Sewer Valves

Many people in Oak Park, a suburb of Chicago, are installing sewer valves for their homes. Some years back we had an impressive deluge and this is a reaction. Your stack or stand pipe may drain directly out to the street sewer. Putting a check valve or flapper in the way means that when the system hits load those houses refuse service and the overall pressure on the system will increase precisely at the time it is stressed. If you don’t have a flap then super tough on you, the effluent has to go somewhere. A product that creates its market. Once everyone has flaps there should be popped flaps or broken pipes.

Flaps are necessary on flood plains. As flood plain construction is common it is difficult for other municipalities, such as Oak Park, to deny their use. Chicago used to require a basement floor drain. You were expected to share your suffering with your neighbors.

Most people have their stack drain into their own sewer that then drains into the street sewer. This is a nice feature that gives the system some bounce and durability. Typically, however, the new flap is inserted between the two sewers. This creates the same shock on the system as above. I think the next deluge will disappoint those homeowners. As I remember it, I heard the sewer cover on the home sewer bounce. There was, for a moment, about a foot of water in the yard. It was the yards’ water coming into the home sewer that went up the stack and flooded the basement. Blocking the street sewer alone will not protect your basement. Maybe a sewer lid gasket on your sewer along with the flapper would work. But then it wouldn’t take the normal drain from your yard, increasing the chance of seepage.

It would be better to place the flap between the home and the home sewer. This would give the street system some bounce and also protect your basement, if not your yard. Unfortunately, if you examine your sewer, you will see that this is a deep connection. At that depth the pressure might overwhelm the flap. If you do not mind advertising that your house floods, you could break through your foundation to put the flap near the stack. Might as well put in the sump pump while you are there.

While you may disdain allowing the sewer unfettered access to your home, consider placing the flap between the stack and basement source. The flap would deny sewer water the exit of your basement without threatening system integrity. Water seeks its level; it can’t go higher in your house than it is outside. It’s just a matter of boundaries. Again, you will have to break the foundation.

The real secret of the Victorians was their plumbing. Failing all else perhaps install a new water closet somewhere upstairs, move the washer and drier up there as well, close off the basement plumbing and then you won’t need a flapper.

Mullet Architecture

I thought of this term while visiting Indianapolis and seeing their library and a nearby church converted to residential. Mullet refers to a hairstyle that is:

-business in the front and party in back.

A mullet is a type of catfish. Mullet head is a derogatory word implying poor and therefore stupid. This word became associated with the hairstyle a few decades ago. While I claim credit for Chicago Facade, peeling the facade off an old building then pasting it on a new one to satisfy nostalgia, the Mullet Architecture term already exists.

Examples given are Frank Lloyd Wright’s Winslow house in River Forest and modernist houses built in Nazi Germany which maintained a severe front. I am extending the term to Mullet houses that meet the requirements of historic districts while allowing large family rooms and kitchens.

This type of restoration arises from envy of the Ranch styles with their dramatic living/dining and open kitchen areas. People living in Craftsman, Victorian, Four Square, Elizabethan, Georgian, Italianate, etc. homes want to have the suburban open pit television aesthetic. Since they can’t capture the spaciousness of those cheap unincorporated lots, they compensate with fancy kitchens.

The kitchens are remarkable. Consider a restaurant line chef’s work station. It is quite snug, in part because space for guests represents revenue but also because chefs are on their feet. Some pastry chefs may maintain a piece of marble, but I have yet to see any of the popular counter tops in a restaurant kitchen. These home kitchen Hestia shrines are an atavism representing a lost mythical past. One giveaway is the lack of a smoke hood above a ridiculous industrial stove. I have seen paintings hung in a kitchen.

The Indianapolis Library anchors a large park designed in the image of the National Mall. Centering of the Sales Force tower at the opposite end of the park has already subverted the nationalist image.

Losing the original pleasant library building at the end of the park would be wrong. I fail to see why keeping that building required that they add on to it. A separate new library building, even at a different site doesn’t seem to be more expensive.

