WBEZ | design

Roman Mars: Stories About the Built World

Thu, 09 May 2013 12:57:00 -0500

He's been called "the Ira Glass of design." His radio show, 99% Invisible – "a tiny show about architecture and design" – focuses on the invisible activity that shapes our world. In August 2012, 99% Invisible became the highest-funded journalism project in Kickstarter history, raising over $170,000 from 5,661 backers. In 2012, with over 4 million downloads online, 99% Invisible peaked at #2 in iTunes ranking for all podcasts in the US.

As host and producer of 99% Invisible, Roman Mars has explored everything from the Purple Hotel – Lincolnwood, IL's most famous building – to poetically-named structures in Santiago, Chile.

Here Mars brings his eye for design, his talent for storytelling, and his rich layers of music and sound effects to Unity Temple, where he performs an extended version of 99% Invisible.

Roman Mars presentation, "Stories about the Built World," is a part of Unity Temple Restoration Foundation's Break the Box program series. Break the Box is made possible by generous grants from the MacArthur Fund for Arts and Culture at The Richard H. Driehaus Foundation, the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation, and the Illinois Arts Council, an Agency of the State of Illinois.

Recorded live Thursday, May 10, 2013 at Frank Lloyd Wright's Unity Temple.

Culture Catalyst: Martin Kastner of Alinea

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 11:46:00 -0500

Learn about sculptor Martin Kastner’s serviceware concepts that helped put Alinea and Chef Grant Achatz at the pinnacle of contemporary cuisine.

Martin Kastner is the founder and principal of Crucial Detail. Kastner, born in the Czech Republic, trained as a blacksmith and spent some time restoring historical metalworks at a castle in Western Bohemia before moving onto natural materials design and sculpture. He founded Crucial Detail in 1998 shortly after his arrival in the U.S. He is best known for his Alinea serviceware concepts, which landed him on The Future Laboratory’s list of 100 most influential individuals in contemporary design. Alinea book, which he designed in collaboration with Naissance Inc., was one of the winners in

2009 Communication Arts Design Annual for Best Book Design and is included in Altitude’s The Best of Cover Design. His work has been featured in numerous publications running the gamut from Gourmet to Fast Company.

Recorded live on March 12, 2013 at the Museum of Contemporary Art.

New college dorm in Pilsen is gaining attention--and accolades

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 05:00:00 -0600

Much too often, Chicago neighborhoods get stuck with a bad pieces of architecture.

So it is worth celebrating when good design occurs in the community, as is the case with La Casa Student Housing and Resource Center, a college dorm that opened last fall in the Pilsen neighborhood.

The six-story building at 18^th and Paulina cuts a tall, graceful figure along 18^th, with masonry exterior walls that pull back—and up—to reveal glassy corners and a base.The building hits the right note in the historic neighborhood by using heft and masonry of its older neighbors, then reworking the elements into a contemporary form.

Designed for Chicago college students who want to stay close to home, the $12 million building is the brainchild of The Resurrection Project. La Casa has 25 four-bedroom suites and amenities such as a fitness center, tutors and on-site counseling.

The building’s purpose and program have garnered it early acclaim, including a New York Times profile. And now its design is getting notice. La Casa’s architecture earned the Richard Driehaus Foundation Award for Architectural Excellence in Community Design at the Chicago Neighborhood Development Awards held at the Chicago Hilton & Towers last Wednesday.

La Casa was designed by UrbanWorks, a Chicago architecture firm that’s been on a pretty good tear lately, particularly with an UNO school in Galewood and Roseland’s All Saints Residence home for seniors.

Oak Woods Cemetery

Mon, 12 Nov 2012 05:00:00 -0600

For decades, a concrete wall topped by barbed wire has surrounded Oak Woods Cemetery.

But behind the heavy, gray barrier is one of the most striking urban spaces in Chicago: 183 acres of gentle lawns, winding lanes and a quartet of lakes, all planned with order and beauty--not to mention fancy mausoleums and monuments ranging from Greek Revival to Art Nouveau and beyond. The North Side's historic Graceland and Rosehill cemeteries get all the attention, but Oak Woods, located on the South Side at 67th and Greenwood, is right there with them.

