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.

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.

Photo-Essay: Random Icons, of a Sort - Unsorted

A modernist photo-essay consisting of five totally random snapshots uploaded from my iPhoto storage.


Clockwise from top-left (all photos copyright Clifton Bertram):

The breezeway of a the University Hotel Lodge on Route 66 in New Mexico. I was meant to stay just down the road in the only slightly more funky Hiway House Hotel, but unfortunately the management there proved to be more than a little more prick-tastic. The owners of the University Lodge were fantastic, room was fine and the Nob Hill location is absolutely premiere, smack dab in the middle of one of the best vintage scenescapes in the southwest.

My single and only example of Blue Mountain Pottery. While not blue in this particular case, the green with which this piece is painted is certainly an authentic 1960s colour. Its shape, that of a pituitarily challenged art glass genie bottle, would make it very much at home in Maxwell Smart's apartment.

A modernist church in Red Deer, Alberta. Given the degree to which churches are one of the most single-minded reprentatives of a certain conservatism (and I mean that in the best sense of the word), isn't it intriguing how, architecturally, many of the most Modernist buildings we see in most towns are, in fact, places of worship? This pic is a bit of a teaser for an upcoming photo-essay I plan to do solely on Modernism in Church Architecture.

Eastown Bowling in London, Ontario. The utterly awesome vintage bowling alley sign juxtaposed with the much less artistically inspired Rent-to-Own sign sums it all up concerning this part of London - despite signs of impending gentrification, it's still very much a threadbare, "wrong-side-of-the-tracks" kind of place where a cold October wind seems to barrel down the sidewalks all year round. The kind of place where a barbershop with a 30-year-clientele and a revolving candy-striped pole is joined at the hip with a Value Village, and the Dundas Street traffic sings the blues in the background.

Dashboard of a '51 Pontiac. While it's a couple of years older, and a slightly different model than the first car I remember riding in, the interior is the same - especially that borderline-gaudy dashboard: a literal expression of the ebullience and confidence of the 50s, dripping with chrome and flaunting the latest (for 1951) high-tech gadget, a dashboard clock the size of coconut. The perfect ride to Club Morocco on a Saturday night.

Architecture: It is Time to Market Modernism

It always rankles with architects that their work is rarely valued.

A simple comparison of sales prices for great works of art and great works of architecture reveals an astonishing discrepancy. It is difficult to draw parallels between artists and architects but in the case of two near-contemporaries, Picasso (1881-1973) and Le Corbusier (1887-1965), a Spaniard and a Swiss who each chose to make his home in Paris and each revolutionised his respective cultures, it is, for our purposes, reasonable.

Picasso’s “Nude, Green Leaves and Bust” sold in May for $106.5m. Two years ago, the top floor of Le Corbusier’s Villa Stein, in an upmarket Parisian suburb, came on to the market. It was being touted at £775,000 ($1.1m), barely more than an equivalent apartment in a contemporary building. Yet this is one of the key buildings of the modern movement, a villa of stunning originality and exquisite proportions, a landmark in architectural history. It is also a great apartment – airy, with wonderful views. So why the disparity?

To read more of this content at The Financial Times click here.