Hello Beautiful!

Show Prentice Some Love - contest to save great architecture

2012-01-23T13:03:00.000-06:00

The Save Prentice Coalition wants your love.

Click here

for my thoughts on why

we ought to save Bertrand Goldberg's Prentice Women's Hospital.

“SHOW PRENTICE SOME LOVE” CONTEST

Rules and Conditions

WHAT IS IT?

The Save Prentice Coalition invites you to get creative and show us just how much you love Bertrand Goldberg’s 1975 masterpiece, Prentice Women’s Hospital. The contest is open to people of all ages who want to express their appreciation for the unique architecture, engineering, and design of old Prentice Hospital. The top five entries will be posted on the Save Prentice Facebook page on Valentine’s Day for a public vote. The winners of the popular vote will get great Goldberg themed prizes:

1^st Prize – $100 gift certification for food, beer, and bowling at 10pin in Marina City
2^nd Prize – A rare copy of the catalogue for the 1985 Paris Art Center exhibition, Goldberg: On the City, signed by Geoff Goldberg
Grand Prize for Kids’ Category (age 13 and under) - TBD

WHAT TO ENTER

There are no restrictions on the nature of the submittals. You can make your Prentice “valentine” in whatever medium you choose—photography, paintings, songs, short video (60 seconds or less), t-shirt graphics, and construction paper valentine are just a few of the options. Entries can originate in any format, as long it can be converted to a digital file and emailed to us. If you have lots of ideas, don’t let that limit you! Multiple entries will be accepted from the same entrant.

HOW TO ENTER

It’s easy. Just email a digital file of your submittal to loveprentice@gmail.com. Please limit file size to 10 MB or less. For each submittal, please include:

· the name of the entrant(s),

· age of the entrant (this only applies to the “Kid’s” category for entrants 13 and under),

· phone number or preferred method of contact

· a title for the submittal,

· a brief (2-3 sentence) description of the submittal and why you love Prentice

If you include clearly identifiable people in your submission, you are responsible for obtaining the necessary releases from those individuals. You must be able to provide copies of those releases to the Save Prentice Coalition upon request. Entrants must not submit images, video, or other artwork that puts any individual in danger, or infringes on the rights of any other person.

The Save Prentice Coalition reserves the right to upload submittals to its Facebook page and to websites of Landmarks Illinois and Preservation Chicago.

DEADLINES

All submittals must be sent to loveprentice@gmail.com by 5:00 pm Central Standard Time on February 13, 2012. Submittals arriving after that time will not be eligible for prizes.

ELIGIBILITY AND JUDGING

Submittals will be judged by members of the Save Prentice coalition based on the originality, technical merit, and overall impact of the submittal, and how well it celebrates Prentice Women’s Hospital. All decisions made by the judges are final.

The top 5 entries will be announced on the Save Prentice Facebook page on February 14, 2012, for a popular vote. The voting period will last for two days. The winners of the popular vote will be announced on February 17, 2012.

YOUR RIGHTS

Your entries will help us with our efforts to save and preserve old Prentice Hospital. Thank you for helping to further our mission through your creative submittals. You will retain all rights to any artwork you submit -- including ownership. By entering the contest, you grant the Save Prentice Coalition the rights for a period of 12 months to:

Use the submittal on the Internet in support of our mission.
Use the submittal in the Save Prentice Coalition’s non-commercial communications
Provide your submittal to other individuals and organizations for non-commercial use, Save Prentice-related use in news stories, newsletters, reports, slide shows, displays, web pages, and Facebook pages.
Use your name in promotions and other publications.
Keep the files provided, and to archive the images on CD or in other electronic forms, so that they can be used to support our mission and be properly credited.

As conditions of this permission, The Save Prentice Coalition shall credit all photographs with the caption "© Person's Name" when the full name is available.

QUESTIONS

Questions and inquiries about contest rules can be emailed to loveprentice@gmail.com.

