Cities/Architecture

For those in Chicagoland or those contemplating a visit, here are some fun goings on over the summer. I still consider myself relatively new in the area so I’m still actively on the lookout for what goes on here these months. I’m very impressed.

In the past couple of weeks I’ve already had the opportunity to go see a Gospel Music Festival, an Art Fair and participate in other outdoor celebrations. Much more is ahead. The free Summer Dance program started at Grant Park this past Wednesday. It runs until the end of August. On Wednesdays they have a DJ. On Thu-Sun they first offer free dance lessons and then have a live band for dances ranging from Polka to Swing, from Bachata to Waltzes. Given that I have been spending increasing amounts of time in dance classes, this is an exciting and fun opportunity. A propos dance, this weekend is the annual Chicago Crystal Ball national dance competition. I’ll be there although only for part of it since I’m hosting friends over the weekend and we’ll be exploring numerous areas of town. No, I won’t be competing at Crystal Ball, but I’ll be cheering on friends who will.

Next weekend (24-26th) will be the Wired Nextfest for all of us interested in the latest gadgets. I think from there I’ll head straight to Grant Park for that evening’s ballroom session.

A bit later in the summer will be the Chicago Outdoor Film Festival also in Grant Park. This event it free as well. They will be wrapping up with Star Wars on Aug 23rd. Sounds fun.

I have found the following resources especially helpful in finding out about goings-on and keeping track. I recommend them as sources of additional amusement:

• City of Chicago Events page
• Upcoming.org‘s Events listings (this should be helpful also if you are in another metro area in the US)

Matt Welch, LBC patriot, has had enough of these expansion-minded Angelenos, and he’s not going to take it anymore. Nativists at an LA radio station (in response to some flap about Californian billboards in Mexico) have erected a billboard reading “Just To Clarify, You Are Here: Los Angeles, CA; Gracias KFI AM 640.” The thing was, they put it in Long Beach. And that was where they made their fatal mistake:

That’s right, Juan y Ken, I’m on to your game, amigos. You and your kind have been trying for a century to effect a reconquista of the LBC, just like you successfully gobbled up weaker port-side sisters like San Pedro and Wilmington. We let you take advantage of our open borders every day, abuse our infrastructure (the 710 looks like freakin’ Mexico City), and now you’ve even stolen the name of what by all rights should have been the Long Beach Angels.

Well, this time you’ve gone too far, angelitos. We’re drawing a line in the asphalt, a bit to the north of the 91 (where the offending billboard stands, like a slap in our mothers’ faces). And you best not mess with our Minutemen — they’re not lard-asses in lawn chairs, they’re the G-funk crew with a gangsta twist. Mr. KFI, tear down this billboard!! Or else you’re gonna learn a new meaning for the word “regulate.”

Now, I’ve never met Matt Welch, but I figure it’s a safe bet all the Reasonistas are packing heat, so, watch your back, KFI AM 640. Watch your back.

Draft review of Heat Wave: A social autopsy of disaster in Chicago, by Eric Klinenberg. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Forthcoming in Imprints.

In the middle of July of 1995, temperatures in Chicago rose to record heights as a mass of hot, humid air settled over the city. On Thursday the 16th, the high temperature was 106 degrees Fahrenheit, or just over 41 degrees centigrade. The humidity made it feel even hotter, more like 126 degrees (52 degrees centigrade). Chicago prides itself on being “the city that works,” but during the week of the 13th to the 20th, the city’s infrastructure, its administration and its people were tested to breaking point. Like the city’s buildings and roads, Chicago’s government, police force and hospitals buckled in the heat as they tried to deal with the crisis. In the end, epidemiologists found that there had been 739 excess deaths that week. “According to emergency workers, the task [of dealing with these deaths] was equivalent to having one fatal jetliner crash per day for three consecutive days” (p8). Eric Klinenberg describes and analyzes the effects of the heat wave in this ambitious book. His goal is to produce a “social autopsy” of the disaster by looking closely at the “social organs of the city” to “identify the conditions that contributed to the deaths of so many Chicago residents that July” (p11).

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Reason Magazine has a long piece attacking New Urbanism co-written by an architectural liaison officer with the West Yorkshire Police and someone from the Thoreau Institute. It would be tempting to suggest the Onionesque headline:

bq. Libertarians: “World would be better if designed by the police.”

Laurence Aurbach has a detailed rebuttal on the City Comforts site .

Via Patrick Nielsen Hayden, a cool index of photographs of cities. Of the cities in the index, I’ve lived in Cork, Tucson and Canberra, in that order. I imagine our cosmopolitan CT crowd can do better than that.

The database isn’t without its errors: this claims to be Cork but is in fact Cobh, a town down the road that was the _Titanic’s_ last port of call.

