Archinect - News

Chicago Mayor considers scaling back sign limits on office towers to lure Salesforce

2018-09-25T13:21:00-04:00

The 20-foot-tall letters spelling “T-R-U-M-P” on the city’s second-tallest building prompted Chicago aldermen four years ago to regulate the installation of large signs on office buildings. Now, Mayor Rahm Emanuel wants to tweak that ordinance to help secure a huge expansion by software firm Salesforce in a new riverfront skyscraper. The city’s Department of Planning and Development [...] unveiled a plan that would allow larger signs on office towers, depending on how high signs are placed.

Who could forget the epic 2014 spat between Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin, backed by Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, and New York-based real estate developer Donald Trump over the controversial "TRUMP" letters on his hotel and condo tower in the city (Kamin's tempestuous relationship with Trump goes even further back)?

Elon Musk’s Boring Company selected to build Chicago airport high-speed transit tunnel

2018-06-15T14:53:00-04:00

Autonomous 16-passenger vehicles would zip back and forth at speeds exceeding 100 mph in tunnels between the Loop and O’Hare International Airport under a high-speed transit proposal being negotiated between Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s City Hall and billionaire tech entrepreneur Elon Musk’s The Boring Co., city and company officials have confirmed. Emanuel’s administration has selected Musk’s company from four competing bids to provide high-speed transportation between downtown and the airport.

Musk's Boring Co. beat out established engineering firms, including Mott MacDonald and JLC Infrastructure, even though it has famously been in business for less than two years and only has a test tunnel near the company's headquarters in the Los Angeles area to show for as construction experience.

Chicago city council approves $8.5 billion O'Hare airport expansion

2018-03-29T13:35:00-04:00

Chicago’s City Council on Wednesday approved a multibillion-dollar expansion plan for O’Hare International Airport, after an earlier dispute between the airport’s two largest carriers had previously threatened to snarl the project.

"The city of Chicago entered into an agreement with carriers United Airlines, American Airlines, Delta Air Lines and Spirit Airlines for airport renovations that include expanding the airport’s existing terminals and increasing the number and availability of some gates," Reuters reports.

Over a half million visitors attended the second Chicago Architecture Biennial

2018-01-17T14:06:00-05:00

The recently concluded 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial saw over 550,000 visitors. Artistic Directors Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee, of the LA-based firm Johnston Marklee, selected 140 architects and designers from 20 countries to participate. Among the vast number of attendees the biennial also boasts engagement of more than 10,000 students.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced, "The second Chicago Architecture Biennial reinforced Chicago's reputation as the vanguard of architectural, art and design innovation on the national and international stage".

Offering over 273 public programs, the event featured exhibitions by the Alphawood Foundation, Graham Foundation, Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. The Biennial will return September 19, 2019 and run through January 5, 2020, again in line with EXPO CHICAGO.

Check out MAD's new LA and SF designs for the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art

2016-10-27T13:48:00-04:00

After a long and obstructive political process (and some sad looking pics of Rahm Emanuel) George Lucas' Museum of Narrative Art decided to abandon its attempt to build in Chicago and now is looking toward the Golden State: specifically, Treasure Island in San Francisco and Exposition Park in Los Angeles. Ma Yansong of MAD architects has subsequently whipped up some new proposed designs for each locale. First up, Exposition Park:

And Treasure Island:

For more on the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art:

Waukegan, IL: future home of the Lucas Museum?

2016-05-05T16:02:00-04:00

With the future of a Lucas Museum on Chicago's lakefront in doubt, the city of Waukegan is asking the organizers to look a little to the north. Waukegan Mayor Wayne Motley reached out to Mellody Hobson, a Chicago financial executive and the wife of "Star Wars" creator George Lucas, about locating the proposed museum featuring digital, traditional and narrative art on Waukegan's lakefront, a city spokesman said on Wednesday.

After a shake-up Tuesday wherein Chicago-based Friends of the Parks (which was taking a 30-day break from suing to prevent the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art from being built) announced that it wasn't going to budge on its anti-LMNA position, George Lucas announced that he was seriously considering other locations. According to the Chicago Tribune Lucas' wife, Mellody Hobson, noted that "this process has been co-opted and hijacked by a small special interest group." On Thursday, The Chicago Tribune reported that Mayor Rahm Emanuel asked his Law Department Wednesday afternoon to ask a federal appeals court to reject the Friends of the Parks case before it is tried. Could the force be with the industrial shoreline of Waukegan, Illinois, population 90K?

