First Warm Day in April

click images for larger view (recommended)

In which the long winter has left even the trees with frayed nerves, and the branches of the ferris wheel still mostly unbloomed.

 

 

 

 

 

Jeanne Gang updates Freud: Will Tell - Not Ask - "What Mammals Want" at the Logan Center

Sigmund Freud finally admitted he didn't have a clue . . .

The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is 'What does a woman want?'

Was it that he didn't know or that, push to shove, he wasn't all that curious?

Alexander Pope wrote, �The proper study of Mankind is Man� but his words became less an invocation for deepening human knowledge than a license for an geometrically accelerating stream of narcissistic rationalizations for our appetites and aggressions.  Now that our technology is giving us an unprecedented and frightening domain over the earth's ecologies, might we be better off, as we send species after species hurling towards extinction,  spending a little less time in infatuated self-contemplation and a lot more studying the living things with which we share not just the world but the fundamentals of our animal nature?

But I digress.

Studio Gang/s Peoples Gas Pavilion, inspired by a tortoise's shell,
at the Lincoln Park Nature Boardwalk

To sell a great story, a great headline is half the battle, and architect Jeanne Gang has certainly picked a provocative one for her April 28th lecture at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts on the University of Chicago campus.  The flyer, shown at the top of this post, sends mixed signals.  First it says seating will be first-come, first served, and then in the very next paragraph asks us us to click to respond to the invitation by April 23rd.  The flyer is a jpg, so clicking the link goes nowhere.  If we get more information, we'll pass it on.

Studio/Gang Architects, Chinese American Service League,
with titanium shingles like the scales of a dragon's skin

I have no idea what a lecture called �What Mammals Want� will be about.  Almost certainly it will nothing to do with my own musings.  But when an architect declares they are going to give a talk that has neither �Form�, nor �Autonomy�, �LEED�, �Theory�, �Parametricism� or even �Architecture� in its title,  and it references humans only by their parent class, well, that's a very interesting proposition.

Gang was last year's recipient of the U of C's Jesse L. Rosenberg Medal, recognizing achievement �deemed of great benefit to humanity.�  Yet, Gang will be at the Logan Center Performance Hall, 915 East 60th, at 5:15 p.m. on Monday the 28th, telling us - not about humanity - but about the Mammals.  And what they want.  And what it might have to do with us.

As Jeanne Gang is honored by National Design Museum, a walk through the seasons at the Lincoln Park Nature Boardwalk

click images for larger view

At a gala in New York City last Thursday, October 17th,  Jeanne Gang of Studio/Gang was recognized in the Architecture Design category of this year's National Design Awards handed out by the National Design Museum at Cooper-Hewitt.  Also among this year's honorees were landscape architect Margie Ruddick, interior designers Aidlin Darling Design, and architect and writer Michael Sorkin, with a Lifetime Achievement Award going to SITE's James Wines.

Gang was cited for her . . .

. . . Chicago-based collective of architects, designers, and thinkers practicing internationally. Gang uses architecture as a medium of active response to contemporary issues and their impact on human experience. Each project resonates with its specific site and culture while addressing larger global themes such as urbanization, climate, and sustainability.

We're still working on our piece on Studio/Gang's WMS Clark Park Boathouse, which had it's official opening last Saturday, but for now, what better way to celebrate Gang's mastery of merging structure and environment than by traveling through the seasons at one of my favorite places in the city, the Studio/Gang designed Nature Boardwalk at Lincoln Park . . .


Read More: 

Reimaging Urban Eden: Studio/Gang and the Nature Boardwalk at Lincoln Park Zoo

At Raw Point of Spring, a Journey through Chicago and its Architecture, Northern Excursion

click images for larger view (recommended)

Last week, we offered a photographic excursion through the near South Side.  Today, we turn our attention north, to an exploration of the city as a flow of gestures - of construction, of art, of cultivated nature - creating a montage of visual incident in a continuity of ever shifting juxtaposition.

Even when you close your eyes the immersion persists.  You may, willfully, imagine yourself somewhere else, but in the reflections of sound and shadings of light, even through shut eyelids, the character of the exact GPS point at which you stand insinuates that moment of the city into your being.

This is the time of year when the constructed city, again in heat, is set off against rare, raw color, leaves an emergent neon green, branches overrun with blossoms red as an angry newborn's skin.

Continue the journey, after the break . . .

 A Digression, on the last seasons of a once mighty tree . . .

. . . the journey continues . . . 

See Also:
Southern Excursion - a Journey Through Chicago Architecture