Triple Fantasy: Chicago Architectural Club makes Obama Library focus of 2014 Chicago Prize competition

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The Chicago Architectural Club, originally founded as a sketch club all the way back in 1885, continues to be active in the city's architectural discourse over a century later.  In announcing on Saturday the topic of its 14th Chicago Prize architectural competition, it's also proven that it's not short on ambition.   The new competition seeks proposals for the Barack Obama Presidential Library . . .

. . .  to initiate a debate in order to rethink and redefine this particular building typology. Within the context of the city, is this institution a stand-alone monument or rather a forum of social-urban interaction and an active extension of a President�s legacy? Would it be considered as one of the civic components of Chicago�s public library system or does it remain autonomous? At its best this is a cultural institution providing a place for the exchange of knowledge, the creation of dialogue and debate, and last but not least an urban niche to read and write.

Many Chicago locations have been proposed for the library, including even Pullman and the old Michael Reese Site, both nothing so bold as the one chosen by the CAC - a prime riverfront site right across from Wolf Point.  And while architectural competitions are often unmoored speculations to let the creative mind roam free, the Obama Library competition is a triple fantasy.

In September, the Barack Obama Foundation narrowed down potential sites to four - one at New York City's Columbia University, one at the University of Hawaii, and two in Chicago, at the University of Chicago, and the University of Illinois at Chicago.  CAC's riverfront site was not among them.

The competition's bare-bones brief includes three maps of the site, and five photographs, all of which show it as a parking lot.   Nowhere does the brief mention that the site is crossed by Metra mail tracks, or, more importantly, that a large structure has just been constructed on the site, covering those tracks, and forming the surface of a new 1.5 acre riverfront park that the city has already spent a large part of the $29.5 million it has committed to the project. 

Looming larger still is that behind that park, River Point, a 52-story-high skyscraper, is now rising.

So while the idea of a riverfront Obama Library is certainly a stimulating one, it's not just divorced from reality, but in a parallel universe, unless you could build it at the tip of Wolf Point where an even taller skyscraper is planned.  Or maybe the Library could be tucked next to lower Wacker to serve as one of the monetizing engines that the City of Chicago has put out to bid to pay back the loans that have funded construction of the new Riverwalk.  Other than that, the Chicago Prize competition is less of a "What-If . . ." than a "Hey, wouldn't it be really cool . . ." proposition.

Registration - $90.00, $50.00 for students - is now open, along with the opportunity to submit questions.  Submissions are due by noon CST on January 10th, with winners announced February 3rd.  First prize is $1,500, 2nd $1,000, with $750 for third with the possibility of non-cash honorable mentions.

Get all the details and download the brief here.

Water Tanks: Urban Menace or Historic Amentiy?

Yesterday, this 15-foot-tall, 5,000 gallon water tank fell from the top of the landmark 1893 Brewster Apartments Enoch Hill Turnoch at 2800 North Pine Grove, injuring three people below.  The tank had passed a city inspection after adjustments were made to the steel supports in 2010.

After the accident, water tanks rose from their usual status as largely ignored up into a media frenzy.  Enterprising reporters dug up The Brewster Building Curse, which has a longer gestation period than a cicada, considering that the incident in question, the death of the structure's builder in a fall from scaffolding, took place in 1895.

Similarly, we should brace ourselves for a gaggle of politicians suddenly and photogenically enervated about water tank safety, although incidents like the one that occurred at the Brewster are extremely rare.  In fact, Chicago treats water tanks less like a threat to public safety than as an endangered species in need of loving care. According to an excellent report by the Trib's Ellen Jean Hirst, Ryan Haggerty and Kim Geiger, a 2006 ordinance puts a 90-day delay on the demolition of water tanks to allow time to find a way to preserve them. [The article is accompanied by its own gallery of water tank photos, here.]

As we wrote in Tanks for the Memory, back in 2005, there were no fewer than 167 firms and individuals who submitted proposals in a Chicago Architectural Club design competition.  The organization had gone to then Mayor Richard M. Daley to ask how architects could help solve the city's problems, and somehow it was not the lack of affordable housing, mediocre civic design or blight that the Mayor asked Chicago's globally renowned architects to tackle, but water tanks.  And, then, of course, absolutely nothing came out of it.  Even with a jury that included Pritzker-Prize winner Thom Mayne - who estimated the entries represented 20,000 hours of work - all those creative ideas came off the wall and into the dark recesses of a closet.

