Day 5 – Battle of the Classics – Mies vs Frank

It’s not often you visit two of modernism’s 20th century masterpieces within the space of a few hours – but this was the challenging and exciting prospect facing the tour on our final day in Chicago. Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe were both prolific contributors to the architecture of Chicago. Wright’s Unity Temple and Mies’ Crown Hall are key projects which clearly affirm the design agendas and philosophies of each architect. In many ways the two projects share a strong conviction of innovating with new materials and spatial strategies, but as we were to discover this was achieved in divergent ways.

 

IIT & CROWN HALL

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First stop was IIT – Illinois Institute of Technology. Channelling a “more is less” philosophy, our student guide led us on an exploration of both the IIT campus masterplan and the campus centrepiece Crown Hall. For the tourers this providing for a classic study in Miesian design moves – the grid implemented as organising device both at the urban and building scale, structural innovation with steel and glass, and horizontal planes and platforms framing an expansive space light, reflective and expansive space. The subterranean black reflective library space being a particular highlight.
Across the campus dotted with multiple Miesian moments, Crown Hall lookalike buildings by SOM fooled some and provided an interesting case study in modernist deception, transforming many of Mies ‘truthful’ structural and material strategies into aesthetic adaptations. (Thanks to Jenna for coining the new architectural terminology of FoMo – Faux Modern). We also explored the more recent contemporary additions to the campus of OMA’s McCormick Student Centre & Helmet Jahn’s student housing.

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OAK PARK & UNITY TEMPLE

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Led by the lyrical and learned Larry from Off the Track, we then ventured out to Oak Park located on the southern edge of Chicago city, a revealing journey of shifting urban and socioeconomic circumstances from highrise downtown via the gentrifying suburbs of Wicker Park and Logan Square, and through the challenging urban outskirts. Beyond this the commuter suburb of Oak Park is strangely and perhaps cinematically familiar – a typical middle American garden suburb of timber clad homes with manicured lawns and swinging front porch seats.

Oak Park contains a vast collection of Frank Lloyd Wright projects. Our tour of the suburb included Wrights own home and studio and revealed the evolution of Wright’s residential innovations and experimentations between 1889 and 1913.
A collective highlight was Unity Temple, which surprised us all with its internal spatial complexity, intertwined circulation paths and vertically interconnected series of spaces. Layered vertical spaces in the main temple space provided many spaces for the tourers to sit and contemplate multiple perspectives, lighting and material details. Sara and Phil from Dulux also seemed to be enjoying the grey,blue and green interior colour palette.

 

DEBATES IN TRANSIT

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There’s nothing like a long security queue and delayed flight at Chicago O’Hare to spark an architectural debate, so putting aside all our preconceived notions, aesthetic preferences and ideological positions; the tourers had it out. Unity vs Crown… the singular, horizontally expansive and unified spatiality of Mies vs the interconnected, vertically layered and compressive spaces of Frank. The verdict was close (and perhaps a mute point) with an initial tie being broken by forcing the fence sitter in our midst into a decision. And so with a margin of 3-2 it seems in the end the tourers came down on the side of spatial complexity. Round 1 to Frank.

Day 4 – Chicago practice visits 2

RONAN ARCHITECTS

Our first stop today was the office of Ronan Architects, a first floor concrete loft located outside the Chicago city centre. The incredibly generous John Ronan talked to us about his fifteen year old practice and fielded questions about project procurement and how his practice operated. He walked us through walls full of drawings and desks full of models of recent competitions and projects including the Gary Comer Youth Centre, a ‘transformational’ project for a neighbourhood in South Chicago. John then took us across to Ronan Architects’ most well known project to date, the Poetry Foundation, only a couple of blocks away. His explanation of the seductive screen to the street, beautifully proportioned volumes, attention to detail and material execution were inspirational.  DSC_0906

KRUECK AND SEXTON

John kindly offered to accompany us to our next appointment with Krueck and Sexton. We met with Thomas Jacobs who gave us the practice history, an evolution from a small residential practice to a firm now undertaking major public and government commissions. Tom entertained us with his recent experience in renovating Crown Hall at the Illinois Institute of Technology where a single mullion detail was the subject of nine months of heated debate with the ‘Mies Police.’ We then cabbed it downtown to check out their Spertus Institute on Michigan Avenue. Yugene and Andreas gave us the full tour with special attention to the innovative facade which broke with the historic streetscape.DSC_0945

SMITH AND GILL

After burritos, chips and guacamole for lunch, it was time to up the scale. Our next meeting was with John Burcher on the 23rd floor of the 1960s SOM classic 111 West Monroe building. Smith and Gill specialise in the ‘super-tall’ tower and are the authors of the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. They are also working on the future world’s tallest building the Kingdom Tower in Jeddah, which will be one kilometre tall. When asked how high it was possible to go with the new technology, John just smiled and said ‘the sky’s the limit.’ With a long history working within Chicago practices, John regaled us with stories of SOM at its height, with over 5,000 staff and a tea lady pushing the trolley between the drafting desk offering ‘hot nuts at four!’. DSC_0999

