When we covered the Wright Plus tour organized by the Frank Lloyd Wright Preservation Trust last spring, a number of readers commented that they'd wished we'd mentioned the event before it took place and before tickets sold out. So consider yourself put on notice. Tickets for the 2009 Wright Plus tour are now on sale. The all day event on Saturday, May 16, runs $80 for members of the FLW Preservation Trust or $95 for......

Architect Santiago Calatrava has stopped work on the Chicago Spire skyscraper and filed a lien against Dublin-based developer Shelbourne Development Ltd., claiming he's owed $11.34 million in work on the planned 2,000 foot tall building. [Cago Real Estate Daily]......

A cleaning supplies company is holding a vote for the best bathroom in America, and two Illinois restrooms have made the cut: the bathrooms at the Signature Room in the Hancock building and the bathrooms at Brio, a restaurant in Rockford. We're up against such facilities as the one in Grand Central Terminal in New York, which, while relatively clean for a gigantic public bathroom, is also pretty nasty in the scheme of things. In......

Block 37 is a black hole where money and plans go to die, and when you combine those forces with the CTA's money-guzzling abilities, well, it's the financial equivalent of a a shark riding on an elephant's back, just trampling and eating everything they see. Time to call City Hall for a bail-out. According to Crain's, the city is set to shell out an additional $20 million in TIF money for the el stop under......

Almost daily, buildings that have stood for decades, some even for a century, are destroyed. For example, the buildings that made up the Cabrini Green housing project get a little bit smaller every day. Other famed architecture like the two Adler & Sullivan buildings that went up in flames (the Pilgrim Baptist Church and Wirt-Dexter building) in one year have also been lost to the ages. Since 2001, Preservation Chicago has fought to keep the......

We were just wondering what was going to go in at the Sullivan Center (née the Caron Pirie Scott building), and now we know: fancypants grocer Fox & Obel is opening up a 25,000 square foot store at the 1 S. State location. The building will also house a FlatTop Grill (whose name always makes us think haircut, not stir-fry), and a three-floor Billabong store. Billabong? They're still around? According to site's developers, Joseph Freed......

While Chicago architecture is perhaps best known for its skyscrapers -- old and new -- the area has an equally rich tradition of residential architecture, too. And nobody is better known in that arena than Frank Lloyd Wright. Once each year, the Frank Lloyd Wright Preservation Trust expands beyond their stewardship of the Wright Home and Studio in Oak Park and Hyde Park's Robie House to give architecture fans a bigger taste of Oak Park......

Wow, underground buildings are the new above-ground buildings, apparently. First the Children's Museum revealed its dugout plans, and now the University of Chicago has yet more plans to keep its students sun-shunning mole trolls. We kid, we kid. Architect Helmut Jahn designed the Joe and Rika Mansueto Library to be mostly underground with a crystal dome on top. The building will hold 3.5 million "volumes of print material" which will be stored "in a high-density,......

Photo by From Dap-dap to the World The Bus Tracker program will include 18 additional routes starting Monday, May 19. [Trib] "Unusual Actions: [] Hiccuping []Belching []Vomiting []Fighting [X]Crying []Laughing []Other." [Reader] U of I running back and 23rd overall draft pick Rashard Mendenhall was robbed at gunpoint last night on the South Side. He's fine. [S-T] Blair Kamin says there's going to be a debate between Alderman Brendan Reilly (42nd) and Children's Museum......

Mike Wallace's 1957 interviews with Frank Lloyd Wright are fascinating, and not just because of Wright's interesting answers but maybe more so because of Wallace's probing questions. The video's not embeddable. Click to watch on another page. "Mob" here means the common man, not the mafia, by the way.......

Developers for the Chicago Spire failed to pay over $400,000 in property taxes. A spokeswoman blamed a mailing problem, saying the tax bills had gone to the wrong address...but is it a symptom of a bigger problem? From Crain's: [T]he failure to manage a routine task like property taxes raises questions about [developer Garrett Kelleher]’s ability to complete a multi-billion dollar project that demands the highest level of concentration. ... The tax gaffe is one......

Should Marina Towers be a landmark? That's one of the questions on the table now that the once nearly bankrupt iconic apartment buildings are back in the black. Another question: Is Dick's Last Resort really going to open in the base of one of the corncobs? Dick's Last Resort is a chain of cheesy bars the Trib calls "in-your-face," and which identifies itself as "outrageous." Eh, it's a jerk-themed Bennigans, but more stupid. Anyway, about......

Over the weekend, the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize was awarded to French architect Jean Nouvel. The prize, handed out by the Chicago-based Pritzker family, is intended "to honor annually a living architect whose built work demonstrates a combination of those qualities of talent, vision and commitment, which has produced consistent and significant contributions to humanity and the built environment through the art of architecture." Nouvel will receive the bronze medallion and a $100,000 purse at......

Photo by Louise LeBourgeois Charges were filed today in the Halloween killing of Back of the Yards resident Leticia Barrera Orlando Avila, 18, was charged with first-degree murder and first-degree attempted murder. [Trib] It's still snowing, but the snow won't be sticking. At least it's something? [NWS] Wally Phillips, a mainstay at WGN for over 40 years, died yesterday. He was 82. [WGN] George Turner, a now-former basketball coach at Walter Payton College Prep,......

The New York Times Home and Garden section (yes, we sometimes read the Home & Garden section) checked in yesterday on the West Town home of two Art Institute faculty members, Frances Whitehead and James Elniski, whose West Town home is starting to turn heads. According to the article (which is accompanied with a nice slide show), the couple has approached their home like a conceptual art project, and in so doing, they've pretty much......