Originally, water tanks were part of the fire-fighting arsenal of a city still bearing the scars of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, capable of providing - instantly - large quantities of water to put out a blaze.  Over time, they became less relevant.  Yesterday, a radio report of WBBM estimated there are about 153 still in operation in Chicago.

The aesthetic value of the water tanks was picked up on other 40 years ago by 41-year-old Japanese-American artist Sachio Yamashita, who made it his personal mission to paint as many of them as possible. �He said his watchword was to paint something every day,� says Chicago Cultural Historian Samuelson. �He'd go to the building owners, and talk them into letting him paint the tank. He'd get them to chip in for the paint, too. He'd go swimming in them - a hot day, climb up the ladder, go in and swim around. Every time he'd paint a tank, he'd paint it in bright colors, and then paint a number on it, and it was sequential. The first two sat atop the old Piper Bakery on Wells Street, side by side, that said 1,2� 

In 2009, a water tank was even incorporated into SMNG-A's design for the Mark T. Skinner West Elementary School. The tank collects storm run-off that is then used to irrigate landscaping.

While many water tanks have graffiti as their only artwork . . .

. . .  others are opportunities for self promotion . . . 

 

 

 

. . . or just for a love of fish . . . 

. . . while for many others, only the platform survives, a body without a head . . .

Read

Tanks for the Memory

Last Week to Submit for CAC's Next Stop: BRT Stations Competition

Noon Monday, May 13th, is the deadline for entering submissions to the Chicago Architectural Club for its 2013 Burnham Prize Competition,  Next Stop: Designing Chicago BRT Stations.  First prize $3,000, second $1,500, third $750.

This is a single-stage international design ideas competition intended to catalyze iconic, sustainable, and functional design for representative corridors in Chicago�s planned Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system.

NEXT STOP seeks to integrate innovative and compelling transportation design into Chicago�s urban fabric. Importantly, NEXT STOP seeks proposals that realize BRT as a system of solutions: each design team must submit designs for three different prototype sites and demonstrate how BRT station design can be adapted to each context. 

Full info here.

Read:
Next Stop:  BRT Stations - As Chicago Transit Moves Forward, Will Design move beyond Backward?

Lipstick Glowing on the Off Ramp: Congress Parkway's New Lighting

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Can you really redeem something created in the urban equivalent of original sin, when even the two parts of its name -  �Congress� and �Parkway� - form an oxymoron?

In 1909, for his Plan of Chicago, Daniel Burnham envisioned Congress Parkway as  the city's great civic promenade, a tree-lined boulevard lined with uniform-height Beaux Arts Buildings leading to a great new public square at Halsted Street dominated by a massive domed City Hall.

Even as  Burnham was writing his Plan, however, a new city hall was already under construction at the site of its predecessor, over a mile away.    In 1932, the vista west down Congress was terminated, not with a classically styled civic building, but by Graham, Anderson, Probst and White's humongous Main Post Office, fitted out in stripped-down Art Deco style.  In the 1950's, the site where Burnham envisioned his great domed structure became, instead, the �Spaghetti Bowl�, a sprawling, anti-urban interchange of ramps linking the three great expressways -  north, south, and west - that quickly began sucking the middle class out of the center city.

Image courtesy The Chuckman Collection

The grand boulevard envisioned by Burnham became, instead, the Congress Expressway, emerging under the Post Office to transform Congress Parkway into a high-speed  connector to Michigan Avenue, favoring not the flaneur but the foot-to-the-floor crowd.  The life of the street was snuffed out as buildings had their end bays sheared off and smaller structures were simply demolished to widen the roadway.  In one of great acts of civic self-mutilation, new sidewalks were hacked out of the buildings facing the street. resulting in the destruction of Louis Sullivan's renowned Oak Bar in the Auditorium, a posthumous connection between the architect and Mies van der Rohe, who liked to drink there.

Over time, Congress Parkway became the butt-end, back office roadway of the south edge of the Loop.  Westward towards Wells, there were no restaurants, no shops, just big, blank-faced buildings.  In 1975 came Harry Weese's Metropolitan Correctional Center, and its massive garage.  Along Clark Street, it's spiky and open; along Congress it's a segmented shear wall.  

In 1985, we got Lucien Lagrange's One Financial Place.  Along Wells Street, it offers a lovely public plaza centered by Ludovico di Luigi's equestrian sculpture. At Congress Street, it spews forward a  South Wing building constructed over the roadway.  It's like a blinded ogre, two massive arched windows providing a false promise of transparency within a hulking Chinese wall, clad in Imperial Red granite.

