Lee Bey

The ill-fated Chicago Spire

By: Lee Bey | Aug. 24, 2012

Aug. 24, 2012

The Chicago Spire would have been built and standing for almost a year by now, had all gone according to plan: a 2,000 ft. tall tower — with the twisted profile of a drillbit — that would have been Chicago's newest landmark.

Of course, fate and finance intervened beginning with the real estate collapse of 2008 and the project was halted. All that remains are memories, lawsuits, liens and a cofferdam 80 ft. deep and slightly more than 100 ft. in diameter on the tower's former site.

That and this four-minute, dreamlike animation of the Chicago Spire, created when the project seemed viable. Posted on YouTube by user lincolnparkmedia, the video is a Surrealist piece of filmmaking with parting clouds, a dramatically falling rain drop and white dove flying past the towers torsioned facade. The score reminds me of the music they played when the heroes reached the cave in those old Jules Verne movie adaptations that used to come on "Family Classics" when I was kid.

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Architectural photographers find themselves under watch

By: Lee Bey | Aug. 22, 2012

Aug. 22, 2012

The above video interested me.

Shot a year ago in London, the video shows six street photographers preparing to take pictures of building exteriors— and getting majorly hassled by the private security personnel from inside those buildings. 

The video shines light on a peculiar cold war between photographers and security personnel in the years following the 9/11 terrorism attacks and the July 7, 2005 London bombings that killed 52 and injured 700: Amateurs and professional photographers standing in the public way to take photographs of a building are sometimes stopped and questioned by security personnel or run off entirely under the rubric of anti-terrorism.

Now building owners can, of course, prohibit photography on their own property. That's understandable. I can't expect to waltz into the lobby of, say, the Aon Building or the Willis Tower on a whim and snap away. But the video shows the other side of the coin, which is photographers standing on public streets, photographing publicly-seen buildings and being challenged by private cops enforcing not a law, but the wishes of the buildings' corporate owners.

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'Purple' by any other name? Owners seek new moniker for legendary Lincolnwood hotel

By: Lee Bey | Aug. 20, 2012

Aug. 20, 2012
The team planning a major makeover of Lincolnwood's Purple Hotel wants to give the long-troubled landmark a new name as well as a new look. And they're asking the public's help.
 
Jackie Koo, architect for Weiss Properties Inc., a Skokie company that led a group that purchased the hotel at auction in May for $8.3 million, is heading the effort to find a new moniker for the structure at 4500 W. Touhy.
 
"We're looking for something that basically speaks to the midcentury modernity of it," Koo said. "But nothing has really hit." 

So Koo turned to the public today "just for fun," using her firm's Facebook page to solicit ideas.

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Quirky modernist building alive and well at UofC

By: Lee Bey | Aug. 15, 2012

Aug. 15, 2012
The students will be returning next month to the University of Chicago graduate residents hall — a concrete, flat-roofed pavilion-like building that cuts an unusual figure on the southern edge of the campus.
 
Built in 1962, the three-story, 122 room complex was originally an on-campus hotel and conference facility called Kellogg Center for Continuing Education. It was converted to dorms in 1983. The building was designed by architect Edward Durell Stone and is part of a triumvirate of modernist structures on campus along 60th Street that includes Eero Saarinen's spectacular law library at University Avenue and Mies van der Rohe's glassy and rational School of Social Service at Ellis Avenue.
 
But Stone's building is the odd duck of the bunch.

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Remembering the modernist Edens Theater

By: Lee Bey | Aug. 13, 2012

Aug. 13, 2012

The Edens Theater — the remarkable midcentury modern movie house that was demolished far too soon — lives again in this video I just found on YouTube.

Built in 1963 and designed by Chicago architecture firm Perkins & Will, the futuristic theater sat on Skokie Boulevard at the Edens Expressway in Northbrook and was one of the most visible landmarks on the North Shore. Its concrete hyperbolic paraboloid roof was once the largest in the world.

The theater was demolished in 1994 with its razing aggravated by the indignity of having screened Jean Claude Van Damme's Time Cop just before its doors closed. And am I wrong for still being a little salty that this great building was razed for a run-of-the-mill shopping mall? The rounded Edens II Theater from 1971 was also torn down for the mall.

At any rate, The Edens Theater: The Life of a Beautiful Bird, was made in the 1990s for Northbrook Community Television. And it is chock-full of great stuff, including color archival footage of the theater and an interview with the esteemed Bill Brubaker of Perkins & Will who credited project architect Bob Palmer as the building's designer.

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Chicago's skyline: Cooler by the lake

By: Lee Bey | Aug. 2, 2012

Aug. 2, 2012
One of the cool things about living in a three-sided city is there is nothing east of downtown — or the North Side or much of the South Side — to block views of that magnificent skyline.
 
But as good as those views are, seeing the city from the lake itself is even better. From the lake, the city erupts from the shoreline; a staggering display of skyscrapers and tall buildings that, from that vantage point, seems to run uninterrupted from 31st Street to Hollywood Avenue.

In the above photo, the Willis Tower is visible to the left. And Trump Tower can be seen in the middle of the picture. The forest of tall buildings is also quite deep: There are skyscrapers behind skyscrapers. Look at this view taken in 1940 from almost the same spot.

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Faded Chicago Vocational could shine with $75m facelift

By: Lee Bey | Jul. 30, 2012

Jul. 30, 2012
The sprawling Chicago Vocational Career Academy is in line for a significant renovation that would include a new addition, athletic facilities and demolition of portions of the architecturally-significant campus, according to documents made public last week.

The project — likely the most expensive rehab in the school district's history — could also equip the 72-year-old Art Deco-designed school at 2100 E. 87th St., with new furniture, fixtures and on campus parking, according a request for qualifications issued last Thursday by the Public Building Commission.

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Empty corporate HQs: Suburbia's next big problem?

By: Lee Bey | Jul. 27, 2012

Jul. 27, 2012
The Libertyville campus of Motorola Mobility — with its manmade lakes, sober exterior and acres of parking — represents the golden age of the suburban corporate headquarters.
 
And next year — less than 20 years after it was built — the complex will be empty. Motorola Mobility CEO Dennis Woodside and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced Thursday the company will move all 3,000 workers from the Libertyville campus to the upper floors of Merchandise Mart. The 80-acre auburban campus was built in 1994.
 
The move brings jobs downtown — part of a reversal of fortune in which the city is now snatching corporations from suburbia. And as a result, a building type with a future that once seemed rock solid now appears under threat. United Airlines vacated its 66-acre Elk Grove Township headquarters — it even has tennis courts — for downtown Chicago beginning in 2007.

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