A Dream for the City of the Future. Chris Burden's Metropolis II at LACMA.

2012-01-13T12:56:00.000-06:00

After mounting a 65-foot Erector Set skyscraper at Rockefeller Center in 2008, and that same year placing a diverse collection of vintage streetlights like lit columns at a main entry to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), artist Chris Burden astounds us again.

Beginning today, LACMA presents Chris Burden's Metropolis II.

Eleven hundred miniature cars race along 18 lanes of traffic around 25 buildings. Given the miniature scale, they speed the equivalent of about 240 miles per hour. 13 trains mosey along through this mini-city as well.

Art that makes you feel young, even for a fleeting moment, is priceless. That a grown man built this car-racing track and made it smarter than just a boyhood fantasy is compelling on its own terms. Because it's about cars, we might even think we can learn something about life in Los Angeles, this youthful city that once again seems like it will never grow up.

Chris Burden at the opening of Metropolis II

Burden does not claim Metropolis II as a utopian vision, and unlike Fritz Lang's 1927 film Metropolis which inspired him, this is not a dystopian vision either. "Only in the speed of the cars is this the city of the future," he says. "The city of the future is that every car is going to be controlled." Burden gets serious here. "Rigidly controlled. Do you know what I'm saying? Controlled by Google, not by a driver. It's insane that somebody's who's drunk or having a heart attack or is a teenager on speed, can drive a two-ton diesel projectile; it's insane! My dream for the city of the future is that the cars go faster and be totally automated."

"I want to evoke the energy of a city, and the sound is a really important part of it," Chris Burden says. "It provides a tension, more than anything else. It's not just seeing the cars go around, it's the noise level."

After a few minutes the sound becomes oppressive, it's hard to talk in this room. The walls are hard and bare and the soundscape is an unknown one, like a digital sound file sped up, with no off switch. And no natural sounds or sights to soften it. "Nature is just, simply suggested by the different colored phenolic panels that the buildings rest on, so there's green, brown, or light tan," Burden says. "They're totally abstract."

What Burden fears. "We considered having water at one point," he says. "We considered having canals and a water flow. But my experience with water is not a good one. Everything that uses water, leaks. If it can leak, it will leak. Water is the universal solvent. We decided against it."

No trees in this city? He answers quickly, "Well, where do you stop? I mean, you could keep going on and on. There could be little people, there could be lights that turn on and off in the buildings. I'm not trying to make an architectural model in the traditional sense."

"The buildings are fanciful," he says, "none are based on actual buildings, except maybe the 'Viagra Tower,' the Eiffel Tower."

The most recognizable building in this L.A. fantasy, is the most recognizable structure in-- Paris. Or is it Las Vegas? Or the homogenization of cities, brought on in large part by the automobile.

Barthes said of the one in Paris, this symbol of modernity, of communication, and science confronts "the great itineraries of our dreams."

“Eiffel saw his Tower in the form of a serious object, rational, useful; men return it to him in the form of a great baroque dream which quite naturally touches on the borders of the irrational ... architecture is always dream and function, expression of a utopia and instrument of a convenience.” ― Roland Barthes, The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies

"We used a lot of wooden blocks, which were real versatile for us," Burden says. "We used Lincoln Logs, Legos, Erector sets, plexiglass, actual glass, and Meccano. Pottery Barn, a couple of years ago made a thin-plywood House of Cards, bigger ones. And they were relatively expensive so I guess they didn't sell well. So we were able to amass a massive collection of them when they went on sale. And those were useful."

Architecture was not Chris Burden's priority. "We got it operational without any buildings in it. So the buildings had to fit the confined spaces." I tell him it sounds as if there was about as much "urban planning" in this piece as there was in L.A. itself. Burden smiles. "Maybe more," he says. "We considered the entirety at once, which is not something L.A. does."

And he mounted modern architecture on top of a base of Lincoln Logs, making layers of history seen less often in L.A. than in most of the world's great cities.