More recently, Congress Parkway east from State has evolved in street-life friendly ways, with the addition of the Harold L. Washington Library in 1991, the street-level shops of University Center in 2004 and Library Tower in 2006. To the west, Congress Parkway stubbornly remains more of a service road than a real street, with blank-faced buildings exemplified by the bunkered AT&T facility at 55 West and the Western Union building across the street. There's also the Loop's last surviving gas station.  Seven lanes of traffic rushes by, motorists gunning it at speeds sometimes approaching 60 miles an hour.

Renderings: Chicago Department of Transportation

So, it's only natural that the city would want to try to find a way to make it all a little less awful.  The Chicago Department of Transportation had been working on the problem since at least 2005, and in 2010 they announced plans to make Congress Parkway, from Wells to Michigan, less of what the Trib's Blair Kamin labeled as a �drag strip� and more of the civic gateway Daniel Burnham had envisioned.  

Rendering: Chicago Department of Transportation

Eighteen 20-foot-high pillars of light, coupled with a procession of illuminated decorative metal trellises, would offset the drabness of Congress Parkway's buildings and allow the thoroughfare to �dance� with the color-lit plumes of Buckingham Fountain in the distance.  The 600 LED lights are programmable to be able to change hue to any one of 16 million colors, although CDOT says the program will probably have just four basic variations across the year.  One lane of traffic was lopped off to allow for wider sidewalks west of State and five new median islands were created both to create room for the pillars, and to provide pedestrians a resting place midway through their crossing of the ultra-wide thoroughfare, which was realigned to eliminate �weaving� lanes and slow down the rush of the up to 63,000 vehicles that travel the route each day.

All of this didn't come cheap.  The final cost is $24 million.  Financing included $11.8 million in South Loop TIF funds, and another $9 million in Federal stimulus money.  Mayor Rahm Emanuel, CDOT Commissioner Gabe Klein, and U.S. Senator Richard Durbin came together to take off the wraps this past April 12th. What did we get for the money?

I'm generally a sucker for colored lights (and balls of string), but my reaction to the new Congress Parkway installation is pretty much the same as when I encountered Lightscape on State.  It's numbingly generic and devoid of any personality.

To call these blocky sheets of metal �trellises� is really stretching the term.  A trellis, by definition, is light and open.  Those on Congress are incised sheets of metals in thick frames.  The way the sheets become more open - more trellis-like - as they rise is largely negated by being weighed down at the top by heavy caps that house the lighting elements.  I may be wrong, but all of the metal screens appear to be identical.  Never really breaking free from the straitjacket of their frames, they march the street with less a sense of progression than monotony.

Yes, there are there those five new median islands, but when they're described as �pedestrian refuges areas�, it pretty much tells you which mode of traffic is actually controlling the design, and it's not those on foot.  Yes, the �refuges� are large, but the small amount of sidewalk is overwhelmed by huge ventilation grates and landscaping raised and sequestered behind granite retainers that visually express �pedestrians keep out� in no uncertain terms.  There must have been a sale on rough-cut granite, because not only is it used to wall up most of the islands from human habitation, but the �street furniture� consists solely of big chunks of rough cut stone bisected on top with graceless strips of metal to make sure no one tries to sleep on them.

During the day, the pillars and metal trellises look a bit like unplugged appliances sitting on a kitchen counter.   They really need the kindness of night to come into their own.  Ironically, the new lighting works best where it's least needed, at the point where the street narrows at State Street.  Here the buildings have large lit window spaces and a variation of illuminated signage to play off of, and the trellises become an interesting addition to the overall fabric.

In the real problem area, however, approaching LaSalle, the installation is unable to dispel the overweening gloom of the aggressively featureless architecture.  It works best where the space it inhabits is most tightly confined - the underpass beneath the South Wing at LaSalle, where the lighting runs along the walls for their entire length, creating an intense visual focus as they change in hue.

Along the parkway, itself,  the colorful light from the the pillars seems almost to evaporate into the darkness above, like smoke floating up a chimney from flames in a fireplace. 

From my perspective as a pedestrian, I really don't think the whole processional thing works all that well.  It all seems engineered for the pace not of walking, but of driving. Speeding along in a car, the succession of lighted pillars at regular intervals may actually suggest the kind of grand gateway the design intends.  But as I watched the stream of cars speeding by me - even after all the efforts to slow it down -  I couldn't help asking myself the question:  why so much money and effort to impress motorists whose primary focus isn't enjoying the parkway but getting beyond it as fast as they can?