You can conquer the box-office, but stakeholder groups are a whole different echelon:

The Lucas Museum may have found a new location – but is it "a trap"?

2016-04-15T12:29:00-04:00

Does Mayor Rahm Emanuel want to tear down the McCormick Place East building to make way for the controversial Lucas Museum of Narrative Art? If reports to that effect are true, the move, which would demolish most of the massive structure, could be an olive branch to parks advocates dedicated to keeping the shoreline clear of buildings.

"Yet the move could also be a trap. By signing off on a plan to allow the Lucas Museum to be built east of Lake Shore Drive, parks advocates would be trampling on the very principle they have used in federal court to block the museum backed by "Star Wars" creator George Lucas."

For more on the controversial plans for the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, check out some past Archinect coverage:

via GIPHY

O’Hare airport announces $1.3B expansion deal

2016-02-02T14:21:00-05:00

Mayor Rahm Emanuel and the city's major airlines have struck a deal to build the final runway envisioned in the city's multibillion-dollar modernization of O'Hare International Airport, but new gates that experts agree are key to significant reductions in long-standing flight delays are not part of the pact. The agreement, which the mayor formally announced Saturday, calls for spending $1.3 billion to build a sixth east-west runway at the airfield’s north end [...]

Chicago City Council approves construction of Lucas Museum of Narrative Art

2015-10-29T18:00:00-04:00

The Chicago City Council voted on Wednesday to approve the zoning proposal for the 300,000-square-foot Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, which will be located near Soldier Field.

According to a press release issued by Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel's office, Lucas Museum of Narrative Art President Don Bacigalupi said that “[The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art] will also deliver nearly 200,000 square feet of new green space and accessible parkland along the lakefront for all to enjoy. We are excited to move forward with the Museum's construction.”

For more on the MAD Architects-designed Lucas museum, do check out:

• Chicagoans still split over lakefront Lucas Museum plans

• Uncompromising design part of newly disclosed reasons for why Lucas museum didn't go to SF

• Lawsuit against the Lucas Museum to Proceed

The stakes of urban transformation and culture's evolving place - in Chicago

2015-10-05T12:58:00-04:00

But the very fact that this question takes such a polarized on-off form is a symptom of the way urban space in our day is being stretched on the rack of inequality, with capital either too-present or not present at all. And the questions of displacement...lurk somewhere on the horizon.

On the eve of Chicago's first-ever Architecture Biennial, Ben Davis ties together three stories - the restored Chicago Art Expo, the spectacular gala benefit preview of Chicago artist Theaster Gates's new Stony Island Arts Bank and a battle over community control and school closings in Bronzeville - in order to examine culture's evolving place in the economic and political life of the Windy City.

Requirements for affordable housing in Chicago under attack from developers

2015-09-02T15:24:00-04:00

As Chicago prepares to enter a new era of ramped-up affordable-housing development, a key question is whether private developers will go along with the city’s new guidances. A lawsuit filed... last Thursday shows signs of possible peril for the city’s low-income housing agenda. At the heart of the lawsuit is the Affordable Requirements Ordinance (ARO), which is part of Chicago’s five-year “Bouncing Back” plan for increasing affordable housing. [...]

Chicago plans architectural biennial for 2015

2014-06-24T11:58:00-04:00

The upstart exhibition, which Mayor Rahm Emanuel plans to announce Tuesday, will be called the Chicago Architecture Biennial, a nod to the prestigious Venice Biennale, which just opened its 14th international architecture exhibition. Chicago is billing its biennial as North America's biggest survey of international contemporary architecture, but the event faces a crowded field.

Chicago Mayor blasts Trump sign as 'tasteless'

2014-06-13T12:24:00-04:00

On Thursday, Mayor Rahm Emanuel belatedly jumped into the fray after a public campaign against the sign on Chicago's second-tallest building spearheaded by the Chicago Tribune’s Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic Blair Kamin. “Mayor Emanuel believes this is an architecturally tasteful building scarred by an architecturally tasteless sign,” Kelley Quinn, the mayor’s newly-appointed communications director, said in an emailed statement.

Trump responds in his typical classy style...

Before I bought the site, the Sun Times had the biggest, ugliest sign Chicago has ever seen. Mine is magnificent and popular.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 12, 2014