What could be more cumbersome to get things done and to maintain a schedule than two national holidays – one mid week, one on a weekend – in the same week?
Independence Day celebrates the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, signaling the creation of the United States of America. It happens on July 4. Many towns, like Chicago, have their giant fireworks displays the night before, on July 3. July 4 is a Saturday this year; I guess that everyone is observing their day off from work on Friday, July 3 – no?
Dominion Day (or more recently, Canada Day) celebrates Queen Victoria signing the British North America Act and creating Canada. It occurs on July 1. Knowing that this somewhat British element had to compete with mammoth American celebrations on July 4, the thought was to try to upstage this all by having the Canadian celebration a couple days earlier.
Dominion Day is Wednesday this year. I guess that people are putting their unused vacation days and comp time towards Monday and Tuesday, not being able to wait to enjoy time off in sunshine – ? Maybe it’s just convenient to take the whole week off.
Who knows? It’s challenging to schedule anything this week.
First we shape our buildings, and then they shape us”
Sir Winston Churchill
“Motion is the aesthetic of modern man”
Clifford Wiens
Maybe it was driving through a crowded parking lot, looking for a parking space. In amidst the row of SUV’s there appeared to be an empty space, only to come upon it and discover that it’s simply a smaller car packed between the Escalades. Or maybe it’s noticing the difference in scale between neighborhoods built at different decades; and that their scale varies directly with the size of their garages. Whether we want to acknowledge this or not, we’re designing our housing stock around our taste in automobiles.
“In the Industrial Age: first we build our cars, then build our communities around them”
Darrel Babuk
A Forward Thinking concept at the time
Take the ’51 Ford as example. In retrospect, it might seem to be something akin to a lunchbucket on wheels; yet in it’s day, it was a Ford’s first revolutionary design of the modern automotive era. Revolutionary in more ways than one; as the embodiment of the GI Housing Bill and the Interstate Highway Act of a few years later, it conquered countless acres of former rural farmland and helped populate these territories with people and commercial strips.
Levittown was another Forward Thinking concept of its time
In 1951, the sought after housing stock was a single family home of two, maybe three bedrooms with only one gathering space not related to food. These houses were probably configured as two separate levels, one being built inside a roof attic space to conserve materials, thus price. It allowed its occupants to spend more money on other things, like fancier cars…
Cars had smiles in this era – this was our dentist’s car
Later on, by the late 1960’s, it was commonplace to expect our cars and houses to be exuberantly flamboyant. Houses had grown into sprawling ranches and split levels; despite experiments with swoopy rooflines, they still weren’t too large in floor area.
Note that the roofline of this house creates the same sort of smile as did our dentist’s car
Instead, individual houses sat on large plots of land, requiring cars to ferry their occupants back and forth. The idea of a two car family had just entered American lexicon, a two car garage proudly displayed to the street was a status symbol to behold. Cars enveloped similarly swoopy masses of sheet metal, they were difficult to manouever through city street. Chicago reverted many of its neighborhood streets to one way traffic, to accommodate these vehicles.
The freshness of sixties design got a bit tired, then mired in the seventies. Maybe it was the energy crunch, or maybe it was by a series of laws that controlled, rather than encouraged design. By the time the eighties came to be, a book by Jane Jacobs “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” came to be better accepted, and we sought ways to do more with less. A few indulgences came in small packages. Sudden interest in condominiums and townhouses were met by happy buyers in BMW 5 Series sedans. Oddly, while we learned to drive more fuel efficient cars, we started to drive more cars, it really didn’t stem our consumption of resources. We rebuilt our cities, yet kept developing new suburbs. We simply found ways to use more resources.
These days, we have McMansions and SUV’s of all sizes, though the family units that live inside the McMansions are smaller than what lived in the 50’s or 60’s tract homes. The McMansions lack design originality, though they boast rare and expensive finishes, like kitchens with granite countertops. Didn’t the original marble cladding of the Amoco Building mine out one of Michelangelo’s historic marble quaries? Our freeways are constantly choked with traffic. Our expectations have become supersized as we simply want more of everything – good design doesn’t really count, just that there be more of it! The car enveloped by a swoopy mass of sheet metal in the late 1960’s is no larger in floor area than a 21st century full size SUV, yet our SUV’s take up considerably more volume and weigh substantially more. And about the original marble cladding of the Amoco Building – once it was removed due to damage, wasn’t it pulverized and used as roadbed gravel for an extension of the Stevenson Expressway?
Would we have a different urban infrastructure design if we had started to drive vehicles like this?