When (if) the now small, scrawny trees mature, they may provide a better balance, dominating the day as the LED fixtures dominate the night.  As it is, I can't help thinking that a much better gateway would have been created simply by putting in a lot more, much larger, more mature trees, and designing a lighting scheme to illuminate the lush softness of nature against the hard austerity of the buildings.   In the last analysis, the GSA's retrofit of 101 West Congress, which gave a more open face to  the 1912 Holabird and Roche building where Rand McNally once printed their guides and manufactured their globes, has probably done more for making Congress Parkway attractive than the entire six-block lighting installation. 
note: ants were sharing a warm spring night with me just off of Congress Parkway
This was a problem that would really have benefited from a competition drawing on the creativity of Chicago's best architects and lighting designers.  Will we ever get the City of Chicago and those who run the competitions into a beneficial relationship?  (How the city responds - or doesn't - to the Chicago Architectural Club's 2013 Burnham Prize Competition, Next Stop: Designing Chicago BRT Stations may give us a better idea of whether we're making any progress.)

I don't want to be harsh.  The new design looks better at night, and better still in photographs, as opposed to in actual experience.  I wish I liked it more, and it's possible it will grow on me.  I know mine is a minority view. No doubt somewhere the awards certificates are already being printed. I applaud the shear guts of taking on this challenging  task.  I just wish CDOT had challenged themselves a bit more.  The very real problem of Congress Parkway has been addressed less by solving it than by kicking it down the road.

Read:
Restoring Burnham Vision's for a Grand Gateway to the Lake

Next Stop: BRT Stations - As Chicago Transit Moves Forward, Will Design Move Beyond Backward?

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This coming Friday, April 19th, is the deadline for the Question and Answer period for Chicago Architectural Club's 2013 Burnham Prize architectural competition Next Stop: Designing Chicago BRT Stations.

 Are we exhausted, or just older and wiser?

Once upon a time, great cities built epic infrastructure.  At the turn of the 20th century, this meant such boodler visionaries as Charles Yerkes creating Chicago's first �L� system. By mid-century as government had taken over, it was O'Hare airport and the game-changing  expressways that carved up neighborhoods like so much deli meat.  In dreams begin nightmares.

In World War II, the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers coined a famous motto: �The difficult we do immediately. The impossible takes a bit longer.�  Today, shell-shocked by - what:  failure? decline? the death of the public realm? - our best answer too often seems to be a defensive, �We're working on it!�  New York City began digging a new Second Avenue Subway in 1972.  After numerous false starts, if they're really lucky, the first phase may open in 2016, 44 years later.

Sometimes, however, a little delay is a good thing.  It was enough to kill off enthusiasm for a Crosstown Expressway that would have slit open neighborhoods north to south throughout the city.  Similarly, delay seems to have also back-burnered an idea from the revised Chicago Central Area Plan, issued early last decade, that everyone seemed to have been swallowing hook, line and sinker: a West Loop Transportation Center that would burrowed commuters like mole rats down into no less than four subterranean levels beneath Clinton, at a hallucinatory low-ball estimated cost of $2 billion.

You don't hear much about the West Loop Transportation Center these days, especially after the CTA buried $320 million of your tax dollars under Block 37 in a �superstation� abandoned in 2008 when the CTA conceded it couldn't see any other light at the end of the tunnel than an all-consuming flame of never-ending cost overruns.

Less remembered was a Central Area Plan proposal for a new below-grade transitway from Michigan Avenue to Clinton, running under Monroe Street in a right-of-way the city had reserved for a new distributor subway back in the 1970's.  The estimated price tag of $200 million seemed a bit optimistic.

Now there's a new buzzword:  Bus Rapid Transit (BRT).  That's right: we don't need no stinkin� electrification.  No tracks.  No expensive burrowing.  You simply seize lanes of existing streets and dedicate them to the exclusive use of buses.

Recently, the CTA entered this brave new world - gingerly - with the Jeffrey Jump, an express service that runs from Ogilvie and Union stations to 103rd street in as little as 46 minutes.  Most of the speed-up comes from limited stops and no stops at all along a seven mile segment from 11th to 67th.  The route has access to dedicated bus lanes only from 67th to 83rd, and only during rush hours.  Traffic signals have been reconfigured to favor the buses at just one intersection.