STRAWN SIERRALTA

Our final practice visit for the day was with husband-wife duo Brian and Karla of Strawn Sierralta. We were graciously invited into their home-office, a renovated one bedroom apartment in Bertrand Goldberg’s Marina Towers. Maintaining a small architectural practice together, Karla also teaches full time at IIT whilst Brian has a consultancy in design thinking and strategy. Needless to say, our young group felt many parallels with these guys and we swapped stories on their balcony and checked out the top floor laundry and roof top for 360 degree views of Chicago. DSC_0022

CHICAGO ARCHITECTURE FOUNDATION TALK

Brian and Karla are also the co-presidents of the Chicago Architectural Club, and organised for the DST crew to speak about their own work to a local audience. The presentations were well-received (even though Ben cheated and went over time) and were followed by a lively and engaged ‘q and a’ session. This was also the first time we had really got to see each others work which gave us an insight into each others practices making for new discussions over dinner. After some serious burger action at the Little Goat Diner, Phil suggested a blues bar. What a brilliant way to spend our last night in Chicago. Entertained by the dulcet tones Charlie Love and his Silky Smooth Band alongside diva Shirley Johnson, we tapped, boogied and drank Jen-and-tonics into the wee hours of the morning. DSC_0094

Day 3 – Chicago Practice Visits

After a well-needed rest, Day 3 began with the group rushing off to begin our first series of Chicago practice visits. Before we go on to tell you about the practices we visited, it is worth mentioning that by this stage, we had a developed understanding of both the way in which the built environment developed within the city, which was further iterated in the meeting of the four practices. SOM The first practice we met with was

SOM.
For those that aren’t aware – SOM are one of the largest and most influential practices within Chicago and across America, and have been in practice since 1936. They have had much to do with the development of the city, and have sky scrapers scattered across Chicago. Doug at SOM ran us through current projects related to the city, most notably their work with the redevelopment of the millenium Park – furthering the Burnham Plan of Chicago which was undertaken in 1909. The main focus was furthering the connection between the city and the lakefront. We were taken for a tour throughout the park, which we all agreed was a brilliant piece of urban design – reinforcing why SOM have had such influence on the development of the city over the years.

PORT

The next practice we visited was the very talented Andrew Moddrell of PORT, in his office in the Monadnock building (the tallest full masonry building). From the beginning Andy was very engaging, particularly given many of us could relate to him as directors of young practices. Andy ran through many of his innovative and highly creative urban design propositions, most notably his Denver City Park City Loop project (definitely worth following this hyperlink!) Andy was also very generous with his time, taking us on a walk down Dearborn St- a street on which Mies’ post office complex sits alongside many influential chicago architecture projects.

WHEELER KEARNS

Across the road from the Monadnock building sits the practice of Wheeler Kearns. Dan Wheeler took us through their practice, explaining their method of practice. It was great to see the hand made iterative models that the practice use; and we were equally as enamoured with the large plate of gummy bears on the meeting room table arrival. Dan also pulled us out of the office for another walk down Dearborn St; during which he told us further architectural anecdotes, building on the story of the city and furthering developing our understanding of this place.

STUDIO GANG

Our last visit for the afternoon was the office of Studio Gang. We were shown a body of works that the practice had undertaken, it was interesting to note the practice took on projects irrespective of typology and scale – the practice was interested in developing projects with a design potential. It was great to see the extensive materiality research, and the use of models in the design development of the projects. What was most notable about visiting each of these practices was the passion and knowledge they held for their cities Architecture. This was evident in their enthusiasm to take us outside, to walk down the street and to point out their favourite buildings.

Day 2 [aka page 6 of itinerary)

In an attempt to ward off our jet lag, we met at the hotel lobby to go on an early morning neighbourhood exploration. Except for Ben. There are a lot of amazing cute little Art Deco buildings in the neighbourhood we are staying In – more on this later!

PART A:
Post our morning walk we jumped in cabs downtown to explore the skyscrapers of Chicago through a river based boat tour run by the Chicago Architecture Foundation. Highlights include towers by SOM (who we are going to visit tomorrow morning) and learning how Chicago has a predilection for passing off their buildings form as ‘contextualism’.

PART B:
Then we met Larry. Larry was our exceptional tour guide who had a background in architecture history, and more notably, worked as a voice over artist. Larry drove us 1.5 hours down to Plano, where he took us on a tour of Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth house (given we begged Bernadette to add it to our jam-packed itinerary).

The two things that stood out to us were its positioning against a noisy highway that now backs onto the property, and how the building is showing a few wrinkles – particularly due to the flood damage over rising river levels over past decades.