The religious buildings, Burden says are just "indications. The one is obviously, quote, a Christian church, and the other, with the onion domes is meant to indicate 'the other religion.'" He smiles, maybe a little nervously. "Be it Hindu, Muslim, it's undefined. It's just meant to evoke "the other."

I wish Chris Burden had designed the room Metropolis II inhabits. As it is, it feels sterile, not a delightful place to be. The city/object/sculpture does not organically touch the ground plane, but stands clinically slightly above the floor. (Of course it's cordoned off from touch, but I'm sure kids will want to try to grab a speed-racer. Parents- word is LACMA will sell the miniature cars when their useful life in this work has ended.) LACMA can be so good at installing art to make it come alive. They've recently hired artists such as Jorge Pardo and Franz West for installations; West's installation of the Art of the Pacific, with tea-stained walls, are some of the wonderful museum rooms in the nation. As collector Nicolas Berggruen has loaned Metropolis II to LACMA for at least ten years, I'd like to see Chris Burden come back and improve the room. This would give the experience more impact. At Burden's studio in Topanga, where he first built this, you're surrounded by nature and sensuousness. This metallic piece with many hard-edges would benefit from softer, more lush, dare I say naturally noise-dampening surroundings. That would make the installation more of its place. In L.A., nature threatens to take back the street.

After about half an hour in the room, I became hoarse from having to shout, to talk to friends. That noise is important Burden says, to recreate the stress of city life. But even he shows pretty strong relief when Metropolis II turns off. This machinery requires breaks or it could burn out. LACMA plans to turn the work on only Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. The general schedule, subject to change, is:

Friday: 12:30–2 p.m.; 3–4:30 p.m.; 5–6:30 p.m.; 7–8:30 p.m.
Saturday and Sunday: 11:30 a.m.–1 p.m.; 2–3:30 p.m.; 4–5:30 p.m.; 6–7:30 p.m.

Check LACMA's schedule for times.

65 year-old Chris Burden, originally from Boston, trained as a sculptor, a minimalist. "As a minimalist, my teachers were always trying to distill what the essence of the experience was. So as I studied sculpture more and more I came to the conclusion that sculpture was activity. A sculpture forces the viewer to be active. So if you reduce that, as a minimalist, what's the essence of sculpture? It's human activity. That was the basis for many of my performances."

In 1974 he gained notoriety with Trans-fixed, in which he had himself crucified atop a Volkswagen Beetle. Many of Burden's works deal with cars, trains and technology.

"At some point in the mid-70's to late 70's I started making objects again. I actually made a car from scratch, called the B-Car. Since then I've made many objects and a lot of them are performative objects, including Metropolis II. I don't have to do the performance anymore, the art is performing for me."

Burden, well-known for having a friend shoot him in the left arm as a work of art in 1971 (see the short video here), draws a line without much trouble between his art that must have been very difficult to look at, and this colorful, toy-like crowd-pleasing piece. "There's tension in both, and they both intrigue people," he says with pride, "so there is some sort of tie-in."

Each of the 1100 little sports cars, sedans, trucks and vans was custom-made in China. This might be Burden's most prescient move. How long until cars made in China rock the US auto industry?

The cars of Metropolis II get carried up a conveyor belt, about eight feet, to speed back down and around. Here, the artist's assistant puts in earplugs and stands in the center, ready to right a car that might get stuck. The human in this Sisyphean construct looks out of scale and out of place. Like a Colossus, no, vulnerable and lost in a new and changing world, they stand like modern Adam and Eve.

And yet, in the compelling vision of our future that Chris Burden sets in motion with Metropolis II, it's reassuring to know that at least it has humanity at its heart.

.

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Robert Stern's Jewish Pavilion / International Press Exhibition Cologne 1928

2012-01-10T14:34:00.000-06:00

Not that Robert Stern. But look at this amazing collection of incredibly pure buildings from Germany in the 1920's and 30's.