The CTA is now getting ready to bring BRT downtown, with its Central Loop East-West Corridor.  Instead of a Monroe Street transitway, the corridor will create a two-mile, BRT loop connecting the commuter stations to Michigan Avenue.   The CTA's proposal is really a kind of BRT-lite.  Only one segment - along Washington - will feature a dedicated bus lane.  The segments on Madison, Clinton and Canal will use �priority� bus lanes, shared with autos.  In a February press release, CTA President Forrest Claypool identified Washington and Madison as two of the agency's most heavily trafficked corridors, with buses running every three minutes at peak.   The release projects the new corridor, extending to Navy Pier, will eventually run 1,700 buses a day.

As part of the project - financed by $24.6 million from the feds and $7.3 in TIF funds - the CTA is acquiring a surface parking lot at Jackson and Canal for a transportation center that will include both a staging area for the buses and an underground passage to Union Station across the street.

Judged from the rendering above, the transportation center, cordoned off in a stitching of ugly concrete bollards, will be a very drab affair that wears its parsimony on its sleeve even as it kicks Chicago's design reputation into the gutter.

A new design competition has the potential to improve things. CDOT and the CTA have teamed up with the Chicago Architectural Club and Chicago Architecture Foundation for Next Stop: Designing Chicago BRT Stations, the 2013 Burnham Prize Competition seeking ideas not quite as dreadful as what we'll probably wind up with.  The competition offers a $3,000 first prize, $1,500 second, and $750 third.  Submission deadline is noon, May 13th; winners to be announced at CAF June 6th.  Registration is $90.00, $50.00 for students.  See all the details and download the brief here.

Entries must include concepts for three different BRT corridors.  That for Central Loop would be at Madison and Dearborn, and would expect to serve 4,500 riders a day, accommodating up to 40 them at a time.  A second would be for a Logan Square station along a projected Western Avenue BRT corridor, adjacent to the Blue Line stop - 3,000 riders a day, 30 at a time; a third for an Ashland BRT between 17th and 18th in Pilsen -  1,500 daily riders, 20 patrons capacity.  Goals include easy pedestrian access, pre-boarding fare collection, shelter from the elements, ADA compliance, sustainability, and - bien s�r - advertising, no doubt in remunerative abundance.

There's little doubt that the competition will bring in some very creative, well-researched proposals.  There's also little doubt that, given history, the odds are CDOT/CTA will completely ignore the results.

The last partnership between CAF and the CAC was a design competition, Future Prentice seeking reuse concepts for Bertrand Goldberg's landmark hospital building.  It got a fantastic response.  Architects from Chicago and throughout the world ponied up thousands of hours of their time, worth probably a million dollars or more, to come up with intensely researched, practical and frequently brilliant proposals that would have saved Prentice while supporting Northwestern University's long-term goals.   The operation was a great success.  Too bad the patient died.  Euthanized, actually, as Northwestern threw the portfolio of great ideas into the trash without a second look (or, most probably, even a first). 

CDOT and CTA have made no visible commitment to draw upon the Next Stop entries for their actual BRT station designs.  What do you want to bet that, in the end, the advertising component trumps all, and we wind up with the entire process controlled by JCDecaux, with stations offering only slight tweaks to their graceless, thick-limbed Robert Stern bus shelters that have proven much more effective in selling advertising than protecting commuters from winter winds, or contributing anything much beyond anonymous clutter to the visual quality of the Chicago's streets?

Cynical?  I confess, with apologies.  Nothing would make me happier than to be proven wrong.  In our current constrained economy, we can no longer afford to consign architectural competitions to being a mere PR stratagem, the results applauded and ignored, a purchased indulgence for mediocre design whose sting will afflict the city for decades to come.


Gratuitous Postscript:  CDOT isn't the only one who gets to dream.  When all those billion dollar proposals were floating around a few years back for an new, far outer Loop circle rapid transit line, I imagined my own circle line, one that linked Navy Pier to the hotels and offices of North Michigan, took the Carroll Street corridor to the Merchandise Mart, south to the Amtrak corridor through Union Station using lanes created by demolishing unused baggage platforms, down to the emerging Roosevelt Road residential/commercial district, across via the St. Charles Airway, south to McCormick Place and back north to the  Museum Campus and Millennium Park using the existing Metra corridor busway, and past Lakeshore East on the way back to Navy Pier.  Dream on.

