Dept. of seeing ourselves as others see us. From the Urban Land Institute’s new book Carrots & Sticks: New Zoning Downtown: “When asked which cities are most conducive to building great buildings, architect Eugene Kohn responded, ‘Chicago and Philadelphia.’ …In cities like Chicago…design excellence is already part of the city’s collective unconscious…. Chicago cabbies are just as likely to point out the local architectural landmarks as they are to boast about their baseball teams.” Provided that they speak English.
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“If bimbos didn’t exist, we might have to invent them,” reflects Marcia Froelke Coburn (Chicago, February 1990). “Maybe we already have. Maybe when a guy goes out with a bimbo, all he sees is the surface, a giggly, Champagne-fizzed dopette. But maybe the alleged bimbo is sitting there, laughing uncertainly at his jokes, knocking back the bubbly, and thinking, Why doesn’t he ever talk about differential equations with me?”
Two signs that Chicago school bureaucrats aren’t ready for reform, courtesy of the Alliance for Better Chicago Schools:
First, the good news… “Chicago enters the 1990s with more than 50 high-rise projects underway or planned,” writes Michael J.P. Smith in the Inland Architect (January/February 1990). “Bursting the traditional bounds of the Loop in all directions, for better or worse [they] represent the greatest change in the city’s skyline since the glory days of the 1920s…. If only equivalent efforts were being made in the public realm. Try tarrying to admire the lobbies of these semi-private high-rise palazzi without attracting official attention. Romantic? Ask a bag person getting the bum’s rush by building security. Castles in the clouds, it needs to be remembered, begin at the street.”
