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SMALLTIME ARCHIPHILE:

The Bachman House

Chicago has had characters – both architects and buildings – throughout it’s development as a place where things get built, regardless of if people want it or not. Bruce Goff, a transplanted Chicagoan, was a character and produced them. Goff was a child prodigy that started practicing architecture at 12-fucking-years-old and was doing weird things before they were cool i.e. Pre-PoMo; hell, pre-WWII.

The Bachman house was completed in 1947 and landmarked in the 1980s. This single-family home sports a straight-up sheet metal façade that’s closer to a shed than a home. The sharp triangulation and peak of the Bachman House roof volume gets bisected by an even more acute triangle, held up by two symmetrical equilateral ones – architects did love drawing with their triangles! The front and center in-your-face nature of this bungalow only gets weirder by placing it within a typical Chicago neighborhood laden with brick 3-flats and masonry walk-ups. Goff’s fortress (many people compare his work to castles) does not embrace local flavor superficially. Instead, it totally engages with Chicago’s, “build first and ask questions later” attitude to architectural culture. Unfortunately, that approach comes with a disclaimer that the Daley’s and Rahm both espouse: “nothing or no one stands in the way of development.” Meaning not even landmark status can save buildings anymore in Chicago.

Maybe they didn’t get the memo that architects are used to projects never getting built, let alone mostly working in virtual reality, so you can kill a building but you can’t kill architecture.

Located at 1244 W. Carmen Ave, Chicago, IL 60640.

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SMALLTIME ARCHIPHILE:

Home Away from Home

Gems are few and far between in terms of iconic architecture. Most of the time, our cities are made up of small insignificant cumulative buildings occupying neighborhoods and defining local character. But this building in Lakeview doesn’t HAVE character; it IS a character, an odd-one-out for that matter.

This polarized 3-flat near the EL on Sheffield is shaped by typical Chicago lot restrictions, but not by local vernacular practices, like red bricks or Chicago Windows. This residence looks like it should be in South Beach, not North Lakeview – a conglomerate of White and Grey masonry blocks in alternating horizontal lines; copious amounts of Miami Vice Glass brick; 90s laser-beam graphics on the long elevation; ‘hi-tech’ Kubrick bubble windows; a diagonally cut front entrance; and fucking shark fins on the parapet roof profile. I can’t believe I just described a building like this AND it’s real. It’s odd placement near a major transit point and its non-Chicago skin make it stand out, but not in the way that suggests it got lost in the wrong neighborhood. It’s as if this building is doing it’s own thing and feeling really comfortable, like dancing with it’s eyes closed and pretending no one’s watching.

As an object, this looker is not a place you can hang at, since it’s a private residence. Maybe you can make friends with the inhabitants of this time-and-place machine. Imagine hanging on the asymmetrical rear patio decks on a warm summer night, sipping on your cold fruity drink – if you get blasted enough, it might feel like Miami Beach with your eyes closed…but then the train will pass by and you’ll realize you’re in a fucking spaceship.

Grade A diamond in the rough.

Address: FIND IT YOURSELF!

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Now on view at The Poetry Foundation.

Reading is Fundamental

• SAIC Secret Admirers. Looks like SAIC has a crush on Prof. Fleischauer and butts. Also, this is probably the best work from the BFA show. (Courtesy of Sofia Leiby.)
• You down with OPP? Chicago’s own artist-turned-entreprenuer, Jenny Kendler, is quoted in this fluffy piece about artist’s websites being not websites, but “constructing a narrative”. At least the photo of Kendler is cute.
• Performing Audiences and Choreographing Coughs. Finally, some real journalism. NPR’s Alva Noë tackles the long-standing question of why audiences cough so damn much during live performances. “They are uncomfortable. They are uncertain. They are, very often, bored out of their minds.” What a surprise. In related news, Rapid Pulse is back for a 2013 installment.

AAM calls out Obama Budget

In an unusual turn of events, everyone is talking about the Obama Administration Budget Proposal for the 2014 Fiscal Year.

The American Alliance of Museums analysis of Obama’s proposed budget is less sexy than a big schmoozy gala, but actually worth reading. As is CultureGrrls somewhat-matter-of-fact budget post.

