Been away for a bit because its been a crazy few weeks at work. Things should be getting back to normal though and finally got a full Weekend O' Fun. I didn't really get to spend much of the last Summer in Chicago and June/July is definitely time to enjoy this city. But yesterday we really got a full day of what Chi-town has to offer. Started with an amazing pie at The Bourgeois Pig, saw Prometheus on Michigan Ave with a bunch of friends, walked down State Street to the Book Fir in Printers Row, met up with more friends and grabbed Cafecito sandwiches and went to Blues Fest in Grant Park, headed to a rooftop overlooking the park for some drinks, saw the naked pike parade down Michigan Ave, and ended up meeting a bunch of great people at a balcony overlooking Wells in Old Town. Gotta love this town and its people.
As promised, a little look at my friend Noel's Masters Project. It is the re-imagining of what the old abandoned Chicago Post Office could become. Pretty wild, but we need these kind of provocative projects to get the collective blood running, especially for adapting or re-using infrastructure at this scale. The Share IIT website is on the fritz right now so I will include the link to his Masters Booklet in a bit.
Spring show went really well and was a pretty good turn out. We all went to Logan and Vija's building where their families threw an awesome party for the grad students (Thank you guys!). Awesome tacos (as usual), great views and great people. it was a fun night. Everyone is coming in this week and graduation on Saturday. I might have a more meaningful post about the end of school, but until then it feels good to be done!
This is what we are reduced to: a man, in a suit and tie, resorts to sleeping under his desk for 20 min before his final review because in the past 3 days he has gotten 6 hours of sleep. He is not lazy, he has not procrastinated, he simply does not have enough time. . This is not rare. This is common. But it is almost over!
I had the amazing opportunity to see Philip Glass in concert last night at the Art Institute (Thank you Logan and Vija!). It was is birthday, and it was a solo performance in the little auditorium. Very intimate and fantastic. I didn't know much about Glass until I heard a Radio Lab reference to him and stumbled upon the documentary about him on Netflix. Unfortunately its no longer available for streaming, but if you can find it its definitely a great watch and a very interesting window into his world. trailer below:
Happy late St. Patrick's Day! Perfect weather this year helped make it HUGE, and pretty much everyone was a mess. We hit downtown for a while and then headed to Max's house and spent the rest of the day on the roof with a perfect view of the city. Not a bad way to start Spring (Work) Break.
After last year's brutal winter the weather gods have seen fit to grant us an amazing and strange spring. its been in the 70's the past few days and should be through spring break. I was at Steve's apartment in Hyde Park last night when this fog rolled in off Lake Michigan. You can just see the SEARS (mild protest of Willis here) Tower peaking out of the fog in the distance.
Click link below to sign a petition to save this building. Description follows
The mission of the Save "Old" Prentice Coalition is to convince key decision makers to protect this modern masterpiece from demolition by designating it a Chicago Landmark. This effort is being led by a coalition of organizations that includes: docomomo, Landmarks Illinois, The National Trust and Preservation Chicago.
The building is in imminent threat of demolition by Northwestern University (NWU), which plans to landbank the site until funds are eventually found to build their own purpose-built research lab facility. A reuse study by Landmarks Illinois has demonstrated that there are reuse options for the building that would allow NWU to incorporate it into their plans.
Prentice Women’s Hospital, designed by noted Chicago architect Bertrand Goldberg and completed in 1975, was groundbreaking for its cutting-edge design, advanced engineering and its progressive plan for the organization of medical departments and services. Its column-free floor plates makes this building especially adaptable for reuse.
Please sign this petition, which will be presented to City of Chicago officials to demonstrate the broad-range recognition that Prentice is an irreplaceable modern masterpiece that deserves Landmark protection.
Every so often there will be an explosion of undergraduate students inside crown hall. If you have ever seen a time lapse nature video of fungi the scene will be very familiar to you: for a while there is a whole lot of nothing, then the surface of the ground will suddenly be covered by messy conglomerations of, um, stuff, and then for a very short time the multicolored and extravagant fruiting bodies will rise into the air, release their spores (undergraduates have these too), then wither and die. So it goes with the undergrads. In this case its their color studies, a holdover of the Bauhaus curriculum, but still pretty cool to see.
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