Archinect - News

Nearly three decades old, Eisenman's (still laser-less) Greater Columbus Convention Center revisited

2019-01-09T14:35:00-05:00

With full theatrical trappings—nu-age Philip Glass music, smoke machines, mood lighting--the Eisenman team unveiled to the crowd a scale model of the building, which produced a light show to rival a Laser Floyd spectacular. These dozen red-hued Death Star beams [...] were to be placed on the building and neighboring structures, flashing, blinking, sweeping across downtown like some insane city-scale laser security system. Three years later, it was opened. Sans lasers.

Nathan Eddy, architecture documentary director and most recently a driving force to save Philip Johnson and John Burgee’s AT&T Building in New York, pens a delightful review of Peter Eisenman's 1990 competition-winning proposal for the Greater Columbus Convention Center in Columbus, Ohio.

"Forget the Bilbao Effect—today’s clients demand the Instagram Effect, with architects all but forced to include social media experiences into their designs," writes Eddy. "In 2018, a quarter century feels like forever ago, and Eisenman’s building, with its peculiar colors, slanted walls and cocky posturing, is still somehow both out of and ahead of its time, a futuristic anachronism."

“Starship Chicago” documentary tracks preservation battle of Thompson Center

2017-11-14T15:07:00-05:00

Can Helmut Jahn's Thompson Center be saved? A newly released short documentary, Starship Chicago, delves into the struggle and controversy around preserving the state of Illinois building. Some see the building as a unique representation of transparent government and Chicago's architectural spirit, while others see a rundown waste of space.

"Chicago preservationists, along with the building’s original champion, Governor James R. Thompson, are gearing up for a major battle to save the city’s most provocative architectural statement" tells the director and producer Nathan Eddy. The documentary interviews the architect himself, Helmut Jahn, the governor whose name is on the building, James. R. Thompson, along with Stanley Tigerman and other Chicago architects, critics, and historians.

Watch Starship Chicago below.

The Absent Column - a film about the fight to save Prentice Hospital

2013-10-29T11:15:00-04:00

Modern architecture, and the fight for its value in the world, is brought into sharp focus in this documentary examining the battle over the preservation of former Prentice Women’s Hospital in downtown Chicago, designed by master modern architect Betrand Goldberg.

The owner of the building is Chicago institution Northwestern University, which intends to demolish the unique brutalist building, composed of a nine-story concrete cloverleaf tower cantilevered over a rectangular five-story podium.

The stage is set for what some preservationists believe will be a defining moment in the battle to preserve modern architecture, and poses the question, Who determines the future of the past?

Directed by journalist and Northwestern alumnus Nathan Eddy, the film made its world premiere at the Durban Film Festival in South Africa and subsequently screened at the Architecture Film Festival Rotterdam and the Architecture & Design Film Festival in New York.