Even it its Death Throes, Bertrand Goldberg's Prentice Hospital inspires Brilliance as Future Prentice Competition winners are announced

First Prize Winner, Future Prentice competition (click images for larger view

At a sold-out event at the Chicago Architecture Foundation last night, the announcement of the winners in the Chicago Architectural Club's 2012 Chicago Prize Future Prentice competition marked the opening of an exhibition, handsomely mounted by CAF's Kate Keleman, of the issues surrounding the battle to save Bertrand Goldberg's Prentice Hospital, Reconsidering an Icon: Creative Conversations About Prentice Women's Hospital.  Competition winners are on display, and you can also view all of the entries, both at CAF, and on-line, here.

Demolished Additions, Second Prize winner by Noel Turgeon and Natalya Egon

From the time I've been able to spend with the submissions so far, I can say that the entries are of an extraordinarily high quality, balancing both the deeply researched and the extremely creative, often in the same concept.

Chicago Architectural Club Co-Presidents
Brian Strawn and Karla Sierralta

In addition to ten invited participants, the competition received 71 entries from 13 countries.  In addition to the CAC and CAF, the exhibition was co-sponsored by Chicago Bauhaus and Beyond. and AIA Chicago, whose Executive Vice President (and competition juror) Zurich Esposito announced the winners, which included an Honorary Mention, First, Second and Third prizes.

Juror Martin Felsen talked about what motivated the eight-member jury in selecting the competition's winners . . .

We met after Mayor Emanuel gave the big thumbs down for the survival of Prentice.  So that really affected our thinking, our mood, and how we judged the winners.

Martin Felsen

Innovation really had to be at the core of the ideas.  Practical solutions, while greatly appreciated - and awarded prizes in certain cases - were in a sense secondary to the idea that there's a kind of disciplinary innovation that had to be pushed ahead, and that was a direct result of the decision that was rendered by the Mayor.   We went away from saving Prentice, in a sense, to around it - ideas in general. The jury also discussed how these proposals could add real value to the health care sector in terms of innovation.

A big conversation - maybe the biggest conversation - was around the idea of a master plan and how a master plan maybe could have solved this whole problem in the first place.  Several of the proposals we see up here tried to repurpose Prentice as the heart of the Northwestern campus, highly connected between all of the different buildings and spaces in the neighborhood.  And on a more practical level, we just thought that a master plan that thought about the building itself, not as something to tear down or replace, but as something at the center of the campus, could have given a whole new meaning and function to the building as a place that the community could be centered on.

The First Prize winner, whose name draws on the work of word artist Robert Montgomery, was The Buildings are Sleeping, You Should Go and Wake Them Up, She Says, by designers Cyril Marsollier and Wallo Villacota.  Their proposal saves the foremost half of Goldberg's concrete cloverleaf, and builds Northwestern's new Research Lab behind it, in a way that the surviving half of old Prentice becomes whole when reflected in the glass curtain wall of the new structure behind.

badly shot video alert

Marsollier talked about the entry . . .

I think we really approached this project from a very pragmatic way.  I think we felt tied to the situation of losing Prentice.  That idea was frustrating in some ways, and so we really wanted to approach this project in a way that was a very real solution in our heads of how we can deal with this problem, as well as preserving the iconic imagery of the building.  Even walking by it how, it's extremely powerful, so I think that was  key to the whole project.

The new building is intersecting the existing structure halfway through and there's this reflecting facade that reflects the entire building.  The new building functions all by it itself, self-sufficient.      At the same time, we were trying to make sure that the existing structure and the new structure would kind of give each other different but shared values.

. . . We wanted to make sure that Northwestern could find its own reasons to keep the building for itself. . . 

Good luck with that.  In an article in Architectural Record,  spokesman Al Cubbage told reporter Fred A. Bernstein that Northwestern refuses to even look at the proposals.  With Mayor Rahm Emanuel safely stuffed in their back pocket, and all but one of the members of the Landmarks Commission little more than puppets to Emanuel's machinations, the courts are the only remaining check on Northwestern's arrogance and power.  Yesterday, Circuit Court Judge Neil Cohen issued a temporary stay of the Landmark Commission's revocation of the preliminary landmark designation it had unanimously granted Prentice less than two hours before.  The next hearing is scheduled for December 7th.

You can see all the winning entries on the CAC's website here.  Reconsidering an Icon: Creative Conversations About Prentice Women's Hospital is currently running in the Lecture Hall of the Chicago Architecture Foundation, 224 South Michigan.  Bertrand Goldberg's Prentice Hospital - the actual building - is running at its original site, 325 West Huron, at least through December 7.  Extensions are uncertain; see it while you can.