Chicagoist has a list of places to visit and experiences we'd like to have before we die. We've hopefully got a few decades left to keep checking these items off, but some are certainly a bit more improbable than others -- like our dream of owning and living in a Frank Lloyd Wright masterpiece. The Arthur Heurtley house -- just down the street from Wright's own home and studio in suburban Oak Park --......

While a Chicagoland Legoland is years away, The Graham Foundation’s latest exhibit is architectural fun with Lego models. “Models” doesn't quite describe them. No, they’re “7 New Architectural Species from the Danish Welfare State,” the brainchildren of Copenhagen’s Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG). BIG’s big idea is to find new practical utopias by “investing in the overlap between radical and reality,” to create a “new breed in urban life forms.” We assume they're speaking metaphorically. Either......

Photo by Calexico Former Bears linebacker Jim Schwantz is running for mayor of Palatine. [Trib] In today's installment of "things that haunt me..." Louis Farrakhan endorsed Barack Obama yesterday at a convention for members of the Nation of Islam. [Trib] L.L. Bean is opening a store in the burbs. [press release] The Chicago Architecture Foundation will be looking for some new digs come 2011. That's sooner than you think! [Crain's] Trailer for the upcoming......

Forgotten Chicago spotlights three abandoned movie "palaces" they hope make the preservation cut: The Colony Theater on 59th and Kedzie, the Ramova Theater on 35th and Halsted, and the Patio Theater on Irving Park and Austin. "Someone, somewhere, has to come up with the necessary means to save and restore these places," they write. "It would be wonderful if they remained as movie theaters, but just saving the interior space would be great as......

Photo by JVoves Go take your classic shots of Buckingham Fountain now. Come September, the landmark will be under a tent for a while as part of a $25 million restoration. The fountain was last restored back in 1994, but this is a bigger undertaking. According to the Trib, "[this restoration will] concentrate on the outer basin and surrounding grounds, while also assessing whether pieces of the fountain's machinery can be made more energy-efficient.......

Photo by The New No. 2, which also looks great embiggened.......

Yesterday's list of buildings that need to be preserved was still ringing in our eyeballs when we came across this picture of the demolition of of the Granada Theater. The Granada was built as a movie theater in 1926 and became a rock venue in the 1980s, but was demolished in 1990. Photo by Genial 23......

Preservation Chicago announced its 7 most endangered buildings today, and on the list are surprise entries Grant Park and the Landmarks Ordinance. Also cited are Norwood Park, the American Book Company Building, the Devon Ave commercial district, the Booker Building and the Daily News building. Photo by WVAllen According to Preservation Chicago's report, Grant Park is endangered because of the plans to relocate the Children's Museum. [That plan[ would impose more than 100,000 square feet......

$15 million buys a nice apartment, especially in the future. Shelbourne Development has officially open a sales office for the 1,194 residences in the Spire, the upcoming architectural marvel and source of an absolutely endless number of wiener jokes. Units—zing!—are priced at around $1,400 per square foot; according to the Trib, most luxury condos in Chicago cost between $750 and $1,100 per square foot. And...our eyeballs just turned to dollar signs. Every unit in......

There are sixty bridges spanning the Chicago River throughout the city, as we found out last month at the annual B News neighborhood pub quiz. We know about the larger bridges downtown, and we stop to stare at them when the spans are raised to allow boats to pass. However, the majority of bridges spanning the river are smaller ones allowing traffic to pass between neighborhoods. We tend to overlook those bridges. This is......

The Illinois State Capitol chamber restoration and a private residence in Evanston both earned 2008 American Institute of Architects Honor Awards yesterday. Vinci | Hamp Architects, Inc. won for "the quality of the restoration, including the reconstruction of lost elements of the original design as well as a skillful implementation of modern building systems," according to the AIA's announcement, and Thomas Roszak won for his design of his own home, Evanston's "glass house," which......

Things are looking up in Margaritaville! We know, we know, wrong Buffett--but we always think Jimmy first. Sorry, Warren. Go cry in your mountain of money. Anyhow, one of the world's richest men but only second-most-famous Buffett is making a $4.5 billion deal with Chicago's own Uncle Money Pants, the Pritzkers. Buffett is buying a 60 percent share in the Pritzker's Marmon Holdings, Inc. Over the next five or six years, he's going to buy......

You're running out of time to shop--and giganto stores are going to be so butts-to-nuts crowded you'll want to kill yourself--but there are still options. We're partial to the Chicago Architecture Foundation's store on Michigan and Jackson ( 224 S. Michigan) if you still need a gift for someone geeky and awesome. Also, give that person our number. Possible good gifts: Are there still people in town who don't own the ubiquitous neighborhood map? If......

After months of anticipation, the $21,400,000 suspension bridge that's gradually been taking form at North Avenue appears to be nearing completion. This morning, for the first time since construction began in mid-2006, traffic is actually passing over the bridge, instead of being diverted to the temporary bridge that sits just to the south. For those that haven't been following the process, construction began in June of 2006 on the new hybrid suspension/cable-stayed bridge, which......

Now this brings back some memories. We've always had this fascination with old movie houses. It probably started with Sunday family days at the Will Rogers Theatre at 5641 W. Belmont in the mid-70's. It was the perfect capper to a day in Belmont Central. Mom would take us shopping for clothes at Goldblatt's — those stores were actually respectable then — or Jack Robbins, maybe have some lunch under the Golden Arches. Then......