archGFX » chicago

Healthy Streets Campaign

adam — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 14:23:19 +0000

It's a good thing I put my car into storage. According to the Healthy Streets Campaign, my neighborhood is a scary place to drive or walk. Well, technically, the danger zone is a few blocks west of me. It's kind of amazing, actually. Even though you can see a number of six-way intersections on the map, they're all far better signalized than the Damen-Elston-Fullerton mess just off the map. And visibility is far worse at Kedzie and Belmont (underneath the expressway there) . So the drivers in the "Drive with Care Zone" are really without excuse. The worst intersections are completely ordinary, according to the 2005 accident totals:

Pulaski and Irving Park: 248
Cicero and Irving Park: 238
Kimball and Belmont: 226
Cicero and Belmont: 205
Cicero and Fullerton: 172

(stats from the "pledge" that was mailed to my apartment)

Looptopia

adam — Wed, 16 May 2007 11:25:04 +0000

that was about it for looptopia. A few odd and quirky sights, but not much real entertainment. Underwhelmed would be the wrong word. I didn't have expectations of the event, just a slightly more entertaining friday. instead, most of the events required advance tickets, or had lines around the block, or both. I supposed it didn't help that me, my wife, and the friends we were meeting all wound up working 2 hours late, but i don't think getting there in time for the parade would have helped my impression.

Apparently getting there later would have been worse, the police gave up on the "dusk to dawn" thing, and closed it down at midnight. go chicago.

Moved

adam — Sun, 29 Apr 2007 16:59:55 +0000

The architemps experiment is over. I didn't really experience it the way it was meant to be experienced, i suppose. during 7 months with the agency, i spent 7 months with 1 firm, and 1 day at an interior design firm. Architemps really consider themselves better at providing 'emergency' staffing, which is what i did at the interior design firm. they don't bill themselves as a staffing agency, which is fair enough. it's not their goal. nonetheless, they are a staffing agency, and they do charge a fee to firms looking to hire their temps.

Which is the position i found myself in. I'm really good at making pretty pictures, and making them fast. The firm i started at was quickly seduced, and kept me on for 3 more projects (and 6 months) after the one they were looking to staff for. The problem comes in because architecture is seasonal. so come January, small firms dry up, and either pay late (K2), downsize, or take on speculative work. This time around, it was option 2. I was moved down to part time, along with a couple other people. Really, this is the problem Architemps is trying to solve. It seems that architecture firms are just too interested in the young talent to treat them as commodities.

So, while i was working part time, i started shopping around, and found a job working from home for the remaining hours of the week, for a firm too small yet to have enough of an office for me to work in. As of last weekend, they've now moved into a new office that has room for me:

(compare to previous versions). Since i'm the only architectural employee so far, I have 4 desks, which makes my area bigger than either of the partners' So far the workload has been considerable, hence the lack of posting. (you can also blame my procrastination while working from home).

of former professors and new magazines

adam — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 02:11:10 +0000

AIA Chicago announced their 2006 Design Awards today. Ammar got an interior nomination for his Me Miyake interior:

It's very interesting, Ammar's work has always been minimal in the sense of how it reacts to program and having open plans. But this space is surprisingly hard edged and orthogonal, in contrast to the work that he was doing when i was in his class.

Also today, i got my very own copy of architect magazine 1. You know the one, it used to be called architecture magazine, but now it always has some attractive starchitect plastered on the cover. Apparently their attempts to convert architecture into a celebrity sport aren't going so well. it's bad enough that they ship them out to every firm, but now they're trolling the phonebooks. mine came addressed to an architect who hasn't lived here since the building was remodelled.

that's a specially crafted link. otherwise the page refreshes automatically so they can serve you more ads. it's also nofollowed.

You can dress it up all you want, it’s still a garage

adam — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 19:07:15 +0000

Kudos to chicago's Landmarks panel for rejecting a plan wherein yet another building is stripped down to its historic terra cotta facade, and had something completely unrelated stuffed inside. I've had enough of projects that use a multistory garage as street frontage, and dress it up in a fake building with spandrel windows. Programatic honesty is a virtue of well designed buildings. Architects should be ashamed to have their names associated with garages that pretend to be buildings.