Harry Rosenthal Arnold Zweig Residence, Berlin 1929-30

(See Eisenman, Peter; see Meier, Richard.)

Rudolf Fränkel Detached House, near Dresden 1932

Robert Stern Jewish Pavilion / International Press Exhibition Cologne 1928

From:

Click to see them all.

Why do these speak so powerfully?

From "Forgotten Architects" published in Pentagram Papers 37

Introduction and Research by Myra Warhaftig

Bring the Olympics to Detroit! 1965 video bid

2012-01-07T14:16:00.005-06:00

Detroit. An exciting place to be. To live, to grow, to work shoulder to shoulder.
Detroit is rebuilding to a masterplan of beauty and public service.

The 1968 Summer Olympics went to Mexico City. And that summer, the world, and Detroit, changed greatly.

Bedford Falls today. What the ideal American town in "It's a Wonderful Life" looks like now.

2011-12-25T18:21:00.002-06:00

"Bedford Falls" in It's a Wonderful Life was filmed on the old RKO backlot, sold for suburban development in 1954. In 1955 Encino Village went up, as shown.

And just a few blocks away, on Ventura Boulevard, the self-proclaimed "Miracle Mile" of the Valley.

Why, it's as if George Bailey had never been born after all. Where is Clarence to help us now, in this "City of Angels"? Is it true that every time you hear a car honk, an angel is getting his wings?
Jimmy Stewart Frank Capra Encino Los Angeles California

And here's what it all looked like, before post-World War II development-

The RKO Encino Ranch in 1941
courtesy Bison Archives

John Lautner - A story I put together for NPR

2011-12-03T14:08:00.001-06:00

Here's the link to NPR's page, enjoy.

Your thoughts?

In New China. Q Confucius says...

2011-11-19T23:32:00.009-06:00

In China, so posting will be sporadic. At the Rockbund Museum in Shanghai, which mounted the best show I saw anywhere in 2010, namely "Cai Guo-Qiang: Peasant Da Vincis." That was outsider art from China's recent decade, including many homemade flying machines, or artwork representing humans being able to fly away from their earthly conditions. (Hence the name "Peasant Da Vincis.") The works were mainly by peasants.

The Rockbund Museum, a fine renovation by David Chipperfield of an existing exhibition space, now shows "Q Confucius," a solo exhibition by Zhang Huan. It's billed as "a series of thoughts on art and society."

The basic concept of Q Confucius originated from a series of questions ZHANG Huan pondered over: faced with rapid economic and societal changes and energy and climate challenges, how can we achieve sustainable development? What responsibilities come along with China’s rise in international importance? Where is the sense of spiritual belonging for contemporary Chinese? These questions seem massive and unrelated, but actually they are inherently connected by inescapable bonds. The artist hopes to explore the inner structure of the questions through large sculptures, ash paintings and installation works tailored for this exhibition.... As in RAM’s previous exhibitions last year, all the works of the artist are custom-made for the art museum’s space, and strive to correspond with the unique architectural environment and historical and cultural background of the Bund district.

I found it to be effective. Q Confucius No. 2, seen above, the enormous bust of Confucius, rising from the water, and mechanically "breathing," with accompanying audio, does make one reconsider today's "go-go China" and wonder what the wise old sage would think were he to return, and what the role of Confucianism should be today. Those teachings- acknowledged or latent- account for so much of what is truly wonderful in the Chinese people. "Q Confucius" runs through January 29. Don't miss it if in you're in Shanghai. As in many great spaces in Asia, an "emptiness," a stillness, encourages the visitor to consider his or her own essence. Such spaces are rare in contemporary China. Here, perhaps in a more hokey manner than in a traditional Chinese garden, but with the water element, the size (think of the great old Buddhas) and with David Chipperfield's very elegant and understated architecture, compared with the rest of bling and commercial Shanghai, this is spiritual. It may be that a billboard like this is needed to get people's attention today, to take them back to something more quiet.

