Harold Washington Library One of World’s Ugliest Buildings?

Chicago Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin points out that Chicago’s central library the Harold Washington Library (seen below) received the dubious honor of being one of the 15 ugliest buildings in the world, according to Travel & Leisure Magazine the publishers of the list.  However as both Kamin and the list-makers concede: “The really ugly buildings, as the story accompanying the list says, are the anonymous ones where architects aren’t even trying to make a statement.”  Read Kamin’s whole article here.

Image: The Harold Washington Library in downtown Chicago. Taken by Douglas Kaye, 2005

This Week’s Words

This week on ArtSlant I review the Buckminster Fuller show at the MCA, Kathryn Born critiques the critics: http://tr.im/l9Ut

Uh Oh: Calatrava’s Chicago Spire Future Uncertain

Over the last weekend the Chicago Tribune broadcast the news  (first broken by Crain’s Chicago Business) that Santiago Calatrava, along with a Chicago architectural design firm, have filed liens against the Shelbourne Development Group totaling over $16 million dollars. And yet it was mere weeks ago that the Tribune was trumpeting the sale of the $40 million penthouse to beanie baby creator Ty Warner. Clearly, things aren’t going as planned.

While the PR coming from the developers is the usual boilerplate of “this is the normal course,” “these guys have been paid,” everyone knows something is amiss. The Tribune sums it up simply: “The liens suggest the project’s financing, as well as its feasibility, is shaky.” The most interesting bit of information was that Shelbourne has stopped having meetings with a neighborhood housing association because, according to the Tribune “the Spire’s construction has been halted.” And that’s not good. It seems to me that buildings are a lot like sharks, they have to keep moving or they will die.

For those of us still trying to stifle our yawns at the Trump Tower, the news about the Chicago Spire is something of a blow. The spire is interesting, creative, thought-provoking and a little provocative.  More than that, it is  not the usual post-modern glass box that is too prevalent here in Chicago and America in general.

Hopefully this project will get back under way, though in a jittery economy and a housing downturn, it might take some time to sell all of the $750,000 studio apartments.

Calatrava’s Chicago Spire to be Built

I thought it was always going to be built but I guess selling 30% of the condos means that Calatrava’s Chicago Spire will be built for sure.  From the Chicago Tribune: read it here. Apparently this is also going to be the tallest residential structure in the world which fits perfectly into Chicago’s architectural history, both in terms of the stature of the building and the stature of the architect.

At the Chicago Art Blog we can’t wait to see this structure built, especially after the giant yawn that is Trump Tower.

UPDATE: The Chicago Spire’s future is now in question as of October, 2008.  Read my the newest post on the spire by clicking here.

What’s that in the Sky? A Bird? A Plane? Renzo Piano’s Addition to the Art Institute?

For everyone that doesn’t live here in Chicago or does live here but can’t make it downtown to see the progress on the addition at the Art Institute, here are some pictures of the progress. The big thing going on right now is the Nichol’s Bridge which will link the museum with Millennium Park, a very good idea in my mind. And yes, apparently this is the shape of the bridge, rounded on the bottom. According the museum’s press release this was inspired by: “the hull of a boat or sleek racing shell. It is a long, thin structure with a rounded bottom.” I thought it would be flat and thinner, but then again there’s only so much modeling you can do with balsa wood (I spent some time looking at the model in the museum’s grand staircase hall). So without further ado here are some photos I took:

This is the where the bridge will lead into the museum. The green trusses are holding the bridge up while the supports are properly secured.

Panning down the bridge towards Millennium Park.

Looking at the bridge across the South Shore train yard. You’ll notice that the bridge is as yet unlinked as this was taken on Thursday. Images of the bridge spanning the road follow.

The landing site in Millennium Park, all ready to receive the bridge.

An admittedly crappy photo I took on my camera phone yesterday. You can see that the bridge now spans Monroe Street.

An admittedly much better photo from the Chicago Tribune, by an unknown photographer. Perhaps they weren’t using a camera phone, taking pictures at night, in the rain.

More Chicago architecture news to come.

Reconsidering Karen Kilimnik

The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (MCA), recently opened Karen Kilimnik from the Philadelphia Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA) on February 23rd and will be open until June 8th. The show opened to heated debate in certain quarters, and received a poor review in the Chicago Tribune, which can be read here. What is it about this show that has sparked such heated debate and is Kilimnik an artist unworthy of attention as some would have us believe?

Karen Kilimnik The Hellfire Club episode of the Avengers, 1989 Courtesy of 303 Gallery, New York & Institute of Contemporary Art. Photo by Aaron Igler at ICA

After reading much about Kilimnik I decided to investigate the show for myself, bracing myself for the worst. The Kilimnik show replaces one side of the Collection Highlights exhibit on the top floor of the MCA. Upon first entering the “scatter-piece” The Hellfire Club Episode of the Avengers (1989) is, well, strewn around. This piece establishes some basic themes and methods throughout the rest of the exhibit: perceptions of glamor and fantasy, the use of assemblage and installation, and a marked confusion of fantasy and reality.