The AAM calls the proposed limit on charitable deductions “harmful,” but Bloomington’s Michael Ruston disagrees. Notable is his alternative suggestion of an equitable tax credit that would apply across donors, begging the question: should people in higher tax brackers really recieve more credit than those in a lower tax bracket if they are donating the same amount of money?

Surprisngly absent from the AAM document is a mention of the $59 million dollar increase to the Smithsonian Institution to fund, amongst many other initatives, The National Museum of African American History and Culture.

We’re most excited about the $500,000 proposed for building a telescope in Greenland to scope some black holes, but with a riveting 230 pages of FY14 Budget Proposal, there’s bound to be something for everyone. Right?

Artist Creates Black Hole in Roger’s Park

Abigal Deville’s opening at Iceberg Projects this weekend was TO DIE FOR. Iceberg’s normally crisp gallery was lost to a literal whirlwind of materials collected from Roger’s Avenue and transformed by the artist. More than worth the trip to Roger’s Park.

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SMALLTIME ARCHIPHILE:

The Patio Theater

The Patio Theatre is arguably the most magnificent movie house in all of Chicago. With awesome programming by the Chicago Cinema Society, a revamped 1920′s Baroquesque interior and streamlined Deco marquee, Patio uses the vehicle of space, time and, more specifically color, to heighten its graphic grandeur.

Color envelopes you in ways only rococo could – through ornamentation, stucco, mirrors, chandeliers, vaults – in variations of gold leaf, reds, blues, yellows and greens. The Patio Theater’s procession starts with its stark yellow and red sans-serif Deco marquee. Once inside, you encounter a nearly 20ft high chromatic ceiling ticketing foyer, followed by a minimally modern concession stand, and finally culminating in the most mindfucking auditorium punctuated by a starry night twice the size of the Music Box Theatre’s. It’s a series of effects that contemporary architects can’t even fathom approaching i.e. using color to form, shape, line and syncopate a procession, not as appliqué.

Patio’s use of color is palpable and interactive. The culmination of this comes in the auditorium’s screen covering that employs classic vaulting effects with an abundance of color to achieve simulacrum by easily inhabiting both traditional building technique (without traditional necessity) and pushing nuanced ornateness in graphic (without being kitsch).

Sitting there watching a Samurai classic like Shogun Assassin on a Saturday night in Portage Park, not Lakeview, Logan Square, Southport or any other “hot spot” is an added bonus to this prismatic gem. Architecture ‘looks’ all the time and the colorful Patio Theater trumps most classic Chicago movie houses in terms of how comfortable it is in its own skin – inside and out.

The Patio Theater is located at 6008 W. Irving Park Rd, Chicago, Illinois 60634.

TRENDING: Music

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SMALLTIME ARCHIPHILE:

The Fireside Bowl

‘Over the line’ and ‘Hey motherfucker, we’re that Spic band’ aren’t two expressions you might simultaneously hear unless you like The Big Lebowski and Los Crudos. But you may have heard it at some point in the 1990s while bowling your mediocre 104, eating a pizza and watching an iconic hardcore punk show at Fireside Bowl. Seldom do you get the productive slippage between national slacker pastime and radical teenage angst that would have been a mainstay at Fireside. This modern gem modularly clad in red-and-white metal tile façade, symmetrically planned with bowling on one end and horizontal circulation on the other, activating corner spaces where the action happened – stage left and bar right – looks more like a Firestone than a punk bowling alley.

Beginning with its 40 ft signage that is part pop-advertising, part surrealist call-to-bowl, Fireside’s modernism plays out in typical plan, allowing basic front-to-back bowling to occur next to stage dives, dog piles and circle pits in a circulatory space no wider than 15 ft – folding slow-paced sport and high-energy hardcore into the same form. Sporting seedy bar décor and MS-DOS-like scoring machines, Fireside’s ability to transport you to a time you never experienced is uncanny. Built in the 1940s, no doubt typified by modernist aesthetic leanings, Fireside is a monument to simplicity of a pre-digital era, where you could’ve killed two birds – bowling and slamdancing – with one roll.

Fireside still has shows, although not as iconic or plentiful as this show list from the mid 90s. Take a gander, go to Logan Square and be a shitty bowler, while this building still exists between eras, pastimes and subcultures, easily annihilating any validity to cosmic bowling.

The Fireside is located at 2646 W Fullerton Ave, Chicago, IL 60647.