Speaking of things calmer, The Rockbund Museum, stands by the Bund in Shanghai, which is a major recent triumph in Chinese urbanism. The popular and historic promenade along Shanghai's Huangpu river boasts a grand row of historic international trading and banking buildings in neoclassical, baroque and art deco styles.

Redeveloped for Shanghai's World Expo 2010, city planners sunk eight lanes of traffic underground, then had Chan Krieger Sieniewicz of Cambridge, Massachusetts and NBBJ, redesign the walkway along the river. The new promenade features more green space and art (some of which lights up at night with LEDs changing colors). You look across the river at Shanghai's ultra-modern Pudong district-- think Apple Store, think huge-- with several of the world's tallest buildings, including the Jin Mao tower by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (Adrian Smith) with one of the great skyscraper interiors of the world, surpassed in height by the Shanghai World Financial Center by KPF, which in turn will soon be passed in height by the under construction and rising high Shanghai Tower by Gensler. After the renovation of the Bund the traffic patterns, most thankfully, are far more civilized than they were before. The cars move more easily than in most parts of this "wild-west, anything goes" city. The Bund is a great stroll. Now, if Shanghai's drivers would just stop honking their horns so much.... we could hear ourselves breathing (thus thinking, and being) like the Q Confucius in the Rockbund Museum.

The Farnsworth House in the coming Great Depression

2011-11-12T19:09:00.003-06:00

Update, based on your comments: While perusing Dorothea Lange's photographs, I came upon this image. The simplicity and honesty, and the form, reminded me of Mies' Farnsworth House. The "porch" did too. That this is raised above the land for these farmworkers struck me. The simple stairs of horizontal slats sealed the connection, for me.

Thanks for your comments. I may not have found the best title for this comparison. What would you title it? Thanks, Edward

Photo credits

Top: farnsworthhouse.org Farnsworth House Mies van der Rohe
Bottom: Dorothea Lange

Modeling Chicago Over the Years

2011-10-23T01:58:00.001-05:00

Above: 2011 - "Chicago Model City" at the Chicago Architecture Foundation

Below: 1959

The Ugliest Barcelona Chair ever ! Pt. III

2011-10-14T19:53:00.004-05:00

Yours, for just $299 the pair.

More Ugliest Barcelona Chairs ever.

Barcelona Pavilion bird bath!

2011-10-12T10:18:00.001-05:00

The Barcelona Bird Pavilion by Monique Engelund for Menu.

Bird bath and feeder, inspired by Mies van der Rohe’s 1929 masterpiece Barcelona Pavilion at the 1929 Expo.

Made of acacia wood and aluminum. Available here.

Pacific Standard Time Launch party video - at the Getty Center in Los Angeles

2011-10-03T13:15:00.000-05:00

CLICK ON THE PHOTO OR SCROLL DOWN FOR FULL POST WITH VIDEO

They lit up the Getty Center last night with sound and light and story.

The Getty Foundation officially kicked off the unprecedented collaboration

of more than 60 cultural institutions across Southern California called

"Pacific Standard Time."

Normally, Richard Meier's plaza and entry building look like this:

But last night, about 1,500 collectors, dealers, curators and even artists downed champagne on the plaza.

They came and went, talking if not of Michelangelo, then of the Charles Ray

"Boy with Frog" recently placed on the steps, and looking for all its whiteness, and its stance

like a more effeminate, limp "David".

The cause to celebrate was indeed a coming of age, that of the Southern California art scene.

From 1945-1980, something happened here, no, many things, many concurrent art movements,

some born of freedom, some of anger, most of new possibilities.

"Pacific Standard Time" exhibitions cover them well.

See this also as a slingshot rock thrust across the U.S.

at the New York art world - Goliath.

To gain a larger share of the narrative of art history,

and a larger share of tourist dollars.

