What's next for Cecil Balmond? (Balmond branded shelving at the Container Store? Or?)

The Architectural Record's Tim McKeough reported today that legendary engineer/architect/designer/polymath Cecil Balmond is leaving ARUP, the global powerhouse where, as head of the Advanced Geometry Unit (AGU), he partnered with prominent architects to create some of the most spectacular structures of the last decade, including Rem Koolhaas's Seattle Public Library and CCTV Tower, Daniel Libeskind's Imperial War Museum North, and Toyo Ito's Serpentine Pavilion, to name just a few.  (ARUP is also being sued for $10 million by the Art Institute for flaws in their new Renzo Piano designed Modern Wing, but we'll talk about that another day.)

Balmond has already been striking out as architect as well as engineer, most notably in 2007 with a stunning bridge in Coimbra, Portugal.  Now he's setting up his own practice, which will include both structures and products.  Think Phillipe Stark for eggheads.  I love to imagine having - and being able to afford - a Cecil Balmond watch, which probably wouldn't be a watch at all as we've come to know them, and might just as likely rethink the concept of time as tell it.  Let him loose on the design of a bra and support of the female breast might never be the same.  Seriously, though, Balmond's work has always been about amazing, one-of-a-kind creations, and it should be fascinating to see if he can translate his talent to the demands of a mass-manufactured product, as well.

I was able to interview Balmond at the time of his mind-blowing exhibition, Solid Void, at the Graham Foundation a couple years back.  Check out my consideration (copiously illustrated) of the war between the heroic and the reasonable, and the work, writings and ideas of one of most influential thinkers of our time here.

New ways of seeing architecture: Alex Roman's The Third&The; Seventh

Spanish-born artist Alex Roman describes his striking film, The Third&The Seventh as trying "to illustrate architecture art across a photographic point of view where main subjects are already-built spaces. Sometimes in an abstract way. Sometimes surreal".  The twelve-minute work, best viewed in HD full screen, includes meditations of the interplay of light and nature on such iconic structures as Mie's Barcelona Pavilion, Louis Kahn's Yale Library and Santiago Calatrava's Milwaukee art Museum.

And it's all virtual. "I use 3DS Max and Vray for rendering," says Roman to Motionographer's Justice Cone, "Photoshop for texture work, AfterEffects for compositing and color grading and Adobe Premiere for edit it all."

The piece's consistently slow rhythms makes the work a bit on the lugubrious side, a little slow, a little heavy, a little too much in love with its own artistry, but there's no denying this is a stunning piece of work, one that could help lead the way past the press-agent photography of architecture that too often manages to kill any sense of the magic - and mystery - of the buildings.

(thanks to EuroRSCG Chicago's Baptiste Limb for showcasing this film)

Marathon! (Chicago 2010)

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click Read More to see all 16 photographs

 

 

A Summer Day's Odyssey in Chicago, October, 2010

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click Read More after the fourth picture to see photographs for the entire journey

 

Brief Encounter: Some friends I shared a hot dog bun with

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Picasso's Lady looks down her nose at faux Trevi

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As part of this year's Fiera Italiana, a free-standing replica of Rome's Trevi Fountain made entirely of calf's butter has arisen in Daley Plaza. Visitors can stand with their backs to the replica, make a wish, and throw a coin over their shoulder. A security guard will then inform them that the actual fountain is at the opposite end of the plaza and make them pick up the coins from the ground.

How many of you saw it? Awesome Patrick Stewart/Kate Fleetwood Macbeth on PBS Wednesday night - soon on DVD

I'm astounded there wasn't more promotion on this; I just happened to stumble across last night's 9 p.m.  premiere on WTTW of the film version of 2007's acclaimed Patrick Stewart/Kate Fleetwood production of Macbeth that one London critic hailed as the "The Macbeth of a lifetime."

Both the original stage production and film were directed by Rupert Goold, setting the play in an imagined Stalinist society of the mid 20th-century, a conceit that could easily have become a gimmick, but in this production's specificity of detail only heightens the immediacy of the drama.  What was a single-set as a play has been opened up to use a visually stunning array of found locations, including a decaying, glass canopied cloister that co-producer John Wyver noted would probably have cost over $100,000 if it had been created as a set.