It makes one wonder about the preponderance of human nature to simply go on autopilot without question: where would we be now if during the fifties and sixties, we had stuck not to the large cars but rather to concepts like the original Austin Mini or Fiat 500; the concepts being produced in Detroit as Ramblers or Crossleys. Would our cities be much more geographically compact, would we be using public transit more often, and would we be living our lives in public rather than in the cocoons of gated communities?
“How often I found where I should be going, only by setting out for somewhere else”
At a farewell party last night, one fellow picked a conversation topic started expounding on “lawyer-comedians”.
Now, I can count lawyers as being among my best of friends, however: a “lawyer – comedian” sounded as oxymoronic as would an “architect-comedian”. I somehow doubt if anyone could find comedy in issuing a change order or an Expression of Interest document.
Thinking of it, until very lately, the only architects ever depicted on prime time television programs were the likes of Mr. Brady of “The Brady Bunch”, or the owner of “Mr. Ed – the Talking Horse” – all these characters being rather contrived. For television, the images of lawyers have been dressed up by inserting a bit of drama into their daily routines – a procedural time out while appealing a stay of execution, for example. We architects could never inject excitement into a Contemplated Change Notice addressing plastic laminate countertop surfaces.
The only group less likely than “lawyer – comedians” or architect – comedians” may be an “accountant – comedian”, perhaps developing comedy in changing the standard office ledger paper from six column to five. A cost effective move, no doubt.
Fortunately, we found a more entertaining conversation topic that involved commenting on wine from Ontario vineyards.
It was fascinating to see a recent proposal for the Sears Tower to include all glass ‘look out pods” – a cantilevered glass structure of nothing but glass on five sides including the floor and all supporting structure. No apparent supporting structure – or at least what we would think to be supporting structure, like steel – at all. An architect who interned under me years ago became fascinated with all glass structures and developed this into a market segment, designing things like all glass stairways and all glass trusses – very showy stuff. The way he explained it was simple: glass is a material whose structural qualities are much like concrete – excellent in compression, limited in tension, not great in shear. A major difference between glass and concrete is that one can’t cast an eight inch thick slab of glass in whatever shape with reinforcing bars, the fabrication method is that different.
Glass Stairway, Chicago
One only need to look at the glass staircase in the Macintosh computer store on North Michigan Avenue, an all glass stairway whose stair treads are perhaps an inch thick. Imagine a slab of concrete one inch thick, and one probably could envision patio blocks. Not the sort of material that one could use to span an entire stairway width.
The same comparisons are true for wood products. I was invited to attend a seminar held by the Canadian Wood Council and the Forest Products Association of Canada last Thursday. Wood has good compressive and tensile properties. In Chicago, it tends to get overlooked due to this fire we had back in 1871, before the days of building codes and fire-resistivity research. A professor of mine once described it this way – if you were given a choice a sitting under a flaming steel beam or a flaming wood beam, which would you rather? Steel melts when heated, whereas heavy timber develops a protective char, preventing further damage. When used properly, wood can be safer than steel.
While wood may be a piece of tree shaved down to a dimension, modern wood technology is based on taking smaller, perhaps scrap pieces of wood and gluing them together in a way that aligns the direction of wood grain to perform to specifications. Wood itself is composed of directional fiber and cellulose, the cellulose acting as glue. Today’s methods essentially take wood fiber and glue them back together with engineered resins.
2010 Winter Olympics Speedskating Oval, Richmond, BC
The new 2010 Winter Olympics Speedskating Oval in Richmond, BC is the world’s largest all-wood structure. Its graceful, curving roof is made up of many pieces of wood, glued and bolted together. By understanding the importance of structural shape and direction of wood grain, the graceful curves allow impressive spans. A “V” truss shape incorporates fire sprinklers.
Murray Grove, London, UK
One of the more dramatic displays came with a British project, Murray Grove, a nine story apartment building in London, constructed entirely of cross laminated timber panels. Imagine plywood but six inches thick. This system could be constructed to be even taller; it offers many sustainability advantages over steel or concrete systems.
Murray Grove Construction
Murray Grove, Panel Diagram
This system met or exceeded all firecodes, provided ease of constructability and negligible construction waste.
Using proper connections, wood construction of this type offers superior seismic resistive cabilities, as entire panels can absord twisting without breaking.
Some people think that wood is like taking a chain saw and killing a tree. Not so. The amount of energy, water and carbon involved in making wood from seedling to reforestation in a properly managed forest is less than what it would take to make a unit of steel or concrete. Trees are most efficient at producing oxygen up to a certain point in their lifespans. A properly managed forest respects this and will target selective trees for harvest while supporting the ecosystem, much like how nature takes care of itself.