I am not a fan of repurposing churches. I understand nostalgia for the buildings. But the cheery appropriation of the sacred for the profane is annoying. Indianapolis wanted to maintain the look of their park while building condominiums. The mullet is easier than attempting an architecturally appropriate modern building on the site.

  

Museums

Trip Advisor recently picked The Art Institute of Chicago as its best museum. I like museums that have a flavor of subversion to them.  The worst museum in the world might be Epcot Center.  It doesn’t claim museum status but it is supposed to represent Future World, sort of a perpetual exposition. There is nothing subversive about Epcot. Drained of content it is nothing more than a people containment facility, which may well represent their view of the future.

My current favorite is the Door County Historical Museum in Sturgeon Bay Wisconsin. It is jammed with the usual historical knickknacks. They have a discussion of fish boils. There is also a fascinating wildlife diorama constructed by a true obsessive. In the middle of the museum is a leftover jail cell with the key.  While I was there a girl locked her little brother in it. What little girl hasn’t wished to do that?  That is what a museum is for.

My favorite exhibit is the Mathematica Exhibit. It has moved around a bit.  Originally built by IBM, I saw it when it was at the Museum of Science and industry in Chicago.  You might pass through thinking it hopelessly arcane. The fun part is when you see a child suddenly become distracted and stare raptly at one of the displays.  I have no idea if the little darling is actually getting anything or just trying to get a rise out of their parents. Maybe they are just watching the little car going around the Mobius strip.  The parents get agitated. It disturbs them that their child might actually have an interest in the exhibit.  They try to distract the kid, draw them on, and practically drag them out.  That is what a museum is for.

The Adler Planetarium in Chicago has a Christmas show, Star of Wonder.  After they have gathered the rubes in and ensconced them in their seats, they roll the stars back to the way they were around the birth of Christ.  Then they patiently explain to them that the most likely explanation of the “Christmas Star” was a conjunction of planets in the Persian Zodiac.  I doubt that most of the patrons are going to consider why the Biblical authors glossed over a zodiac event as the precursor of Christianity. But still, that is what a museum is for.

George Lucas is going to build another museum on the Chicago museum campus, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art.  It will house his Star Wars and Norman Rockwell collection. Museums are, of course, the expression of the egotism of their benefactors.  Any city that features the Rubloff Paper Weight collection at the Art Institute can’t turn its nose up.

The Lucas project has all the indications of a disaster. The more fascinating the museum’s building, the less interesting the exhibits.  The new Lucas building looks to be a humdinger.  There is Opposition of Friends of The Parks, and Better Government Association.  To his credit Lucas is proposing 3000 underground parking spaces.  Scary that they will be built in a waste dump dating from the Chicago fire.  Old waste dumps are not always safe waste dumps. An outside architect has been brought in all the way from China.  This is probably payback for all the work China has given our architects. But the only time our architects are that generous is when they are afraid the project is going to hurt their reputation and future sales. We have a history of fall guy architects being brought in for difficult clients with disastrous projects: Benjamin T. Wood from Boston for Soldier Field, Moriyama & Teshima from Toronto for 10 S LaSalle. If they are far enough away people will know that the fall guy had a big project in Chicago and not that it is loathed.

My greatest fear is that the museum will be popular.  I don’t want the museum campus to feel like Epcot.

1984 Buildings

You can do this for any city.  Here are my picks for the Chicago buildings to use for the four ministries in 1984:

Ministry of Truth:

http://www.chicagoarchitecture.info/Building/1063/Leo-Burnett-Building.php

Ministry of Peace:

http://www.chicagoarchitecture.info/Building/1051/The-Boeing-Corporate-Headquarters.php

For those who like that sort of humor it is located on Riverside.

Ministry of Plenty:

http://www.chicagoarchitecture.info/Building/1031/Chicago-Board-of-Trade.php

Ministry of Love:

http://www.blueprintchicago.org/2010/12/22/metropolitan-correctional-center/

Obviously Orwell’s descriptions are bleaker, give it time.

