Places: City buildings play role in movie on architect
Tuesday, April 08, 2008
By Patricia Lowry, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Darrell Sapp/Post-Gazette
The "Pittsburg" leg of the Penn Station rotunda of 1900, when the city's name was spelled without the "H."
Was Chicago architect Daniel Burnham a visionary space planner who brought order, clarity and monumentality to American cities? Or did he, as Louis Sullivan suggested, set architecture back 50 years with his unflagging promotion of classicism, just when the dawning skyscraper promised new opportunities for structural expression?
Chicago filmmaker Judith Paine McBrien will examine both viewpoints in her documentary "Make No Little Plans: Daniel Burnham and the American City," now in production. But it's clear how she feels about the man whose fabled "White City" at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair launched the City Beautiful movement in America, and whose urban plans had influence far beyond the cities Burnham and his firm shaped.
"We want to communicate how one person can make a big difference in how millions of people live their lives today," McBrien said over the phone from Chicago. "We want to show the power of buildings to impact our lives and the role of urban planning in our communities through the life of this very charismatic person who was essential to developing the skyscraper and urban planning."
After the White City, Burnham designed the National Mall in Washington, D.C., and produced city plans for, among others, San Francisco, Cleveland and Manila, Phillippines, culminating in his 1909 plan for Chicago.
McBrien will film several buildings this week in Pittsburgh, which has more Burnham buildings than any other city except Chicago. The Pennsylvanian apartments (the former Penn Station) and the Frick and Oliver buildings are must-stops Downtown, and her crew also may shoot at East Liberty's Highland Building.
Tomorrow evening she'll speak at a reception for her and her crew at the Senator John Heinz History Center. University of Pittsburgh historian and urban geographer Ted Muller will introduce McBrien, who will present a 10-minute trailer that lays out the film's major themes and whets the appetite for more. The reception is from 7 to 8:30 p.m. and is free and open to the public.
The reception's organizer, Pittsburgh architect Rob Pfaffmann, is Burnham's great-great-grandson. His great-grandmother, Burnham's daughter Margaret, moved from the Chicago area to New England when she married. Pfaffmann, who grew up in Cohasset near Boston, is just getting to know some of his Burnham relatives in Chicago.
Pfaffmann's interest in architecture came through his maternal grandmother, an interior designer, and through a Latin teacher with a passion for Roman architecture.
"Burnham was kind of on the outs, especially among the modernists, when I was in architecture school in the '70s," Pfaffmann said. But with a resurgence of interest in planning in cities, there's a renewed interest in Burnham and in classicism.
In 2003, Rizzoli published a lushly illustrated monograph by Kristen Schaffer, who argues that Burnham's work has been unjustly neglected and misunderstood. On the cover is the rotunda of our own Penn Station.
"Make No Little Plans" -- the title comes from Burnham's best known quotation -- will premiere in August 2009 in Chicago's lakefront Millennium Park, the recent addition to Burnham-designed Grant Park, and will likely later air on PBS stations.
CMA/CMU lecture
Stefan Behnisch of Behnisch Architekten and Thomas Auer of Transsolar Climate Engineering, both of Stuttgart, Germany, will discuss several of their collaborative projects in a free lecture from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m. April 15 in Carnegie Museum of Art Theater. The two firms are designing the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust's proposed RiverParc project for Downtown.
Their talk is in conjunction with the exhibition "Ecology.Design.Synergy" at the museum's Heinz Architectural Center through May 25. The Heinz galleries only (not the rest of the museum) will be open for free visitation from 5 to 6:30 p.m. preceding the lecture.
The presentation is the Hans Vetter Memorial Lecture in the Carnegie Mellon University School of Architecture Spring 2008 Lecture Series.
A Wright-like night for less
The Blum House at Polymath Park Resort, the last of three Frank Lloyd Wright-related houses to be restored by Usonian Preservation Inc., opens this month to overnight guests. Visitors can rent one of three bedrooms for a single-night minimum, unlike the Duncan and Balter houses, which are whole-house rentals for a minimum of two nights.
"This will give guests who are traveling alone or who are only in the area for a limited time the opportunity to stay more affordably," said Laura Argenbright, director of the Laurel Highlands resort. "As the Duncan and Balter houses are quickly booking up through the year, it also opens up space for more guests to stay during the same period."
The Blum House, designed by Wright apprentice Peter Berndston, was built in 1965 and has been used as the resort's temporary visitor center. Berndston also designed the nearby Balter House, built in 1964; they were joined last year by the Wright-designed Duncan House, a 1957 prefab originally built in Lisle, Ill., outside Chicago.
Information: 1-877-833-7829 or polymathpark.com.
Architecture critic Patricia Lowry can be reached at plowry@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1590.
First published on April 8, 2008 at 12:00 am