Canadian forests consistently rank among the world’s best managed and best documented, managing a small portion of forest while leaving the majority of forests in their natural state. This approach makes wood a highly sustainable building product that is just beginning to be recognized by the “green” industry.
The good hostess favours of rain ponchos the evening previous was an omen indeed. Unprecedented 70 mph winds and heavy downpour rains swept through the area. Upon checking email at 430 on Saturday morning, a note read “.. the Games will go on..”
Just a wee bit of the 7000 pounds of this 1953 Bentley R-Series
The Illinois Saint Andrew Society is the oldest and longest continually operating charity in the State; it’s like a Scottish benevolent society. For the past twenty-three years, it has staged the Highland Games – heavy athletics, rugby, soccer, dancing competitions, shortbread baking contests, dog shows, sheep herding… For the past few years, the program has been expanded to include a British Car Show. I am honoured to Chair the committee that organizes the car show within the overall Highland Games Committee. The British Car Show Committee led to the formation of the Scottish Motor Club, an organization that can continually promote the Highland Games, the Illinois Saint Andrew Society, and offer moral support to anyone relatively new to Lucas Electronics.
Looking down the Car Show Row, early in the morning
The Highland Games were held at the Oak Brook Polo Grounds. The grounds are being converted from polo accommodations to soccer; a seemingly insignificant though very major change is that soccer fields have longer cut grass that tends to retain water. The thought that came to mind is that kilts are always preferable to trousers when marching through wetlands. The grounds were awfully soggy at 6AM.
Lotus Europa (left) Lotus Super Seven (Right)
Nightmarish thoughts of low-slung Lotuses (Lotii ? ) and 7000 pound Bentleys came to mind. The Village of Oak Brook was quick to disallow cars on the main field; the car show had to quickly relocate. After an impromptu committee meeting, a well drained site along the main walkway to the admission gates was chosen. Though a bit tight in area, it had exceptional visibility and even offered shade. The Highland Games are highland games first and a car show second, so cars are never a major bill. This year however, despite overnight flooding and fallen trees leaving neighbourhoods in disrepair, some seventeen cars appeared. None sank in the mud, as our site had no mud to sink into.
Not a Sunbeam Imp, but rather a 1973 Land Rover Series III
The Arts & Culture Club of the Saint Andrew Society invited me to make a presentation describing Scottish cars. There were Scottish Americans who formed automobile companies like Winton, Buick, then General Motors; and there was the Rootes Group who built a factory at Linwood, Renfrewshire, Scotland that manufactured Hillman Imps (mainly) with the occasional Sunbeam Alpine and Humber Scepter coming off the line.
1963 Sunbeam Imp, photo from the 2008 Highland Games British Car Show
Midway through the afternoon, a friend’s Sunbeam Imp (as badged in the US) appeared, making the display complete.
Another friend contacted me earlier, I had asked if he could bring his 1929 Austin, as we didn’t have any pre-war British cars showing. He returned the contact indicating that a friend of his was letting him use his racetrack to try out his McLaren F1. This constitutes quite an acceptable reason for not attending the Highland Games British Car Show.
Lotus Elise
Early in morning however, my daughter won First Place for dancing the Flora, and Second Place for the Sword Dance!
A good time was had by all, with the Lotus Corps Chicago attempting to convince me that my next car should be a Lotus M100, while people from New Zealand approached me, actually recognizing my car as a Clubman Mini, and sharing stories.
A reception and concert was held on Friday, June 19 in Chicago to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Burnham Plan for the City of Chicago. These events coincided with the opening of two Millennium Park pavilions that capture the essence of the Burnham Plan of 1909, and marked the start of an entire season of cultural events and presentations.
The Burnham Plan was visionary. It envisioned a prairie metropolis with public lakeshore and efficient transit; with sustainable growth and economic muscle. It spawned the now famous phrase “..make no small plans..”
Before heading into the reception, I took a quick peak at the two pavilions, located on the opposite side of the Jay Pritzker Pavilion; the Frank Gehry designed bandshell and open air theatre.
Burnham Pavilion, UNStudio, Amsterdam
The rectilinear pavilion designed by Amsterdam Architect Ben van Berkel of UNStudio is a created slot of air and sky. People could wander through the square pavilion with its diagonal pilotis gracefully piercing through a solid sky of painted surface. The upward floor lights of changing colour reinforced the experience.
The oblong pavilion design by London Architect Zaha Hadid was an ambitious ‘clam’ of fluid space. Its tenuous frame sat adroitly at the site, waiting for its fabric skin. “..it was a bit more complicated than originally thought…” was a comment heard. When finished, a multimedia presentation displayed on the fabric would give a never-ending show of Chicago.