When the color rich skies above the Getty had darkened,

the lights on the plaza dimmed to black,

and a voice that otherwise might be selling CD's on late night TV,

proclaimed the true history of modern art in Los Angeles:

Impressive technology, precision and creativity.
Only in L.A., you might say.

I thought of the overwhelming light shows in Chinese cities nightly,
and Europe's woes, then wondered,
how much power in the US will shift
from the Atlantic coast to the west.
To what extent will the 21st century be
Pacific Standard Time.
.

Good night, L.A.

2011-10-01T17:03:00.000-05:00

L.A. "The"

2011-10-01T17:01:00.000-05:00

L.A. cliche´

2011-10-01T16:58:00.000-05:00

L.A. soon-to-sleep

2011-10-01T16:57:00.000-05:00

L.A. is the only city I know where what happens above the horizon line is every bit as interesting as what happens on the ground.

L.A. City Hall last night

2011-10-01T16:56:00.002-05:00

L.A. arrival

2011-10-01T16:23:00.000-05:00

Tire skids, L.A., Leimert Park

2011-09-26T19:40:00.000-05:00

L.A. rainbow today, for Labor Day

2011-09-04T20:00:00.000-05:00

Exclusive tour of Mies van der Rohe Lake Shore Drive apartments in Chicago

2011-08-16T18:17:00.006-05:00

Ever want to get inside the 860-880 North Lake Shore Drive Apartments?
Here's your chance!

---

Join the Mies Society for

A TOUR OF 860-880 NORTH LAKE SHORE DRIVE APARTMENTS

Tuesday, September 20, 2011

5:30 pm

Take an exclusive tour of four artistically unique homes in the 860-880 North Lake Shore Drive Apartments. These units have never been open to the public, and they are full of design inspiration. After the tour, join us for a wine reception in the apartment of Don Powell of Powell/Kleinschmidt. His apartment reminds one of the Barcelona Pavilion and is a rare treat. This will be a sell-out event and space is limited, so please make your reservations quickly.

Tickets
$250 for members
$300 for nonmembers

Proceeds go toward the restoration of Carr Memorial Chapel at Illinois
Institute of Technology.

Reservations are required by Monday, September 12, 2011.

RSVP with credit card payment to 312.567.5042 or at
www.miessociety.org/happenings.

---

Rare treat is right!

Can't wait for 1100 more cars in L.A.!

2011-08-07T17:49:00.004-05:00

Love this film of this work of Chris Burden, soon to be seen where the banked turns and slots of the Richard Serras stood in BCAM at LACMA in L.A.

Click to play. Best enlarged to full screen.

Burden's installation will measure 20×30 feet and feature about 1100 matchbox cars traveling in 18 lanes at speeds up to 230 scale mph! Plus 13 toy trains and tracks, all coursing through a landscape of futuristic buildings made of wood, tile, Legos and Lincoln Logs! The sound, as you hear in the film, is as mesmerizing as a Steve Reich - or Elmer Bernstein - soundtrack. "Anxiety-provoking," says artist Chris Burden. Metropolis II, as it's called, will run and run and run at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art beginning this fall.

Here's how it was made and "what it means".

Here's how it got to LACMA (scroll down).

Shades of Fritz Lang's Metropolis

Charles and Ray Eames's films of toys

Walt Disney's Autopia at Disneyland

and of course, the best of all

childhood memories.

Mattel Hot Wheels Disneyland Walt Disney model cars road racing

Next in Chicago: sculptures "in the throes of sex"?

2011-08-01T17:16:00.006-05:00

Vanity Fair has the well over-the-top story of Prince Jefri Bolkiah, "notorious playboy brother of the Sultan of Brunei, (in) a world of orgiastic wealth: 250 companies, 2,000 cars, luxury hotels, planeloads of women and polo ponies, colossal diamonds." Well, the man's in court, and this came out:

Before the trial began, the defense had released photographs to the press of sculptures Prince Jefri had commissioned from J. Seward Johnson for $800,000, allegedly portraying the prince and his fiancée at the time, Micha Royale Raines, in the throes of sex.