The film was shot in wide-screen HD using a pair of the fabled RED digital cameras by cinematographer Sam McCurdy, perhaps best known for bringing creep-out visuals to such horror films as The Descent and Dread.  That style proves an embracing fit for the fear and loathing world of Macbeth, even if some of the visual tricks sometimes seem like a crib from a Mark Romanek music video, especially one scene where the three witches are portrayed as un-Florence Nightingale-like angels from hell.  (Which will no doubt be appropriated in commercials for the next campaign to dismantle nationalized health care.)

Part of what gives the production its power is how it gains an incredible intimacy through setting some of the play's most intense scenes in the family kitchen, including Lady Macbeth steeling her husband's resolve to murder Duncan as she retrieves the dessert cake from the fridge to serve to the party of the soon-to-be martyred king in the adjoining dining room, or, most famously, the scene were Macbeth instructs the two men he's enlisted to murder Banquo as he makes cheese sandwiches.

None of this would be worth much is there weren't two extraordinary performances at the core.  Kate Fleetwood's Lady Macbeth is beautiful, seductive, brittle.  Patrick Stewart's performance as Macbeth is the zenith of a long, varied, and distinguished career.  Stewart's strength has never been in an actor's flamboyance, but rather, in a rock-solid centering of the character in the Spencer Tracy mode.  You can't just sit back and observe impassively.  Stewart draws you in: you know this man; more to the point, you begin to feel that, in different circumstances, you could be that man.  You begin to experience the action of the play as if you were in his skin.  You feel what, in our modern times, has become an increasingly elusive sense of the tragic.  Like Oedipus after questioning the messenger, Stewart's Macbeth has just enough self-awareness to realize how he's allowed himself to be trapped.  He sees how fate has plotted his end, but he must play it out, even if he already knows the dread conclusion.

Love is a battlefield, Pet Benatar has told us, and this Macbeth is a very warped love story, indeed. Fleetwood's Lady Macbeth is the ultimate trophy wife, much younger than her husband, inwardly unnerved by the intimations of his mortality to the point of projecting her lust through him and past him, into a carnal craving for blood and power that Macbeth, when we first meet him, has buried deep within himself beneath a mask of amiable soldierly loyalty.  Like Macduff ripped from his mother's womb, Lady Macbeth reaches into Macbeth's entrails and pulls these dark longings back to consciousness.  Entwined scorpions, the Macbeths reinforce each other's venomous cravings.   They give birth to their crimes in primal embrace, only to be condemned to live out the annihilating consequences apart, and utterly alone.

This is a rare case where a landmark theatrical production has not only not been ruined by its translation into another medium; in many ways, it's been enhanced.  The raw theatricality of a live performance is, of course, missing, but the skill with which Goold opens up the play actually helps to ground it and give a visceral presence.  You're not in row K listening to actors project; you're inches from a character's face, leaning in to hear their whispered confessions. 

I was blown away by this production.  If you missed it - and given the lack of fanfare, that's a good possibility - the DVD goes on sale October 19th, and it's only $19.99.  If this were a theatrical release, Macbeth would be one of the best films of the year, laden with Oscar nominations.  As it is, it's transformed the term "direct to video" from a epithet to a bloody wonderful gift.

Chicago Streetscene: Ellen Degeneres, by Lorado Taft

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David Shah, Bruegmannx2, National Public Housing Museum lectures - more for the October calendar!

 And the hits just keep coming.  Just added to the October calendar of Chicago Architectural Events:

This coming Monday, October 11, trend forecaster/provocateur David Shah will kick off the School of the Art Institute/AIADO's Mitchell lecture series, with a talk on Design in a Time of Change, 6:00 p.m., in Fullerton Hall.

On Wednesday the 6th (make your reservations by noon today), UIC's Robert Bruegmann will talk about The Rise and Fall of Public Housing: An International Perspective, followed by a tour of the site of the National Public Housing Museum, one of a series of five lecture/tours this month that will feature such people as Little Italy's Peter Pero,  great-granddaughter of Ida B. Wells Michelle Duster and City Design Center's Robert Feldman.

On Tuesday, the 26th, Bruegmann is back at a Graham Foundation event held in Harry Weese's dramatic Seventeenth Church of Christ, Scientist, talking about the new book he's co-authored with Kathleen Murphy Skolnick, The Architecture of Harry Weese.   This first monograph devoted to Weese's work has just been published.  I'm making my way through it now, and it's a worthy successor to Bruegmann's 1997 The Architects and the City: Holabird & Roche of Chicago, 1880-1918.  Along with a recent profile of Weese by Robert Sharoff in Chicago Magazine, it's jump-starting what looks to be a renewed appreciation of one of Chicago's most creative architects.