Awnings

Large office buildings are unoccupied during the weekends.  Even when they are occupied, office management, by custom if not fact, feels entitled to turn down the heat.  On Monday mornings the heat is turned up again and the ice that has collected on these buildings falls off onto the streets below.  Certain buildings seem designed to take maximum advantage of this effect.  In particular the diamond topped Smurfit Stone building at Michigan and Randolph used to be the best example of this effect.  The diamond roof dropped all the ice directly on the entrance. 

If there ever is a nuclear disaster I am sure that Chicagoans will still go to work.  I vividly remember people inching along the walls of the building hoping to get to their offices before being brained by the ice.  The ice dramatically shattered in the plaza before them sending fragments up into the air. Since then the building has constructed an entryway with shops on its plaza giving tenants greater safety. 

The Citibank center, formerly the Northwestern train station was a wonderful example of architectural spite. The scalloped roof would gather heat at the top, sending the ice and snow onto the lower levels, each iteration gathering more mass until some hapless commuter would be buried under an avalanche. The management finally built a large awning over the entrance area, spoiling the entertainment, or at least moving it to the street.

 The sensible bungalow solution of an awning in front of many Chicago sky scrapers is not for concern over rain or sun but because while we are willing to accept the occasional rare fatality from falling ice in the street it is more difficult for a building to get a favorable settlement if they were injured or killed in an entrance.

Chicago Facade

When I was a kid, there was urban renewal.  This meant many vacant lots with construction debris, rebar, huge piles of dirt; they were perfect.  When they rebuilt the neighborhood, the adults asked us what kind of playground we wanted.  We tried to tell them: construction debris, rocks, huge piles of dirt, what we were saying is that we wanted our vacant lots.  So they put a bump, a little hill, in the middle of the playground.

LaSalle Street is an architectural success, in large part, because the buildings have a common proscenium.  I have heard that word used to describe the theatrical nature of the buildings street level.  I think of it as a kick plate, like the ones at the bottom of kitchen cabinets or doors.  Even the State of Illinois Thompson center has a line distinguishing the bottom of the building from the rest.  On other streets, the buildings kick plate/proscenium, in deference to Chicago’s plaza law, raise their skirts to give more walking space. On LaSalle they come up to the sidewalk.

The building at 10 S. LaSalle is particularly odd. It replaces the Otis building. That experience has been so traumatic that the new building does not have a name.  On top, it is a normal blue skyscraper. The kick plate however is an old granite facade tacked around the bottom of the building. What happened is that the developers didn't coordinate their normal process of destruction and building sufficiently and they destroyed several landmarks at the same time, the Otis building and the Chicago Stock Exchange building.  There were conservation meetings, a photographer, Richard Nickel died in a salvage expedition; the developers had to respond.

One story has the sister of the Heller brothers attending a conservation meeting:

-This is terrible, who owns that building?

-You do.

For her they took a room out of the Stock Exchange building and installed it at the Art Institute. Another sop to the preservationists was to take the old front of the Otis building and stick it around the bottom of its new blue skyscraper. Just as the adults had tried to assuage the kids’ nostalgia with the playground, the developers halfheartedly made a gesture to preservation.

Turning a disaster into a tragedy, this response became an architectural fashion, trotted out whenever they need to flatten landmarks. The worst example is the flying saucer landing on the coliseum at Soldier Field.  The fashion has reached the neighborhoods.  Walgreens, the destroyer of the Car Kabob in Berwyn mentioned in Wayne’s World, is now carefully keeping the Midwestern storefront at Oak Park and Madison on the front of that new store.

It’s not enough to raze landmarks, now we have to make fun of them.

Architectural Criteria

When a Universalist temple requested a proposal from an architect some years ago, their principal requirement was that the new addition not be architecturally significant. They were terrified that architectural significance would deny them autonomy in the use of their building.   I’m put in mind of this story by the fuss over the old Northwestern Prentice Women’s Hospital. Hospitals tend to favor neo brutalism and this building is no exception.  Four concrete towers are suspended around a central core.  The new Prentice is a glass Michigan Avenue style building with no more interest than any other department store, but time will tell.  At least it respects the neighboring buildings. Prentice has valet parking. I wonder how good the tips are.