The artist is the same J. Seward Johnson who designed the statue of Marilyn Monroe and her underpants, on view in Chicago.

It seems the work for Prince Jefri, designed for his 28-acre Long Island, New York estate Sunninghill, was designed to shock and appall. Marilyn too, a little bit, just maybe?

(Jefri's attorney Geoffrey Stewart says) Jefri commissioned J. Seward Johnson to make the sex statues to shock his brother. “Mohamed loved to buzz Prince Jefri’s palace in his helicopter, and Prince Jefri decided that the thing to do would be to have these life-size statues made and put them around the pool. The next time Mohamed buzzed the house, he’d be appalled and shocked.”

Johnson created four to six pieces for Prince Jefri.

Sculptor J. Seward Johnson has an extensive body of G-rated public works, controversial only for whether or not they are good art. Pioneer Court in Chicago previously displayed his tall sculpted homage to Grant Wood's painting "American Gothic," and a 20-foot tall "King Lear."

He is reported to claim he was unaware the more X-rated commission came from Prince Jefri. "The sculptures were a commission specifically featuring positions of the ancient public domain Kama Sutra," his spokesman told The Daily Beast. "Artists’ models were used and there was no reference to any collector, buyer, or other individual in the making of the pieces. The project was commissioned anonymously via a holding company and the sculptor was not told the identity of the buyer."

A little more from Vanity Fair's Prince Jefri: The Prince who Blew Through Billions:

(A 1998 lawsuit) described Jefri’s “sex parties” at home and abroad. (The manifest on his 747 usually comprised mostly young women.) An attorney called him a man of “unlimited tastes,” a “one-man walking market,” who bought practically everything he saw, including a rug woven with jewels in threads of solid gold ($7 million), 10 jewel-encrusted wristwatches that depicted on the hour a couple copulating ($8 million), and similarly erotic fountain pens ($1.3 million). In London alone, the Manoukians charged, he kept 40 prostitutes at the Dorchester hotel and spent $34 million for the former Playboy Club at 45 Park Lane—more than four times the market price, according to the brothers—so that he could house more hookers and secretly indulge his passion for gambling. (Jefri denied employing prostitutes.)

Read more here.

Kind of makes the Marilyn look not too bad? More on Chicago's Marilyn here.

Update: see comments for obligatory comparison to work of Jeff Koons.

The Seven Year Itch meets Kitsch

2011-07-18T18:14:00.050-05:00

Forever Marilyn

Chicago, Illinois 2011

Madonna of Mercy

Siena, Italy (c. 1308)
Simone Martini

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Marilyn in Chicago means curves against grid, which is always exciting!

From top: Barcelona Pavilion with Georg Kolbe's Dawn

Federal Center Chicago with Alexander Calder's Flamingo
Cell from "Mad Men" opening sequence

Forever Marilyn photo from Business Week

But not always tasteful.

The sculpture of Marilyn Monroe on Chicago's Michigan Avenue, erected by the management of the Equitable building behind it and not by the city, is only temporary, thank goodness. Based on the famous subway breeze scene in Billy Wilder's 1955 film, "The Seven Year Itch," Seward Johnson's twenty-six foot tall sculpture is due to be removed next spring. I wonder if other cities will want it?

Milton H. Greene, photographer, Marilyn Monroe, 1956

Andy Warhol understood curves against grid.

In greater Toronto, Ma Yansong and MAD Studio's new Absolute World South tower, like Jeanne Gang's Aqua Tower in Chicago, blends the grid and curves. Ma's is known as "Marilyn Monroe." Wonder why?