There are over 60 great events still to come on the October calendar.  Check them all out here.

And speaking of great Chicago architects, while we don't usually list tours - there's just too many of them - I did want mention a one-time only tour that's part of Docomomo North American Tour Day for 2010, Architecture in the Round:  the life and work of Bertrand Goldberg, a bus tour co-sponsored with the Chicago Architecture Foundation, from which it departs at 12:30 p.m. this Saturday, October 9th. The tour takes in four of Goldberg's designs: Marina City, the Hillard Homes, River City, and the endangered Prentice Hospital (just don't try to take pictures of it.) $38 per person; $33 seniors/students; $33 CAF members, 3.0 AIA Continuing Education Credits. Registration and information on-line.

What Happens When You Don't Listen: Art Institute opens up Ando Gallery, lets out the magic

Japanese architect Tadao Ando had never done a museum space, when in 1988 he was enlisted by Art Institute President James Wood to create a gallery for the museum's collection of Japanese screens.  The space Ando created has often been written of as the best room in the museum.

You entered through a pair of standard issue glass doors, and found yourself face-to-face with a forest-like grid of 16 free-standing foot-square dark columns, in four rows, stopping short of the high ceiling.  Beyond them, the art is displayed behind a L-shaped wraparound of continuous glass that begins flush with the floor and stops about halfway up the wall.  Two spare, backless benches, also designed by Ando, are in the back corner of the room.

The visible focus of the room was the space for the art, the only strong light source in the room.  The forest of columns stood in near darkness; the gallery itself had the feel of golden hour just before evening.

That was wonderful in itself, but what was most remarkable was the silence.

The room was not soundproof - you could hear louder noises from outside, but just barely.  It was if you were hearing them from beneath the ocean.

Most often, there was silence.  A silence that you didn't experience as a negative, the mere absence of a sound.  It was a presence, palpable, as if all the aural crud that fills each second of our every waking hour - televisions, iPods, cell phones, Muzak, traffic, sirens, the hum of appliances, mindless chatter - had been gently washed away to reveal a mysterious, embracing essence, waiting for us patiently at the lowest threshold of our hearing.

Now it's gone.

The Art Institute has just opened a major revamp of its Japanese Art Galleries in the museum's Roger L. and Pamela Weston Wing, designed by wHY Architecture and Planning, whose Kulapat Yantrasast is an Ando protege.   He created light-filled galleries that added 55% more space.  And he removed the doors to the Ando Gallery.  "Moving was designed to be free flowing, giving the visitor views of several rooms at once while also providing carefully placed focal points."

free-flowing = homogenization

The architecture of the Ando Gallery remains unchanged, the experience of the space has been eviscerated.  With the acoustical seal broken, sound - and light - "flow".  They seep in as an alien presence, invading the room, making it a sideshow extension of the generic, bright-white galleries outside.  The columns seem more widely spaced, the dimensions of the seating area appear to have expanded.  The sensual, almost sacred sense of intimacy has vanished.

Keep the pathways clear, unambiguous.  Keep the bodies moving.

The Ando Gallery remains a visually striking work of art.  How strange, though, that the caretakers of one the world's great cultural storehouses seem able to work only on the level of the visual; that they should be - or choose to be - deaf and unfeeling to the centrality of our other senses in experiencing spatial art to its deepest, most profound level.

On the great stair of the Art Institute, fear and hope stream beneath your feet in color and light.

Words, words, words, words
I have no words
To describe the vanity of life,
The insane inanity of life . . .
           Martin, from Leonard Bernstein's Candide

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Through January 2 of next year, the sedate grand staircase of Chicago's Art Institute has been transformed.  The black backgrounds of its risers have burst worth with strips of lettering in day-glo colors.  The bright LEDs that subvert the abstract classicism have been compared by Robert Venturi  to temple hieroglyphics, "where the sparkle of pixels can parallel the sparkle of tesserae and LED's can become the mosaics of today [creating] an architecture that embraces human dimensions over those of abstract expression--that celebrates the beginning of an age of virtually universal literacy and embraces meaning over expression."

The installation at the Art Institute, Public Notice 3, is the work of the Mumbai-born artist Jitish Kallat, and it draws on a historical synchronicity.

In 1893, the Art Institute building, then home for the World Congress Auxiliary of the World's Columbian Exposition, hosted a 17-day Parliament of the World's Religions.

