast sections of Beverly, especially the area south of 99th Street and west of Western, remained prairie until the 1940s and 1950s.”

This is the Gilded Age “Irish castle” of Robert Givins, with its distinctive turret mostly obscured by leaves at the moment. These days, it’s a Unitarian church. Note the slope of the hill.
The tour involved walking south on South Longwood Dr., which follows the bottom of the slope, then up (west) on W. 105th Pl., then north on S. Seeley Ave. and S. Hoyne Ave. Along the way, we stopped and looked at houses, while the docent described them. We got to go inside only one property, the Guy C. Smith House on Hoyne. More about that later.

The last place we saw was at the corner of Seeley and 103rd.

Nice design, but the shoes got more attention. There was a sign in the yard saying HAPPY BIRTHDAY BOB! and another that said, 80 YEARS AND KICKING.

St. Luke’s Lutheran Church, Park Ridge

Posted on September 24, 2015 by admin

You might call St. Luke’s Lutheran Church at 205 N. Prospect Ave. in Park Ridge an example of Suburban Gothic, but apparently that’s the name of a movie that came out last year. Anyway, it’s a handsome English Gothic-style church in the suburbs. We were back in Park Ridge Saturday afternoon for the last stop on the Churches by Bus tour.

The building has the distinction of being designed in the late 1920s by Elisabeth Martini (1886-1984), the first woman to be the proprietor of an architectural firm in Chicago. Mostly she did houses, but it seems that she was a member of this church, and did the design work for a payment of $60 a month for the rest of her life, which turned out to be another 50-odd years, though it might not have been adjusted for inflation.

Adjoining the sanctuary (next to the bus in my picture) is a 2010 addition by Douglas E. Lasch of Jaeger, Nickola, Kuhlman & Associates, which replaced a smaller addition from the 1970s and blends in remarkably well with the original structure. He has his own shop now, Faith Environ Studio, which focuses “primarily on providing architectural services to faith-based and other non-profit clients.”

St. Luke’s sanctuary has an elegant interior.

The stained glass windows tell of the Old and New Testaments. I’m sure the representation of Moses in one of the windows was meant seriously, but I can’t shake the idea that he’s grinning. Maybe it’s the eyes. “See what I have here! Commandments! Ten of them! Aren’t they terrific?”

Luther, on the other hand, looks fairly serious, but not grim.

I suppose those are the 95 theses on the door. A little hard to read at this scale. Wonder if they’re microprinted in the original Latin? I didn’t check. Never mind, the text is easily available on line in Latin and English (and other languages).

I haven’t looked at the theses since sometime in a college history class, so I was amused to find No. 86: “Again, ‘Why does not the pope, whose wealth is today greater than the wealth of the richest Crassus, build this one basilica of St. Peter with his own money rather than with the money of poor believers?’ ”

Ah, if only in our time and place we could mention Crassus without having to explain who he was. Then again, if those poor believers were able to understand that they were doing their little part to build the grandest church in Christendom, would they have been particularly upset?

One more thing about St. Luke’s in Park Ridge, which I read about later. It’s the home to the Bottle Band. Odd the things you find out. More about the band here.

Our Lady of Hope, Rosemont

Posted on September 23, 2015 by admin

The newest church on our bus tour last Saturday was Our Lady of Hope, a Catholic church at 9711 W. Devon Ave., just barely in the boundaries of the small suburb of Rosemont, which is better known for its proximity to O’Hare and various entertainment venues. In fact, while I might be wrong, it seems to be the only church with a location in Rosemont, based on a Google map search.

Built only in 1986 (which seems new to me), the church counts as a “Modern Prairie” style, according to the Chicago Architecture Foundation. “Modern Prairie designs are often devoid of frills and decoration, but build character through asymmetrical shape, and large open spaces,” the CAF says.

Frill-less indeed, especially on the outside.
Also true to its prairie-style forerunners, the entrance isn’t immediately apparent, but once you go in, you do find large open spaces. I liked the curve into the nave — maybe this space counts as the narthex, though probably that terminology went out with traditional church decor.
A semicircle of seats faces the altar. The lighting was such that I didn’t get a decent shot of the altar. The seats, on the other hand, were quite visible.
There was some representational art, but not much. Such as this group standing among plants.
A young architect named Leslie Ventsch, working at the time for developer Opus Corp., designed the structure. These days he’s a design director at Gensler, according to LinkedIn. He won a Burnham Award in the mid-80s, for a different structure.

St. Joseph the Betrothed Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church

Posted on September 22, 2015 by admin

Go to 5000 N. Cumberland on the Northwest Side of Chicago, and then to the back of the building at that address, and you’ll be looking at this.

In full, the English name of this church is St. Joseph the Betrothed Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church. The church is part of the the Ukrainian Catholic Eparchy of Saint Nicholas of Chicago, a diocese of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. St. Nicholas Cathedral, which we visited last fall, is the mother church of this group. For simplicity, I’ll call this church St. Joseph’s, which is an Eastern church in full communion with Rome.

As a building, St. Joseph’s is an impressive use of glass, concrete and steel, completed in 1977, which such materials weren’t always so impressively used (and they still aren’t). The docent asserted that some people are reminded of rockets when they look at the church, but I think of those pneumatic tubes you use at drive-through banks. Still, they work somehow as building elements.

There are 13 domes, as often the case in Eastern churches, the center for Christ and 12 others for the Apostles (I assume that includes Matthias, who took Judas’ place). A Ukrainian-born Philadelphia architect named Zenon Mazurkevycz (Mazurkevich) designed the church. He seems best known for St. Joseph’s, though he’s obviously done other structures.

The inside is ornate and also light-filled, on account of the tall windows on all sides. I assume the scaffolding over the sanctuary are temporary.

Mazurkevycz is quoted, in this blog at least, as saying, “We are dealing with a very functional architecture today no matter what we do, but church architecture is aesthetically functional more than anything else… It probably is the last architecture, as our buildings become more regimented, in which you can be exuberant.”

Exuberant is a good word for this church, inside and out.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Tag Archives: architecture