Japanese architect Arata Isozaki put in the "Monroe curve" in his Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

A Marilyn reference makes more sense in Los Angeles, where she's from and worked in Hollywood. The Seven Year Itch takes place in New York. But there is a Chicago possibility. They might have sculpted her pose from Hugh Hefner's Playboy issue Number 1, from December, 1953.

This, as a 26 foot high statue, would have been less vulgar. Interesting how the layout of this cover places squares and rectangles against her curves in modernist fashion.

This reminds me of what Rem Koohaas wrote in "Miestakes," around the time he was designing the student center at the Mies-designed campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology-

In all my visits to Chicago, I learned only one new thing from the Miesians, or actually two.

One, Mies had received a letter from Hugh Hefner once, asking him to do the Playboy Headquarters–Mies had said no, for reasons no longer accessible.

Two, Mies’ model shop had a (frequently exploited) view of the photo studios of Playboy Magazine–all during the Fifties and Sixties, Mies’ architecture and the first generation of playmates had been fabricated in voyeuristic proximity.

Mining for meaning in Marilyn, aren't we all?

Richard Serra, "Marilyn Monroe - Greta Garbo," 1981, Cor-ten steel

Niki de Sainte Phalle, Jean Tinguely and Per Olof Ultvedt

"hon-en katedral," 1966

Former New York Times architecture critic, the late Herbert Muschamp called Frank Gehry's Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, "the reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe."

Howard Finster, "Marilyn Monroe"

Willem De Kooning, "Marilyn Monroe," 1954

Claes Oldenburg, "Ghost Wardrobe (for M.M.)"

Click on this "Church of Marilyn Monroe" scene from Ken Russell's 1975 film "Tommy," for the full mind-blowing effect.

As awful as the iconography is in that video, at least it "uses" Marilyn to say something, about idolatry and religion gone amok. That's more message than you'll find in Chicago's Marilyn. At best it speaks of desire, like many a modern building and plaza; alas, this, in the most simplistic way.

Chicago is becoming a more feminine city, all dolled up with flowers and newer buildings that are less hard-edged; you've come a long way, baby, from your past as "hog-butcher to the world." Is this Marilyn mascot then the Colossus of Chicago, a modern dance partner, perhaps, for the Colossus of Rhodes?

And art as commerce-- is she so different from those Calvin Klein underwear ads seen in cities around the world?

To sum up, I can only extrapolate from Barbara Kruger's piece on Marilyn.

We have met the meaning of Marilyn, and it is us.

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Happy 100th Birthday John Lautner!

2011-07-16T00:01:00.004-05:00

Happy Birthday, Iconoclast! No one has designed L.A. residential architecture quite as spectacular since you've been gone (1911-1994). One of my all-time favorites, for his reverence of nature, that his spaces make me gaze at the heavens and see connections, with stars and celestial beings, he blurs land, sky and water, mixes solid and air, practices a humane modernity based on nature, finds low-cost solutions with progressive engineering, he infuses his work with optimism despite his own crankiness. John Lautner was born one hundred years ago today.

See a calendar of events to honor him here.

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My childhood (in rural Michigan), I had a hundred miles of beaches, private beaches, you know: no people, no nothing. I mean, just go swimming anywhere you want, and no problem. The coast here to me is just ugly, you know, it's crazy. Malibu is nothing to me, it's just crazy." ... Oh it was depressing. I mean, when I first drove down Santa Monica Boulevard, it was so ugly I was physically sick for the first year I was here. Because after living in Arizona and Michigan and Wisconsin, mostly out in the country, and mostly with good architecture ... this was the ugliest thing I'd ever seen ... If you tried to figure out how to make a row of buildings ugly, you couldn't do it any better than it's been done [here]. I mean they're just ugly, naturally ugly, all the way. There isn't a single, legitimate, good-looking thing anywhere.
^{From "Responsibility, Infinity, Nature" — John Lautner interviewed by Marlene L. Laskey, Oral History Program, University of Los Angeles, California, 1986}.

Carmaggedon