It's National Engineers Week! Full day of events for kids at CAF this Sunday

It's almost here: National Engineers Week, February 17-23, the annual event that bring engineers into the spotlight often hogged by their architect partners, reminding us that no matter how beautiful a building might be, it's a whole better when an engineer is on board to make sure it doesn't fall down.

This Sunday, February 17, the Chicago Architecture Foundation kicks it all off with a Studio for kids, ages 5-18, Engineering the 21st Century City, a free event from 11:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m., at CAF at 224 South Michigan.

at CAF, Bob Johnson (at microphone, left), Thorton Tomasetti's Joe Burns, far right

Our indefatigable correspondent and engineering ambassador extraordinare Bob Johnson provides a preview . . .

For all of you who have kids and grandkids, there's going to be all kind of presentations geared to showing kids how skyscrapers - and bridges - stand up and fall down.  Architectural student Rocco Buttliere is going to bring a whole collection of his Lego skyscrapers.  You name it, he's got it: the World Trade Center, the old one and the new one, Freedom Tower, Sears (Willis) Tower, Burj Khalifa. And then engineer Larry Novak, formerly of SOM and now of the Portland Cement Association, will be giving a presentation on the Burj Khalifa.  Believe it or not, we'll have kids designing bridges on a computer.

Sounds like a fantastic event.

The Chicago Architecture Foundation is actually devoted the entire month to engineers, including its Wednesday lunchtime lectures.  I attended a great lecture this week by Thornton Tomasetti's Joe Burns on what's below Block 37.  This coming Wednesday, the 20th, Krueck and Sexton's Tom Jacobs talks about Glass Engineering in Architecture, and on the 27th, Terry McDonnell of US Services discusses the engineering and design considerations behind the Willis Tower Ledge.  On Tuesday, the 26th, Dr. Shankar Nair discusses Skyscrapers - Past, Present, Future, including the surge in super-talls.  On Saturday, the 23rd, there'll be a Building and Testing Studio for teens, down at Crown Hall at ITT.  More information on all these events here.

Also on the 23rd, from 10:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. the annual DuPage Engineers Week Expo will take place at the IIT's Rice Campus in Wheaton, with more family-focused events, including the ZOOM into Engineering and Design Squad, Lego Robotics, Mr. Freeze Cryogenics, and 4,500 Years of Structural Engineering Program.

On March 8th in West Chicago, Siemens will be holding its 9th annual edition of its Introduce  a Girl to Engineering  event, offered to 100 girls in grades 5 through 12 and hosted by women engineers.  Contact Jayne Beck via email to register and for more details.

And we couldn't leave you without this photo of the winners of this year's Chicagoland Future City competition, which brings together area students to put their visions of the future into built form.  This team of students from St. Paul of the Cross in Park Ridge go on to the finals in Washington, D.C., where the winner gets a trip to Space Camp.

Lohan on Mies, Burns on what's under Block 37, plus Architecture and Emotion fuse in extraordinary I Am Cuba

This week, on the February Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events . . . 

click images for larger view

Tomorrow, Tuesday the 12th, begins with the Chicago ACE Mentor Program Lunch, and ends at the Block Museum in Evanston with Dirk Lohan talking about his grandfather's Mies van der Rohe's Legacy and the Chicago Skyline.  Wednesday, the 13th, lunchtime at CAF, Joe Burns of Thorton Tomasetti will provide A Look Under Chicago's Block 37, including structure, foundations, and the unfinished CTA superstation, while in the evening Arup's Chris Luebkeman lectures on Design for the New Normal in the Next Decade for AIA Chicago.  The Structural Illinois Engineers of Illinois has a day-long seminar on Design of Low-Rise Reinforced Concrete Buildings at the UBS Tower on Thursday.

There are still dozen of arresting items to come on the February Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.

Capturing Architecture as it's Lived:  I Am Cuba

Meanwhile, over at the Gene Siskel Film Center, Tuesday the 12th at 6:00 p.m., is your last chance to see one of the most remarkable films ever made, Mikhail Kalatozov's I Am Cuba, which transcends its intentions as a propaganda film that made it a flop in both Cuba and the U.S.S.R during its initial 1964 release. 

First of all, I Am Cuba is a time capsule that captures Cuba at the cross point between the decadence of the mob-run luxury resorts under dictator Fulgencio Batista and the evolution into a vassal state of the Soviet Union, the period of hope that saw the creation of a native revolutionary architecture in the never-finished National Arts School, and the descent into the imposed degradation of now crumbling Soviet-style pre-fab housing towers.

It's all captured in stunning, hyper-expressive black-and-white cinematography by Sergey Urusevsky, including two continuous-shot sequences that put even Orson Welles' opening of Touch of Evil to shame.  The result is one of the most profound explorations of a built environment that you will ever encounter, culminating in this amazing sequence in which the camera - in one take - moves down, through, up, in and over the streets and buildings of Havana as it follows the funeral procession of a martyr through city streets.  It is the most amazing intersection of architecture, movement and human emotion as you're ever likely to see.

Next week, a true cornucopia awaits: National Engineers Week, Leos Carax at the Siskel, and films in 70mm at the Music Box.  Stay tuned.