To east of the grand staircase, two large, 3,000-seat auditoriums, the Hall of Columbus and the Hall of Washington, had been erected where galleries now stand. On the Parliament's opening day, the platform of Columbus Hall was filled with dignitaries from "almost every national and every religion . . . The big oak doors of the Art Institute were besieged by visitors as early as 9 o'clock eager to secure seats in the auditorium or gallery . . .  when the doors were thrown open there was a wild scramble to gain access to the body of the hall."

Several times throughout the day's session, a young Hindu monk from India, Swami Vivekananda, declined invitations from the podium to speak.  "My heart was fluttering and my tongue nearly dried up; I was so nervous, and could not venture to speak in the morning.  All were prepared and came with ready-made speeches.  I was a fool and had none . . . I who never spoke in public in my life."

Late in the afternoon, at the chairman's insistence, the Swami Vivekananda rose.  A rapt silence descended on the hall.  "Sisters and Brothers of America," he began, and the room erupted.  It would be several minutes before the applause and cheering subsided and the Swami could deliver his speech, which included these words:

Sectarianism, bigotry, and its horrible descendant, fanaticism, have long possessed this beautiful earth. They have filled the earth with violence, drenched it often and often with human blood, destroyed civilization and sent whole nations to despair. Had it not been for these horrible demons, human society would be far more advanced than it is now.  . . .  I will quote to you, brethren, a few lines from a hymn which I remember to have repeated from my earliest boyhood, which is every day repeated by millions of human beings: "As the different streams having their sources in different paths which men take through different tendencies, various though they appear, crooked or straight, all lead to Thee."

I fervently hope that the bell that tolled this morning in honor of this convention may be the death-knell of all fanaticism, of all persecutions with the sword or with the pen . . .

On the exact same day, September 11, one hundred and eight years later, the hijacked planes crashed into the Twin Towers.  Over the intervening century, the Swami's fervent hopes have been confounded by a unyielding parade of what Voltaire called "the heroic butchery."  Christians murdering Jews, Muslims Hindu's, Hindu's Muslims, in variation and explication across geographies, religions, and sects, all in the name of the one true God. 

So back at the Art Institute, the colorful light show winding cheerfully through that stately, self-satisfied stair is actually the full text of Swami Vivekananda's brief address.  And the significance of the colors?  Jitish Kallat explains:

Now his speech is illuminated, conceptually and actually, in the threat coding system of the United States Department of Homeland Security. I find it interesting how the advisory system co-opts five colours from a visual artist’s toolbox into the rhetoric of terror, by framing them as devices to meter and broadcast threat (much like its predecessors, the British BIKINI alert state and the French vigipirate). Treating the museum’s Grand Staircase almost like a notepad, the 118 step-risers receive the refracted text of the speech. I see Public Notice 3 as an experiential and contemplative transit space; the text of the speech is doubled at the two entry points on the lower levels of the staircase and quadrupled at the four exit points at the top, multiplying like a visual echo.

Is Northwestern trying to make Prentice Hospital disappear even before they try to destroy it?

 

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Shortly after snapping this photo of Bertrand Goldberg's wonderful and endangered Prentice Hospital, I was pursued by a guy with a badge hanging around his neck who kept insisting I couldn't take pictures of the building without getting prior permission.

Sullivan at the Block, Design Evanston Awards, Music's sway over Frank Lloyd Wright, Traditional Building Exhibition and Conference - still MORE great October events

As if 50+ events weren't enough, we've just added another half dozen to the October Calendar of Architectural Events.   Saturday, October 2nd, the Pleasant Home Foundation will offer up A Tour of Oak Parks Arts & Crafts Interiors in Oak Park.  On Wednesday the 6th, the Häfele America Chicago showroom will offer  Digital Solutions: Locker Management (yes, even getting shut up in your own locker by the school bully has now gone digital.)

On Thursday the 7th, musicologist David Patterson will talk about The Five Influences: Music and Mr. Wright's Architecture at Frank Lloyd Wrights Unity Temple in Oak Park.  On Thursday, the 14th, Design Evanston will offering up their 2010 Awards, while from Wednesday the 20th through Saturday 23rd, the Traditional Building Exhibition and Conference will convene at Navy Pier with dozens of panels, workshops, seminars and tours.  Access to the exhibition hall is free with registration.

And on Thursday, October 28th, there will be another screening of Mark Richard Smith's new documentary, Louis Sullivan: The Struggle for American Architecture at the Block Museum in Evanston, part of the Block's film series, The American Architect in Focus, that will continue into November.