Created in 1853, Oak Woods belongs to a first generation of high-quality cemeteries that sought to take the burial experience beyond cramped graveyards and creepy boneyards, instead allowing loved ones to be laid to rest in well-designed, park-like spaces with trees, museum-quality statuary, rolling lawns and landscaping. Oak Woods was designed by landscape architect Adolph Strauch whose Spring Grove Cemetery, designed in 1844, gave birth to this movement.

And now a look around Oak Woods, beginning at the shore of Symphony Lake, looking north:

Daniel Van DeGrift rests in a sarcophagus inside of a replica Greek Temple not unlike the one Palmer and Bertha Honore Palmer were placed in at Graceland Cemetery:

The small Jewish cemetery within Oak Woods needs a little more care, though. Located on the south edge of Oak Woods near 71st Street, there are a few leaning monuments and some overgrown grass.The old cemetery-within-a-cemetery looks forgotten. But judging by the dried flower taped to the face of the marker in the photo below, someone remembers:

Here's another marker from Jewish Oak Woods:

Outside of the Jewish section, I spotted what looks to be headstone that doubles as a bench. The stone is carved to resemble the texture of a tree. I like this:

I bet there is a pretty good story here:

The Woodward family monument from the late 1800s is a powerful expression in Art Nouveau:

But no expression is more powerful than the sentiments expressed here:

There are more than 200,000 people buried in Oak Woods. The list of luminaries seems endless: Jesse Owens; Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the first commissioner of baseball; Chicago gangster Big Jim Colisimo; mobster Jake "Greasy Thumb" Guzik; journalist and activist Ida B. Wells; and a set of Chicago mayors including Harold Washington and his successor, Eugene Sawyer. Not to mention the largest Confederate burial ground in the north, where a reported 6000 sons of the South rest.

The cemetery marks the 160th year of its founding in 2013.

New York City firm picked to redesign Navy Pier

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 16:49:00 -0500

The team led by designer James Corner is the winner in a competition to revamp Navy Pier’s public spaces or Pierscape. New York City-based James Corner Field Operations was in charge of converting an unused elevated railway into Manhattan’s High Line and is currently working on a plan for reviving Seattle’s waterfront.

The winning design proposal calls for adding a pool that in winter could be used as a skating rink. The designer’s renderings also show the construction of an amphitheater at the Pier’s east end.

The board of Navy Pier, Inc. voted on Thursday to select James Corner from among five finalists. NPI Board Chairman Sarah Garvey pointed to the practicality of Corner’s design as one of the deciding factors.

“They dreamed big, but were able to do it in a way that we can actually pay for it,” said Garvey.

The board also pointed to Corner’s work on the High Line.

"It's not that different from here. They were working with an existing space that needed redevelopment," said Garvey.

She also said the High Line project showed Corner was open to taking into account public input on the design.

A committee of NPI board members is scheduled to meet with the winning team in the next months to work on a final design proposal. Garvey said they are still planning on staying within the initial proposed budget of $85 million. She hopes a good part of the Pierscape will be built by 2016.

Global Activism: Local architects work on pro-bono projects in Chicago and around the world

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 16:30:00 -0600

On this week's Global Activism, Worldview talks to two women who lead the Chicago chapter of Architecture for Humanity. Katherine Darnstadt is co-founder of the chapter and Laura Bowe is its current co-director.

The organization's slogan is “design like you give a damn,” and they do just that. Uniting architects, designers, engineers, community leaders, and construction workers, Architecture for Humanity provides pro-bono design services to communities in need. In the past, the Chicago chapter has worked here at home, in Des Plaines and Chicago, and around the globe, in Aruja, Brazil and Nyegina, Tanzania.

Katherine and Laura tell Worldview what their chapter is up to, and how design is becoming a crucial tool in uplifting communities.

