Advertising Clutter has no place on Chicago's Skyline

With its curving green glass wall echoing a bend in the Chicago River, 333 W. Wacker Drive is one of Chicago's most beloved skyscrapers, a renowned example of architecture that simultaneously draws inspiration from its surroundings and upgrades them.

So I was deeply dismayed last week to get a reader's email alerting me that workers were installing a big "NUVEEN" sign (left) at the top of the 36-story office building.

Guess who was even more upset? The architect of 333, New York's William Pedersen.

"My God," Pedersen said after I showed him a picture of the white-lettered, off-center Nuveen sign — a blot on 333's exquisitely symmetrical riverfront facade. "It is poorly proportioned. It is poorly placed. The sign seems to have little impact other than it just messes up the building."

These warts in the sky are proliferating, bringing ad clutter where it doesn't belong — to Chicago's world-famous skyline.

With the economy still struggling and with office vacancy rates still high, building owners who want to attract or retain tenants may feel they have no choice but to cave in to demands to turn skyscraper tops into advertising billboards.

"To see these signs on these beautiful buildings — they don't belong there, but in today's environment, in today's economy, when you're trying to get a big tenant, that's a real incentive," said Marilyn Lissner, an executive director at Cushman & Wakefield, the global commercial real estate firm.


To read more of this content at The Chicago Tribune, click here.

Imploding the Pruitt-Igoe Myth

Accepted wisdom will have us believe St. Louis' infamous Pruitt-Igoe public housing development was destined for failure. Designed by George Hellmuth and World Trade Center architect Minoru Yamasaki (of Leinweber, Yamasaki & Hellmuth), the 33-building complex opened in 1954, its Modernist towers touted as a remedy to overcrowding in the city’s tenements. Rising crime, neglected facilities, and fleeing tenants led to its demolition—in a spectacular series of implosions—less than two decades later. In the popular narrative, bad public policy, bad architecture, and bad people doomed Pruitt-Igoe, and it became an emblem of failed social welfare projects across the country. But director Chad Freidrichs challenges that convenient and oversimplified assessment in his documentary The Pruitt-Igoe Myth, opening in limited release January 20.

He makes a compelling case. Drawing heavily on archival footage, raw data, and historical reanalysis, the film reorients Pruitt-Igoe as the victim of institutional racism and post-war population changes in industrial cities, among other issues far more complex than poor people not appreciating nice things. But while Freidrichs opens a new vein for discussing Pruitt-Igoe, he doesn't totally dispel the titular myth about it. There's a passing mention of the project’s failure being one of Modernist planning, that such developments "created a breeding ground for isolation, vandalism, and crime." And of course there's an invocation of Charles Jencks' famous declaration that the death of Pruitt-Igoe was "the death of Modernism." But Freidrichs never adequately addresses Pruitt-Igoe's place in the history of urban design.


To read more at The Architectural Record, click here.

Discard or Recycle? Pondering the Fate of Coca-Cola Canada's Iconic Modernist HQ Building

Coca-Cola Canada is moving downtown and out of its Toronto headquarters on Overlea Blvd. in Thorncliffe Park, and the future of the structure is unknown, despite it's iconic status.

“It is one of the best remaining examples in Toronto of a suburban corporate headquarters, which was a new and important building type during the postwar period,” Robert Moffatt of Moriyama & Teshima Architects told The Toronto Star. “It’s a classic, clean-lined modernist design, executed with high-quality materials and workmanship, and immaculately maintained in original condition.”

Designed by Mathers and Halenby, a long-standing Toronto architecture firm whose work included The Eaton Centre and the National Library and Archives in Ottawa, the building was opened July 22, 1965.

Equally uncertain is the fate of the HQ building's beloved bronze landscape sculpture of Coke bottles by Walter Yarwood. "We are doing research to find out whether it belongs to the community or it belongs to (Coca-Cola),” Tova White, Coke HR VP told The Star. “It is obviously an iconic piece that was created especially for this building, so it will be entrusted in some way to either the community or our new facility.”