Mira Bar-Hillel has an interesting piece in the Spectator about the way in which English Heritage has undermined its own role by backing a deal not to reconstruct the Baltic Exchange in the City. I did a little googling to find out what the old building looked like and I was surprised to discover that the whole thing is up for sale in a dismantled state! Not on ebay, but on a web page of Complete Large Buildings for Sale (scroll down). I happen to think that the Baltic Exchange would serve nicely as a new Crooked Timber corporate headquarters, though getting my colleagues’ agreement on location might be difficult.

This is a _colour_ photograph of Lake Windermere last Thursday afternoon! Fortunately there were other things to do and among them was a visit to Blackwell , the masterpiece of Mackay Hugh Baillie Scott. It is a wonderful example of the Arts and Crafts Style, brilliantly conceived and stunningly decorated. It also incorporates work by other leading designers of the period, most notably William de Morgan. It is, I think, worth a very long drive to visit. We also caught the Sickert and Freud exhibitions at Abbot House in Kendal before a much sunnier trip up to Scotland. Normal blogging will resume shortly.

The Financial Times has a profile of Jane Jacobs , author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities (which I think of as a very great book indeed). Jacobs’s other works haven’t achieved as much and some of them have been pretty crazy, but she’s still at it, now aged 88. Worth a look.

I work right beside the Pont de l’Alma where Diana, Princess of Wales, Dodi Fayed and Henri Paul died in that infamous car crash. It’s a very ordinary underpass, and probably disappoints the tourists who still come to see the accident site. It’s also much too dangerous to walk into the underpass, so most visitors leave their mark on a superbly tacky and incongruous sculpture across the road. (The sculpture is a brassy looking ‘eternal flame’ meant to symbolise American-French friendship, and probably deserves a post of its own.)

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I arrived in Pasadena (from Sydney) yesterday. Or possibly today. I’m still adjusting to jetlag, driving on the right and Los Angeles in general. The view of the mountains from the hotel is beautiful, at least in the photo in the hotel guidebook. Right now the smog makes them invisible. The area around the hotel has the usual collection of dull office blocks and carpark-like structures that turn out also to be office blocks. I’ve seen three buildings so far that are more than three stories tall, face the street on at least two sides, and have no windows at all: a Bank of America, a Target, and a Macy’s. I don’t have very high expectations when it comes to urban design, but these things look like the _Simpsons_’ Springfield Mall. They might as well have “Ministry of Truth” or “Central Reprocessing” written on the side. Is Pasadena particularly bad in this respect? Or has nine months away from the U.S. been enough for me to start paying attention to this kind of thing again?

Time to compare and contrast rejected proposals for the World Trade Center Memorial, from prehistoric to prehensile, from schmaltz to spikes, literal minded to questioning, melted to missed the point, patriotic to flowery, amateur to amateurest … on and on they go, all 5,201 of them.

There’s been light blogging from me over the past few days as I’ve been in Bilbao , biggest city in the Basque country and home to Frank Gehry’s wonderful Guggenheim Museum. The Guggenheim is really the main reason to visit the city and is a visual and technological marvel. The computer-generated curves link sufaces of stone, glass and most memorably titanium scales which shimmer over the bank of the Nervion river. Gehry isn’t the only architect in town, though, with Norman Foster represented by the new Metro which runs all the way out to the sea. Building the Guggenheim cost around US$100 million of public money but the effect has been to regenerate a decaying industrial city and put it back on the map as a tourist destination. Good to see a practical demonstration of the power of compulsory taxation and state-sponsored public works projects!

I watched North By Northwest again last night and was struck more than I had been before by the boldly modernist style the film projects. The texture of the film is wonderful: the future we were promised and never had. The opening title-sequence in which the titles are aligned with the straight lines of an international-style skyscraper with New York taxis reflected in the windows is really striking (the Seagram building?). And Roger O. Thornhill and Eve Kendall (Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint) throughout project a thoroughly enviable lifestyle that is sharply at variance with other images of the 1950s. In fact the whole film (1959) has a taste of the optimistic side of the 1960s about it: the NASA–Expo 67–white-heat-of-technology–007 side. That optimistic image of the future is something I grew up with: children’s comics like Look-and-Learn painted a picture of future cities in which we’d all be whizzing about in our personal aeroplanes (those who weren’t travelling by monorail of course). That isn’t exactly what is happening in North by Northwest, but rather a projection of of what the future might be like if the world of North by Northwest were the present (a TV in every hotel room in 1959!). Architecture and design do the work: from that opening sequence, through the United Nations (clean, sharp lines) through the exquisite train ride from New York to Chicago, through the scene in the cafe at Mt Rushmore (such a clean Scandinavian feel) to the Frank Lloyd Wright-style house at the end. Fantastic.

Many aeons ago I posted on a controversy about crime and the new urbanism (here and here ). David Sucher has an update on that argument over at City Comforts Blog .