Lee Bey

In '60s film, a glimpse of Cuba's architecture

By: Lee Bey | Sep. 7, 2012

Sep. 7, 2012

Check out the above clip from the 1964 film Soy Cuba.

That astounding, unbroken camera shot is the stuff of cinema legend, to which sequences like the opening scene in Boogie Nights and the nightclub entrance in GoodFellas pay homage. The joint Soviet/Cuban production tells four self-contained stories of Cubans who are oppressed — but who ultimately fighting back against the corrupt, late '50s, pre-Castro (and non-communist) government.

The film ("I am Cuba" in English) was designed to serve as a dramatic reminder of why — in the eyes of the filmmakers — the Castro revolution was needed and, as such, is one of the finest straight propaganda films made. But the movie wasn't much of a hit in the USSR or Cuba and was seldom seen in this country, given the film's anti-American sentiment. Fortunately, Directors Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese rescued the film in 1995 and restored it. (My former Sun-Times colleague Roger Ebert reviewed the film for its 1995 re-release.)

Why talk about this film here?

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Landmarks officials set to save Gold Coast house

By: Lee Bey | Sep. 6, 2012

Sep. 6, 2012

City officials Thursday will seek landmark protection for a vacant 130-year-old Gold Coast residence under threat of demolition.

Staffers from the city's landmarks division will ask the Commission on Chicago Landmarks to grant preliminary landmark status to the three-story, Tudor-styled Augustus Warner House, 1337 N. Dearborn Parkway, according to a draft agenda of the commission's meeting today.

The narrow, three-story Warner House caught the attention of city officials in June when the building's owner, developer Bart Przyjemski, applied for a permit to demolish the structure. Built in 1884 and designed by architect Lawrence Gustav Hallberg, the home is rated "orange" in the city's Historic Resources Survey — the document's second highest rating — which triggered an automatic review of the demolition permit by landmarks officials.

Sandwiched between a four-story 1880s limestone residential building and a slit-windowed 15-story condo tower built in 1972, the Warner House has been marketed as a redevelopment site in recent years.

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Park Forest's praiseworthy church architecture

By: Lee Bey | Sep. 5, 2012

Sep. 5, 2012
A few days ago, I passed through Park Forest, the planned suburb developed by Chicago businessmen Philip Klutznick and Nathan Manilow right after World War II.
 
Park Forest was a sensation from the moment its plans were announced in a 1946 news conference at downtown's Palmer House. On 2,400 acres of cornfields 30 miles south of Chicago, Klutznick and Manilow's American Community Builders company built an entirely new middle class suburb, including schools, municipal buildings and the now defunct Park Forest Plaza, an outdoor shopping center in the middle of town.
 
Churches and synagogues were also built. And 60 years later, these structures are among Park Forest's finest looking and best-maintained buildings.

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The bridge that wasn't to be

By: Lee Bey | Aug. 27, 2012

Aug. 27, 2012
 
In the wake of last week's musing about the ill-fated Chicago Spire designed by Santiago Calatrava, the good folks at architecture and engineering firm Epstein reminded me of an earlier unbuilt Calatrava project: in Chicago: The Queen's Landing Bridge.
 
Proposed in 2001, twin cable-stayed pedestrian bridges would have crossed Lake Shore Drive at Buckingham Fountain, allowing people and cyclists to connect to the lake at one of the most critical points. Epstein was picked for the project and brought in Calatrava.
 
"I think the design is quite beautiful," remembers Epstein Director of Design Andrew L. Metter who worked with Calatrava on project.

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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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