Oakbrook Center

Right after work.

mid-century architecture's future

I've been seeing a lot of articles recently about threatened Modern buildings around the country, including one from last week about a church in Washington, DC trying to revoke its landmark status in order to tear the building down. It's built in the Brutalist style like Oberlin's own Mudd Center, and it seems to get the same love/hate reaction. I personally love Mudd and became really interested in Brutalism, but it's definitely a flawed approach to building.

A bunch of other buildings in the Chicago area are threatened with demolition, including the Gunner's Mate School at Great Lakes, an early example of the steel and glass style found later in the Sear's Tower. Most buildings from this time period are not designated as landmarks, and often lack popular support for protection, so they're easy targets for demolition. 

Sunday Morning

eating ice cubes on a slow, hot sunday

The Gift

The idea behind the gift is making work that is geared towards a very specific audience, more or less just one person. I have no intention of giving this to that person, a friend from a long time ago I no longer speak to, but it gave me a change to really reflect on our friendship. 

This was the last thing I made as a student at Oberlin, and I ended up pretty happy with it. The story behind it isn't really that personal, but I still haven't figured out a way to tell it succinctly so I'll leave it out for now. 

One reason I posted this now is I came upon a video Ben made of the Senior Show and it features a much better analysis of it than I could ever come up with (there's also talk of cheese):

Two Links

Two really good articles I read today.

One is from the Atlantic on Hillary Clinton's campaign, and the other from the Freakonomics blog on the future of suburbia.

The Atlantic article made me sympathize with Clinton, something I could never see myself doing during the primaries. With the staff she had, she was doomed from the start and it's tragic to read her struggles with the indecision and infighting rampant in the campaign. 

The suburbia one was a good follow-up for me after reading the Post-Inversion City - a lot of different viewpoints on demographic shifts, development, and future urban planning. The main conclusion is that the suburbs (where I live and will be living shortly) as we know them now are doomed, but interpretations for their future vary wildly.