The October Calendar is now at 60 great events and counting. Check them all out here.

China National Day Celebration, Daley Plaza

 

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This just in: Moon over Chicago not blue cheese, but blotchy, half-nibbled ritz cracker

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Chicago Streetscene: Cavern of the Bridge

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It's Louis Sullivan month! plus Kamin, Samuelson, Vinci, CTBUH, a tribute to Bruce Graham, Julie Snow and much more - the October Architectural Calendar!

How the hell did this happen?  It's not even November yet, and we're putting up our October Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.  (I promise I won't let it happen again.

I'm sure I'll be adding things I've overlooked, but we've already got over fifty great events:  a tribute to the late architect Bruce Graham on the 14th, a symposium on the development of Dearborn Park, AIA Chicago's 55th annual Designight, the Richard H. Driehaus Preservation Awards, and Penelope Davis on The Propagandistic Functions of Public Monuments in Rome.

What's shaping up as the Louis Sullivan year continues with an October 8th Art Institute symposium, From Fragment to Photograph—Interpreting Louis Sullivan's Architecture, with Richard Cahan, Jeffrey Plank, Tim Samuelson, John Vinci, Alison Fisher and Elizabeth Siegel, plus the Glessner House Museum is sponsoring two gallery talks of the Cultural Center's great exhibition, Louis Sullivan's Idea, with co-curator Tim Samuelson, while back at the Art Institute on the 12th, curators Siegel and Fisher offer a guided walk through their Sullivan show, Looking after Louis Sullivan: Photographs, Drawings, and Fragments.  And on the 13th, again at CAF, there's a screening on Mark Richard Smith's new documentary Louis Sullivan:  The Struggle for American Architecture.

On the 21st, The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat sponsors a free Tall Buildings Symposium at IIT, with presentations by William Pedersen and Ysrael A. Seinuk, and on each of this years four award winning projects.  On the 5th, the Structural Engineers Association of Illinois will hear Brian McElhatten of SOM talk about their zero energy Pearl River Tower in Guangzhou, China, while CAF's Greg Dreicer will discuss their spectacular 320-square-foot Model City of Chicago for Friends of Downtown on the 7th.

You want books?  Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin discusses his new book, Terror and Wonder: Architecture in a Tumultuous Age on the 7th at CAF, where on the 20th, Alice Sparberg Alexiou discusses her book, The Flatiron Building: Chicago’s Gift to New York.  At IIT on the 18th, Dana Buntrock discusses the subject of her book, Materials and Meaning in Contemporary Japanese Architecture: Tradition and Today.

But wait - there's more!  Much, much more.  Bill Becker, the Rosa Parks homes, CNU's 4th annual Illinois conference, Landmarks Illinois's Lisa DiChiera, the Rosa Parks apartments, the Baha'i Temple, a Bridgeport pub crawl, Julie Snow,  Ian Bogle, and, just in time for Halloween, Clarence Hatzfeld haunting the Park District's Julia Bachrach. And yet, there's still more.

Check all the over fifty events on October calendar here.

Can Mary Zimmerman solve the Candide Problem?

Despite an artistic pedigree that included composer Leonard Bernstein, playwright Lillian Hellman, poet Richard Wilbur, director Tyrone Guthrie, singer/actress Barbara Cook, and dabbling by the likes of Dorothy Parker and James Agee, the musical Candide was considered a flop when it premiered on Broadway in 1956, closing after just 73 performances.

It's a testimony to the brilliance of Bernstein's music that Candide became the musical that refused to die.  In 1974, legendary director Harold Prince created a stripped-down,  boisterous restaging, with a new book by Hugh Wheeler, additional music by Bernstein, and new and revised lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, that was such a smash Off-Broadway that it transferred to the Great White Way and ran 741 performances.  Prince also staged a 1994 production at Chicago's Lyric Opera production that featured Elizabeth Futral  as Cunegonde.

The downside of the success was that subsequent productions have veered increasingly into the realm of burlesque, culminating in a 2004 semi-staged version with the New York Philharmonic where such brilliant performers as Thomas Allen and Kristen Chenoweth were reduced to acting in an "aren't we being funny" manner so arch that it made you want to throw up. 