The point of the old hospital was to meet the challenge of the home birthing movement.  In the 1800s, all births were home births but now most births take place in hospitals.  The Chicago maternity center, financially supported by Northwestern, encouraged and supported mothers delivering at home.  This movement was never particularly large in Chicago but back in the early seventies, it had a resurgence that was met in large part by the then new hospital.  The hospital was designed, and its building was intended to advertise, that mothers would room with their babies while still making efficient use of the nursing staff.  The Chicago Maternity Center did not make any appreciable inroads into the earnings of obstetricians.  However, having built this new facility Northwestern was able to cut off the Chicago Maternity Center grant money with a clear conscience.

This facility was also an answer to Michael Reese on the south side, which had always offered rooming in, moms and newborns in the same room.  Michael Reese had secret parking places, where you could leave your car if you scouted around and found them. Finally, the north side could have the same rooming in facilities at Northwestern that the south side had at Michael Reese.  Michael Reese has since closed.

Demographics and Northwestern have moved on.  Today 1/3 of all moms in the United States get caesarean sections and the average length of stay is over four days. There are a number of legitimate reasons to schedule a c-section but most are the consequence of delayed labor. The grift is simple:  when the pain gets intense, the patient goes for the epidural, which sometimes stops labor, then a C-section becomes necessary and you have to recover from abdominal surgery while taking care of an infant.  Bonding isn’t a big issue any more, yet the unfortunate building remains.

 An http://www.saveprentice.org  wants to save this utilitarian building after its purpose has passed.  What these people fail to grasp is that they are killing all hope for architectural creativity and design.  Would you want to pay for a building that you would never be allowed to demolish?   I can hear the client:

-Oh no, it has features.

-Make it more banal.

-It looks too clean, too elegant.

-Someone might like kitsch.

Eventually all new buildings will have to be under ground, so that their demolition will go unnoticed. 

Raze Unity Temple

Some time ago, in Chicago’s Hyde Park, well, on the border with Washington Park, Laredo Taft built a statue of a concrete very close to sandstone.  It was a variety of people, sharply cut, in a procession.  He built the statue around a fountain and over time, it eroded as he meant it to do.  The statue was the Fountain of Time and it was a performance piece.  Eventually it eroded to nothing and then some stupid people decided to rebuild it at considerable expense since he obviously hadn't made it correctly.  Today you can see a replica of Laredo Taft’s performance piece desecrating the site.  Thank heavens there isn’t an afterlife or he would be furious.  Admittedly, it still will eventually erode, but they completely missed the point.

Over a hundred years ago, some Scots in Oak Park decided to build a temple. They wanted to stick it to all the other churches in the area.  Their point was that the congregation owned the church and not the other way around.  They didn't use granite, limestone or marble.  They didn’t decorate with gold leaf, statuary, carvings or expensive woods.  They hired a smart young architect to build something a little pricy, but as comfortable and elegant as their own living room, if they were blessed with that much taste.  He used poured concrete and the normal construction materials of the time.  People pointed out that it wouldn't last, but that was the point, the building wasn't supposed to last, the congregation was.  They could always tear it down, sell the land and move farther out when it came to that.  Now the affirmation has become a desecration; so expensive to maintain that the building receives government grants for its upkeep.  They have become the temple of Wright.  Thank heavens there isn’t an afterlife, those Unitarian Scots would be spinning like tops.

The Romans considered Jerusalem an outpost of the Persian Empire and the Romans hated the Persians. The Roman travesties included perpetual slavery,   institutional torture, messing up the calendar so that the land was destroyed rather than lying fallow and oppressive taxation for the purpose of building monuments.

The Roman Catholic Church, for all its faults, teaches that no matter how beautiful something is, no matter how much you love it, everything of this world has an end.

Now, Oak Park is building a combination hotel and condominium glass spire, designed to overlook the temple, ignoring the neighboring religious strip mall along Lake Street.  The temple has become the tourist attraction driving the development.  It’s hard to imagine anyone with a larger ego than Frank Lloyd Wright, but I am certain that he would be appalled. Thank heavens there isn't an afterlife.