We Were Going to Dance About This, But We Heard That Was Silly

By Margaret Lyons in Arts & Entertainment on Nov 19, 2004 9:08PM

The Chicago Architecture Foundation honored its Patrons of the Year yesterday in the commercial, institutional and governmental categories. This is the first year for the awards, and they're meant to encourage and recognize architectural innovation. Listen up, Block 37.

CMK, a realty/development firm, took commercial honors for its Contemporaine, a 15-floor condo at 516 North Wells. Units are still available if you have a ton of cash handy and are dying to live someplace with an extremely pretentious name. The Tribune calls Contemporaine "a pinwheeling composition of exposed concrete," which means almost nothing to us.

IIT took the institutional award for its McCormick Tribune Campus Center and State Street Village, designed by Rem Koolhaas and Helmut Jahn, respectively. IIT's striking and creative architecture beat out the U of C's slew of new buildings, a library, and the Licoln Park Zoo. Biatches.

And now, drum-roll please, what project won the governmental award? Hold on to your hats, funsters: Millennium Park's bike station, Harris Theater, and Pritzker Pavilion. No real shocker there. No, it looks like the Wacker Drive Reconstruction and Near South Transfer Tunnel just couldn't cut it against like, what, one of the most important spaces in the city ever? Sorry, Transfer Tunnel. We'll always have the near south.

What we found interesting about this whole deal was who lost, namely Soldier Field. Eat it, suckers.