Now, Chicago director Mary Zimmerman has thrown out everything and written a new book for her production of Candide at the Goodman, which has been in previews and opens, I think, tonight.
I'm scheduled to see it on Thursday, and I expect to be writing a lot more about it after that, but for now, here's some links to excellent stories by the Sun-Times' Heidi Weiss and New City's Dennis Polkow.  You can also access the Goodman's own program for the new production, which provides a very fine overview of Candide's history, and an interview with Zimmerman on her approach to this classic yet troubled work of American theatre, which is scheduled to run at the Goodman through October 31.

Chicago Streetscene: Cordon of Valets

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What WTTW didn't want you to see: Samuel Mockbee Rural Studio documentary at Gene Siskel this weekend

The documentary Citizen Architect: Sam Mockbee and the Spirit of The Rural Studio had its broadcast debut on PBS August 23rd, but not on Chicago's WTTW.  I'm not sure they ever ran it - probably no room amidst all the rebroadcasts of Change Your Brain and Celtic Thunder.

This weekend, however, you'll have three chances to catch the film at the Gene Siskel Film Center, Friday the 24th at 8:00 p.m., and Sunday the 26th at 3:15 and 4:45 p.m. Also included on the program is the 17 minute film Robin Hood Gardens (Or Every Brutalist Structure For Itself), on Alison and Peter Smithson's now doomed 1972 London housing development both hailed as a masterpiece and assailed as an eyesore.

Not to be outdone, Chicago Filmmakers, 5243 N. Clark, 2nd floor, is presenting Chicago Architecture in Motion, Saturday, September 25th at 8:00 p.m. The seven short films including Equitable Building: Time Lapse from the 1960's, Beverly Willis's Girl is a Fellow Here: 100 Women Architects in the Studio of Frank Lloyd Wright, and Conrad O. Nelson's traversal of Halsted Street, from 1934.

Who's buried in John Logan's Monument? Superb new website catalogues Chicago Parks' Fountains, Monuments and Sculptures

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OK, let's get past the bad stuff first. The web design sucks. In fact, there really isn't any web design, just a library of dead-end pdf's. No hyperlinks, no works by artist, name or subject, no sorting chronological or geographic. And if you don't know which park the work you want to learn about is in, be prepared to start clicking through a list of 67 until you find the right one.

All that said, the new Chicago Park District Guide to Fountains, Monuments and Sculptures, now on-line after several years of research and work under the direction of Park District historian Julia Bachrach, is an amazing new resource. There's a PDF for each work - as I surfed through them all, Safari actually gave up, saying I had exceeded the maximum amount of open windows. The works and their histories are described in an informed, fact-packed text, and illustrated with both contemporary photographs by Park District photographers, and historical shots from the holdings of the Chicago History Museum.

To get back to our initial question, there's actually no one buried in the Augustus Saint-Gaudens/Alexander Phimister Proctor John Alexander Logan Monument east of Michigan Avenue at 9th street, although originally the rising hill beneath the sculpture was intended to be the final resting place for Logan and his wife. I never knew it was designed to be a tomb. Did you?

I've also always wondered where those big carved stones scattered on the site of the late, decrepit 12th street Metra Station were from. Now I know they're from Bradford L Gilbert's 1893 Central Station, with its great arched-ceiling waiting room and tall tower that personified the might of the Illinois Central, until the decline of rail travel led to its demolition in the 1970's.

And did you know that the Columbus Statue in Arrigo Park at Loomis and Polk is actually the sculpture Moses Ezekiel created for above the entrance of W.W. Boyington's 1893 Columbus Memorial Building, which soared 240 feet into the air at the corner of State and Washington where Old Navy's stubby store now stands. Did you know the forty-foot-high columns at the Cancer Survivor's Garden came from Henry Ives Cobb's domed 1905 Federal Courthouse on Dearborn, replaced by Mies van Der Rohe's Post Office and Kluczynski Building?

Or that the Tribune's Robert McCormick's $600 contribution in 1906 paid for half the cost of the Washington Square fountain that now bears his name, part of a series of improvements designed by Jens Jensen?  Or that in addition to our Standing Lincoln and Seated Lincoln sculptures, there was once also a Leaning Lincoln statue in Kennedy Park,  until the Women's Christian Temperance Union forced its removal?

Delving into the Chicago Park District Guide to Fountains, Monuments and Sculptures is like opening a bag of potato chips - you have one, then another, then another . . .  but it's a lot more nourishing. This is an absolutely superb compendium of images and information about Chicago's rich storehouse of public art, a seminal resource for historians, and an addictively entertaining read for the rest of us. Check it out here.