SkyDome and Expo '67 architect Rod Robbie dead

The architect for two of Canada’s most famous buildings – the SkyDome in Toronto and the Canadian Government Pavilion at Expo ’67 in Montreal – has died at 83 in Toronto.

Roderick “Rod” G. Robbie died Wednesday morning in St. Michael’s Hospital where he’d been admitted Christmas Day for treatment to alleviate the restriction of blood flow to his small intestine. Until shortly before this hospitalization, Mr. Robbie visited the offices of Robbie Young + Wright/IBI Group Architects daily.

Toronto city councillor Adam Vaughan, a long-time family friend, described the architect, an Officer of the Order of Canada since 2003, as “one of the most extraordinary craftspeople that’s ever graced the industry in this country . . . When my dad [Colin, now deceased, a former Toronto councillor and architecture partner with Mr. Robbie] talked about Rod Robbie, he talked about the best person he’d ever practised architecture with, bar none . . . The guy was just brilliant, as close to a genius as anyone, I think, in Toronto, the way he could transform ideas onto paper and from paper into reality.”

A native of England where he obtained degrees in architecture and town planning, Mr. Robbie immigrated to Canada in 1956, eventually becoming an associate at the highly influential modernist firm of Peter Dickinson Associates, Ottawa. In 1966, he moved to Toronto as partner in Ashworth, Robbie, Vaughan & Williams Architects and Town Planners.

It was this firm that secured the commission, in 1966, to design the now-legendary inverted pyramid, called Katimavik (Inuit for “meeting place”), that served as the Canadian pavilion for the Universal and International Exhibition in Montreal. The largest pavilion at Expo ’67, the structure was a huge hit and became a symbol of sorts for the maturity, poise and confidence that the fair represented for Canadians as they marked the country’s centennial.

To read more of this content at The Globe and Mail, click here.

A throwback to the high-octane days of modernist gas station design

The mostly scrubbed-off window signage revealed the vacant west suburban building was a small florist's shop in a recent life.

But for anyone old enough to drive in the 1960s and 1970s--or able to peek out the back window of his father's 1970 Buick Electra 225 ragtop--the rakish inward tilt of the building's glass front wall and the angle of its roof could only mean one thing: Before it was a little shop of flowers it was a Clark Super 100 gas station.

Looking back at the old Clark stations now--and they do turn up here and there--they were clever, efficient little buildings. The tilted glass and angular roof suggested modernity, just as the tailfins and billet-like window schemes of many of the cars of the day. The design was also a perfect way to reinforce the element of speed, given Clark's product was 100 octane premium gasoline--the only kind of gas the stations sold until the 1970s.

To read more of this content at WBEZ91.5, click here.

Marilyn throws a curve at traditional Toronto condo design

When the wraps came off Yansong Ma’s design for the foxily curvaceous Absolute condominium tower in Mississauga almost six years ago, applause rang out from every quarter. Critics at home and abroad hailed the project as a landmark breakout from cereal-box modernism, and home buyers snapped up the product. Popular demand to live in Marilyn Monroe – as pundits instantly dubbed the slinky building – was so feverish, the developers (Fernbrook Homes and Cityzen Group) quickly put its young Beijing-based architect to work on a second, adjacent high-rise in the same style.

Noting recently that the original 56-storey Marilyn was finished and her shorter sister mostly done, I fell to wondering what Mr. Ma, now 35, thought of his early handiwork. Marilyn was his very first tower, after all, and it launched him on a career that has gone from strength to strength since the spring of 2006. He has crafted imaginative hotels, museums and commercial and residential high-rises across China, and is now at work on his first European commission, in Rome.

But before I could pick up the phone, I discovered that Mr. Ma was flying into Mississauga to attend a special presentation about the Absolute buildings at the sprawling suburban city’s annual urban design awards ceremony. So, it was that the Yale-trained architect and I met in a Mississauga restaurant just under the elbow of the first Marilyn.

To read more of this content at The Globe and Mail, click here.