The bulk of the exhibition is found next in the long, wing gallery. Prior to visiting the exhibit I had read several reviews and expected to see nothing but paintings, the objects of much scorn. However, the work in this room showed a range of practice from assemblage to drawing to photography and video, with Kilimnik often incorporating unusual media to suit her purpose. Wondering where the hated paintings were I took in the apparently ignored output of Kilimnik, the work that wasn’t painting.While it has been hard for some to discern the thematic content in Kilimnik’s work, in the main gallery of the exhibition they emerged clearly. The fascination with with glamor and beauty in general and especially related to celebrity, and typical (almost stereotypical) girlhood interests like ballet, fashion, fixations on “it” boys and imagination. These themes surfaced most overtly through both the drawings and installations. A fake dinner party with the pink panther, illustrated fantasy stories about being an internationally famous Russian ballerina or a child who never became a model, all concealing more than a hint of the macabre.

However the most interesting theme that presented itself was that of an underlying violence and the methods of dealing with trauma resulting from it. Most poignant in this respect was I Don’t Like Mondays, the Boomtown Rats, Shooting Spree or Schoolyard Massacre (1991), a scatter piece that featured target silhouettes, bullseyes, chicken wire and a toy gun. I don’t think that this piece was intended as a memorial to school violence but as a reaction to it. The toy gun is a mainstay of children’s play but placed in this context the boundary between violent fantasy and reality is challenged. The haunting unreality of children committing murder is underscored by the artifice of the materials displayed. Plastic guns and flimsy targets belie the reality of our increasingly violent times. The conscious artifice of the “bleeding” holes in the wall echoes the violent fantasy drawing of children but also its distance from reality. In this way the reality of violence has been repressed into an unreal, dreamlike state, the end product of a mental defense mechanism.

The themes of repression and violence was continued in other works. In the video gallery the 1989 film Heathers, a film about students plotting to murder their classmates and ultimately trying to blow up the high school, is stretched to six hours. Snow was a repeated motif in many images and is appropriate: snow whitens, brightens, covers and dulls its surroundings. Snow covers up ugliness. In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe the White Witch suspends the land of Narnia in eternal winter, similarly Kilimnik uses snow and has a professed interest in witchcraft (another topic all together). In photographs showing street-level entries to houses Kilimnik added white acrylic paint the images to transform them in a quiet snow bound scenes. Any unpleasantness in the image of the house is repressed through the addition of snow. Another photograph, contained within the red room in the modern Architecture (2007), depicted a dead squirrel on the street with the title Just Resting. This indicates the general way trauma is denied, death does not exist, only a deep sleep like Snow White (another frequent allusion of Kilimnik’s). Likewise, the scatter-piece Smallpox (1991) was totally hidden out-of-sight behind the cube structure for the red room. . . Containing fake blood, powder and the kinds beauty marks that were used to conceal the physical signs of the disease, this piece overtly hinted at covering up a trauma, this time through physical means.

While much has been made over the paintings in the red room. . . I don’t believe I shall address them at all, at least not now. Criticisms of the paintings seems more based on the fact that someone has trespassed onto the sacred ground of oil-on-canvas than any criticisms of substance. My point here has been to draw out themes in Kilimnik’s art that others have claimed don’t exist at all and to show that Kilimnik’s painting is only one part of her varied output. If anyone has anything constructive to add about the paintings or these themes I would welcome those comments. Finally, much has been made of Kilimnik at the MCA and my fears that it would veer close to the tendencies of certain so-called Young British Artists were assuaged. I was disappointed to miss the soundtracks that accompany both I Hate Mondays. . . and The Hellfire Club. . . on my first trip and then several weeks later they were still silent, with the guards clueless as usual about why the sound was off. If an artist mixes a soundtrack or chooses a certain song to accompany the display of a certain artwork then it should be included or else it seems that one is doing a disservice to the artist and artwork. The MCA should fix this problem.

Anxious about Addition

Photo: Monica Almeida/The New York Times

After reading through multiple reviews of architect Renzo Piano’s extension, the Broad Contemporary Art Museum, to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art I have to say that I am somewhat anxious about how the addition to the Art Institute of Chicago will turn out. They were, at best, only slightly disparaging. You can read the reviews in New York Times here, Los Angeles Times here, and the New York Review of Books here. The picture above picture from the NY Times is the frontal view of the museum which illustrates one of the many problems cited, that is, the huge dull walls facing the street which gives the museum a hulking and monolithic feel. The palm tree-on-blue is actually are giant banners hung on scrims, presumably to disguise the weightiness of the exterior.

Considering that Piano’s “Modern Wing” addition to the Art Institute of Chicago is opening in 2009, these lackluster reviews are probably causing more people then just this author some anxiety. However, I think that the pitfalls in LA will be avoided here in Chicago. To see the plans for the building click here. The frontal facade, facing Monroe St., will be sheer glass which allays concerns about a weighty and boring entry. The dull, hulking wall criticized in LA here will be turned to the Metra train line that bisects the museum and as such will be needed and appropriate.

This is not avant-garde or daring architecture, but that’s alright. The proposed design is classical and elegant modernist architecture and as such is perfectly in step with both the collection and the institution. It would be odd for this respectable and historic institute to have a really radical addition. The Piano addition is essentially updating the language of the classical Beaux-Arts hall that is the original building of 1893. The Piano is likewise reserved, rectilinear, and displays the art in natural light. For modern art, this building seems to fit the bill both for the art and the institution, for a contemporary art museum Piano may have been too conservative for LA.

I’ll reserve final judgment for the building for its opening in 2009, but for now it looks like the pitfalls in LA are avoided here.