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Ps: We definitely recommend visiting – Google ‘off the map architectural excursions’. As a true Mies aficionado, on our way home Larry detoured us past the Lakeshore Drive apartments – in which he fortunately used to own an apartment

Are we there yet…..

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Day 1 of this year’s Dulux Study Tour is an extraordinarily long one, with crossing the date line somewhere over the pacific apparently it is still Saturday nearly 48 hours after we left Australia Saturday morning.

According to the theory of relativity, the you travel faster the more subjective time slows down. Paradoxically it seems the same thing is happening in LAX, except we are not moving anywhere, let alone fast.

Apparently the pilot for our flight has been misplaced. I am not sure how you lose a captain of a commercial airline, I honestly think that America Airline should keep closer tabs on them, maybe get one of those things that you put on your key ring so that when you clap they beep and you can find them – or in our case put them in the cockpit and fly our damn plane to Chicago.

Now they have us boarding, but have not found the captain, Sarah is worried that they are going start calling for volunteers from the passengers to fly the plane – this is not going to end well.

Wait, the captain has arrived and we are pushing back from the terminal, 4 more hours and here we come Chicago….

(Meanwhile, Jenna and Cherry had no issues, and likened the first leg of the journey to the amazing race, given team Sydney arrived 5 hours before the others and had a brilliant pilot who took it upon himself to commentate the journey)

Confirmed itinerary….

With the departure date fast approaching, I’m excited to announce the itinerary has been completed, if you wish to have a look, please see the PDF attached in the link below.

As per previous years, we will blog daily about our observations and experiences, and will tweet with more frequency during the day.

…and for those on Intagram, please follow our hashtag #2014duluxstudytour

2014 Dulux Study Tour Pack FOR WEBSITE

 

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T -4 weeks

With just a fraction over four weeks until we depart, things are heating up.

We’ve had plenty of confirmations from practices to visit, it’ a getting very exciting!

Tickets have been purchased to tour both Falling Water and Philip Johnson’s  Glass House; it will be a great to compare the two, not only the architecture, but also geography, and as much as its a cliche, the journey to both of these places.

Feel free to make any music suggestions to play on approach,  however I can’t seem to get Simon and Garfunkel out of my head!

Keep up to date with the Twitter feed, as we post links to projects and practices that we are visiting, as they are confirmed.

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2014 Dulux Study Tour

Drum roll please….

The five winners of the 2014 Dulux Study Tour are……

The group will depart on May 10th, and will visit Chicago, Falling Water and New York.

 

Ben Milbourne, Victoria

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Having graduated from the University of Sydney with first class honours in architecture, Ben Milbourne continues to enthusiastically and ambitiously invest in the profession.

Milbourne’s commitment to architecture includes mentoring and teaching at RMIT and Monash Universities. He has contributed widely to publications and exhibitions, and was a finalist in the 2013 Australian Timber Design Awards.

Since forming his own practice, Bild Architecture, in 2008, Milbourne has established a reputation for working collaboratively with his clients, colleagues and the broader industry to produce serious, bold and well-considered designs that integrate sustainability to minimize the environmental impact of the whole life of the project.

As a founding partner of Regional Associates, he has significantly contributed to community and conservation programs with extremely disadvantaged communities, producing real and tangible benefits for the local people and the environment in Uganda and Rwanda.

Milbourne’s personal commitment to architecture and the built environment impressed the jury, making him an excellent candidate for the 2014 Dulux Study Tour.

 

 

Michael Zanardo, New South Wales

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Michael Zanardo graduated from the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) in 2003 with first class honours and is a registered architect in New South Wales. His credentials in all of the Dulux Study Tour selection criteria – practice, design, education and community – are exemplary.

Zanardo has demonstrated a passion and commitment for architecture, in particular social and affordable housing. He has published several papers on affordable housing and regularly delivers lectures at public forums, universities, conferences, and professional CPD events. Zanardo has successfully combined practice and consultancy with an ongoing dedication to research and teaching activities. He has taught every year since graduation, first at UTS and now at the University of Sydney.

Zanardo enthusiastically contributes to the architecture community, particularly initiatives that engage with the public. A team member of Super Sydney, he has been actively involved in the Institute’s Architecture on Show series, has volunteered for Archikidz and is an active member of the New South Wales Chapter’s Built Environment Committee.

His focus on serving people and community through design was highly commended by the jury, who considered Zanardo an outstanding ambassador for Australia’s emerging architects and a worthy participant in the 2014 Dulux Study Tour.

 

Suzannah Waldron, Victoria

SuzannahWaldron_PhotoSuzannah Waldron has progressed quickly in her career, becoming widely recognized for her leadership within the profession in both practice and education. After graduating with first class honours from RMIT University in 2006, she gained valuable experience in the UK and in Europe with the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA). In 2007, she co-founded Melbourne-based practice Searle x Waldron Architecture, a firm which is engaged in public and cultural projects and has an international focus – a difficult path for many.