To hear more stories of people making a difference, check out the Global Activism page, where you can also suggest a person or organization for the series. Or, email your suggestions to worldview@wbez.org and put “Global Activism” in the subject line. Also, don't forget to subscribe to the podcast.

Custom Frank Lloyd Wright house up for auction

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 14:25:00 -0600

Frank Lloyd Wright certainly left his mark on architecture. He also had something of a reputation for being inflexible on matters of design. But there’s at least one house where he let the client define the process. The Laurent house is one of Wright’s Usonian houses – a simpler structure built for middle class families. But it was also the first residence Wright designed for an owner confined to a wheelchair.

It was commissioned over 60 years ago by returning World War II veteran Kenneth Laurent and his wife Phyllis; they live there still today. When Dennis Rodkin of Chicago magazine heard the house was on the auction block he insisted Eight Forty-Eight talk with Mr. Laurent; both men joined Eight Forty-Eight Wednesday.

Music Button: Charlie Chaplin, "Park Avenue Waltz", from the album Oh! That Cello, (Zebra Acoustic)

Fond of fonts? Check out 'Just My Type'

Thu, 01 Sep 2011 07:37:00 -0500

Simon Garfield's Just My Type, published in England by the same people who brought us Eats, Shoots & Leaves, hopes to do for type fonts what Lynne Truss' surprise best-seller did for commas. For those of us who normally concentrate on the sense of words without paying much attention to the typeface in which they appear, it's at once an eye-opening and eye-straining read.

For typomaniacs, on the other hand, who can't rest until they've identified a font, Garfield's engaging history of letter design will be eye candy. Helvetica? Frutiger? Univers? Is the bowl on that g elongated, and how wide is that o? Their passion helped fuel the cult success of Gary Hustwit's film, Helvetica, about the font created in Switzerland in 1957 that has become the face of Bloomingdale's, Gap, BMW, Verizon, American Airlines and countless other corporate logos. When Ikea changed its typeface from Futura to Verdana, it provoked a "fontroversy."

"Good type is instinct born of experience," Garfield writes. He takes us back to Johannes Gutenberg's 15th century innovation for casting reusable letters to produce cheaper books, but makes clear that Steve Jobs' inclusion of a menu of fonts in his earliest Macintosh computers — thanks to a course in calligraphy he took at Reed College in the 1970s — was nearly as revolutionary.

In addition to Typography 101 terms — including serif versus sans serif, a serif being "a finishing stroke" at the "feet or tips of letters ... often appearing to ground the letter on the page" — Just My Type offers profiles of the eponymous (and often eccentric) graphic designers who created such classics as Baskerville, Gill Sans and Johnston Sans. It is also stuffed with fascinating bits of information. Who knew, for example, that the backward P printer's mark that denotes a paragraph break is called a pilcrow or that the only letters formed in a clockwise direction are m, n, h, k, b, p and r? A single character combining a question mark and an exclamation — called an interrobang — didn't catch on because it doesn't read well in small sizes and never made it to standard keyboards, while, thanks to email addresses, the @, also known as an amphora, has become ubiquitous. Type designers show off their entire alphabets with pangrams, and the most famous, "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog," has spawned a video with more than 300,000 views on YouTube. What may be the worst typo of all time appeared in Christopher Barker's Bible of 1631, which included the commandment, "Thou shalt commit adultery."

With more than 100,000 fonts in the world, the differences are often ridiculously subtle. Garfield's lively, richly illustrated book, which showcases more than 200 of them, extols the most beautiful and excoriates the bloopers, including Comic Sans and the 2012 Olympics font, called 2012 Headline. We don't learn until page 251 that the main text of Just My Type is set in Sabon, "one of the most readable of all book fonts," designed in the 1960s and named for the owner of a 16th century type foundry. Even more frustrating, I couldn't find an identification for the sans serif typeface used for special "Fontbreak" chapters, and iPhone's WhatTheFont app was no help. In this of all books, the dying tradition of a colophon — a publisher's note describing the typefaces — would have been especially apt and welcome.