Burnham Pavilion, Zaha Hadid, London
Both pavilions presented strong, though concepts of “sky” – an important feature in a prairie city.
At the reception, civic officials and leaders, history aficionados and those who work to carry on the Burnham Plan were in attendance, under a mammoth tent erected just behind the new Harris Theater on Randolph Street. How a kid from the Canadian Prairies could ever wind up in an event like this is beyond me though not up for question. I renewed several contacts connected with Great Chicago Places and Spaces, and discussed potential format changes for next year. I also had the chance to tell the visiting Oak Park municipal delegation about my Secret Streets of the Loop presentation, and the concept behind those streets.
In a completely separate conversation, one said “..I’m off to an event with air conditioning..”, it was rather sticky weather, though many times I’m just a bit intolerant of weather like, my internal thermostat seems permanently stuck on the high plains. The Chicago Loop had been hit by a nasty rain storm earlier, at noon; it left everything humid under a dark sky. As the crowd was being ushered towards the Pritzker Pavilion, rain ponchos were being handed out as good hostess favours. Perhaps a telling omen.
The Scottish Motor Club is comprised of Illinois Saint Andrew Society members who own classic British cars and look for excuses to get them out of the garage now again. In doing so, we promote the Society, its goals and its programs. I chair this group. Our major event is the Highland Games British Car Show, held this year at the Oak Brook Polo Grounds. We attend other events throughout the year, and this year, we decided to hold a ‘pre-event’ in a neighbouring community to promote the Saint Andrew Society and the Highland Games. The Oak Park Avenue Business Association is a group I know. I used to hold membership in this organization when my practice was located in Scoville Square in Oak Park.
By using a few contacts I know on the Avenue; the Scottish Motor Club made a presentation to the Association to stage a car show with accompanying events. Two other businesses on the Avenue, the K9 Cookie Company and The Irish Shop helped us on this presentation. The Magic Tree Bookstore lent support and their facilities, as did the management of Scoville Square. The Wednesday Journal newspaper gave publicity. With all approvals in place, and with an effort of heroic proportions mounted by the manager of Cucino Paradiso who secured a street closure permit, the show went on as planned.
1967 MGB-GT
On the afternoon of July 14, like clockwork, Oak Park Avenue between Lake Street and North Boulevard was closed down, and about sixteen or so British cars and a motorcycle appeared, as did a client who drove his 1963 Lincoln Continental ( let’s see – this was the basis for the US presidential limousine, it saw a lot of international exposure: ok, we’ll let it in! ).
1957 MGA “hotrod”
It was a great collection – an MGA and an MGB-GT, a couple Jaguar XKE’s and a classic Jaguar XK150, a Triumph TR3 and Spitfire, a bunch of Lotus Europa’s and assorted other cars.
Not even counting the 1967 Sunbeam Tiger that kept driving around but never stopping, we had fifteen or so cars appear – real cars, not counting the folded-paper model cars that were displayed through the Chameleon Clothing Company.
1973 Jaguar XKE 2+2
The K9 Cookie Company joined with the Oak Park Animal Care League to stage a dog show with an interactive exhibit identifying the thirteen breeds of dogs from Scotland, they both invited friends with dogs to bring them to the Avenue and parade them around. The Thistle and Heather Highland Dancers made an appearance, then the City of Chicago Pipe Band ( who practice around the corner at Grace Episcopal Church ) marched onto the Avenue and played, eventually the highland dancers started dancing flings to the pipe band, and then sword dances – at one point, there were about 200 people watching.
The Thistle and Heather Highland Dancers with the City of Chicago Pipe Band
It was quite the afternoon of activities. All was so successful that no one even noticed that this was an entirely volunteered event – no one was paid anything for their energies other than hearty gratitude and applause.
At the invitation of the Ontario government trade representative to Chicago, I attended the Scientific Research and Experimental Tax (SR&ED) seminar last Friday, June 12. It was held at the Mid-America Club, on top of the Amoco Building / Aon Center / Standard Oil Tower / whatever that building is known as these days.
The seminar was hosted by various Canadian, Ontario and Quebec government entities. While the amount of information concerning this topic was only ‘scratched’ during this presentation, it still seemed to be a rather exhaustive description of the type of tax credits out there; the types of research that may be funded by tax credits and the criteria that fundable research must meet.
By using a few contacts I know on the Avenue; the Scottish Motor Club made a presentation to the Association to stage a car show with accompanying events. Two other businesses on the Avenue, the 