The studio’s built and unbuilt work is widely awarded and published, most notably the Art Gallery of Ballarat Annexe, which received the Institute’s Victorian Chapter 2012 Award for Public Architecture – Additions and Alterations and was the cover story for Architecture Australia. The studio has also won multiple competitions including MoCAPE in China and UN-Habitat spatial design competition for a mobility centre in Kosovo, and was shortlisted in the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation’s Fugitive Structures competition.

In practice, Waldron demonstrates a high level of professionalism, a sense of clarity in approaching design within complex cultural and civic contexts, and an ability to communicate with professionals and non-professionals.

 

Cherry Williamson, New South Wales

Self Photo B+WCherry Williamson received a Bachelor of Architecture with first class honours from the University of Newcastle in 2008, and was a recipient of the University Medal. She also received the Architects Medallion from the NSW Architects Registration Board.

After working with Michael Marshman and Associates in Bega as a student, Williamson worked with Francis-Jones Morehen Thorp in Sydney for five years before joining the CKDS Architecture team in Gosford in late 2012. In her current role she is admired for her ability to read a project brief, assemble a team and inspire everyone – including the client – to deliver excellence in architectural services from design to completion.

Williamson has made a significant contribution to architectural education and to the Australian Institute of Architects as founder and co-chair of EmAGN Newcastle. Over the past eight years, she has mentored a number of students and graduates on their journey from university to employment. Williamson impressed the jury with her personal commitment to architecture practice and her enthusiasm for her role as a tutor, as well as her involvement with the Institute. The jury agreed that she is an excellent candidate and would benefit greatly from the experience of the Dulux Study Tour.

 

 

Jenna Rowe, New South Wales

Dulux_Study_Tour_Jenna_Rowe_BWJenna Rowe graduated from the University of Tasmania’s Masters of Architecture program with first class honours. She started her career as a research assistant in the office of the Tasmanian Government Architect, and is currently employed as a retail design manager at Terroir.

Rowe’s commitment to and passion for architecture and design is evident in the energy and focus that she has applied to extracurricular activities. She is very active with EmAGN, first in the Tasmanian Chapter and currently with the New South Wales Chapter, and she is also a prolific blogger and user of social media. As such, she is part of the next generation of architectural spokespeople, bringing the dialogue about the benefits of design to the broader community.

The jury agreed that Rowe would gain immensely from the Dulux Study Tour. Her enthusiasm for sharing information with the broader community means she is well placed to share her learnings from this invaluable experience. As her first overseas travel, the 2014 Dulux Study Tour will be of great benefit to the ongoing development of her career.

 

2014 Post Judging analysis

The Jury met and reviewed the shortlist last week; five winners were selected after a thorough, rigorous judging process.

The winners will be announced at the AAAA’s, in Hobart, March 20 2014.

A number of you have been asking for feedback, we can’t enter into an individual conversation with each of you, however an outline of what the jury are looking for is below.

The prize will be awarded to five emerging architects or graduates on the basis of their individual contributions to;

  • Architectural practice
  • Education
  • Design excellence
  • And community involvement

It is desired that the winning entrants:

  • will have held a significant responsibility on a variety of projects
  • will have demonstrated a strong contribution to their practice and the architectural industry
  • will have displayed exceptional; creative and critical thinking in relation to their projects
  • may have contributed to architectural education through tutoring or mentoring
  • may have been considered or nominated for design awards, prizes or competitions
  • will have shown leadership within the profession
  • will have been involved in Institute and/or community activities

 

 

2013 Alumni – Hobart

Last week, 29 of the 30 Alumni members met in Hobart for an archi-marathon whirlwind; a pace we’re all used to!

On Thursday evening we had a candid discussion about MONA, from James Pearce, project architect on MONA from Fender Katsalidis, as well as a brief presentation from this years Alumni group.

On Friday, the group then caught an early ferry to MONA, nursing coffees after a late night in Hobart.

O device in hand, here we were treated to the subterranean delights on MONA, where we were let loose for two hours.

The visceral effect was too much for some, remaining above ground was wise a move.

Following a light lunch and wine tasting in the Barrel Room, we briefly visited Room 11″s Glenorchy Art and Sculpture Park; a recent National Award winner for Urban Design.

The tour official concluded after GASP, however a good number of participants stayed on for the weekend to enjoy Hobart.

Peter Walker from the Alumni year 1, has collated information on the Alumni Group, ans started a tumblr blog so you all know who you are, there will be a pop quiz next year!

Tom Ferguson, from the 2010 Alumni has posted some amazing pictures on his flicker site here.

Thanks to every single one of you, and a special thanks to Phil for having  the foresight to make this such an amazing program.

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