PATRICK SISSON

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Chicago Reader
August 28, 2014
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You can hardly throw a game token ten feet without hitting a vintage arcade bar in certain Chicago neighborhoods. The barcade boom has been a boon for lovers of old consoles, and it’s also piqued people’s interest in new indie games created by up-and-coming developers (as evidenced by the popularity of the ten-player arcade console Killer Queen at Logan Arcade). On September 6 at Bit Bash, Chicago’s first indie-gaming festival, it’s all cutting edge all the time.

No tokens needed.

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Dwell
May 21, 2014
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Matt Litwack can’t tell you exactly when he first began exploring the tunnels, ghost stations, and secret passages of underground New York, or who first ushered him into the secret society of those who have journeyed past the subways and layups (areas where trains are parked overnight). He literally can’t due to legal reasons, since it’s against the law to explore underground, and as Litwack puts it, extremely dangerous to travel around the third rail and dodge 400-ton trains. But with his forthcoming book Beneath the Streets: The Hidden Relics of New York’s Subway System (Gingko Press), co-authored by graffiti artist Jurne, Litwack can showcase some of the eerie, quiet beauty of a side of the city few have seen.

“It’s a timeless environment,” he says. “You see it much like a track worker saw it in 1970. There are few places in New York you can say that about.”

Litwack, a graffiti and mural artist who runs his own studio, started working withJurne on Beneath the Streets five years ago. Many of the photos, which cover the last decade, focus on graffiti artists, whom Litwak calls the first urban explorers. REVS, a long-time artist who, once painting on trains became too difficult, began creating autobiographical murals underground, figures prominently, and painter Bill Brand’s Masstransitscope project, a colorful, flip book-like mural that takes advantage of the motion of the train to create kinetic artwork, is a one-of-a-kind example of how public art could enhance the subway system. While there’s been increased attention to New York’s underground, such as the Low Line proposal, Litwack doesn’t see many new projects being approved and finished. He feels the beauty and silence of the lower levels of the city will be maintained.

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Dwell
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June 3, 2014
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Dwell
June 5, 2014
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He Conceived of a Gorgeous Headquarters for the Lenkurt Electric Company

While Wright displayed a keen understanding of the roles cars played in modern America and incorporated them into his designs, for his proposed corporate headquarters for the Lenkurt Electric Company in San Carlos, California, he surreptitiously swept them under the rug. By placing the car park underneath the building, he gained the space to create a sprawling structure that built upon ideas developed for the famous Johnson Administration Building in Racine, Wisconsin. This exceptional sketch depicts the structure at night, when a proposed grid of pyramidal skylights made from copper and glass resemble a luminous tent city. It’s a glowing testament to modernity, fitting for a mid-century company that made microwaves and telephones.

Photo courtesy Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation

“Early in life, I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility. I chose the former, and have seen no reason to change.” It’s possible Frank Lloyd Wright, the towering architectural virtuoso who can make as serious a claim as anyone to the title of America’s most famous architect, might bristle at the concept of this article. After all, what’s not to know about the man whose structures straddled waterfalls, spiraled around artworks like a nautilus, and advanced notions of profound importance and influence, such as organic structure and the fusion of nature and man-made materials?

While it’s impossible to ignore a colossus, there’s plenty of subtle ripples and threads left in his wake that may go unnoticed. Finding unknown footnotes to Wright’s exceptional career proved a challenge, so Dwell consulted a group of Frank Lloyd Wright scholars—Scott Perkins (Director of Preservation at Fallingwater), Mary Roberts (Executive Director of the Martin House Restoration Corporation), Jeffery Herr (Curator at Hollyhock House) and Robert Fishman (Professor of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan)—to find out what they considered under-recognized aspects of the architect’s life and work. Click through the slideshow to see nine examples of unfinished projects and proposals and facts that showcase the breadth of his talent and influence.

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Dwell
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June 22, 2014
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Kitchen and Dining Room

A dimly lit living space above a former funeral home, the kitchen and dining rooms have become animated, illuminated family spaces with splashes of color and light-providing transom windows. The dining space features Hans Wegner chairs circling a Matthew Hilton Cross-Extension table and a Pallucco Glow Square pendant lamp.

Photo by Morlen Sinoway

As the Chicago-based Midwestern sales rep for Burton snowboards, Matt Hoffman has a job that many feel could only be improved with closer access to real mountains with good powder. But try telling that to him before he moved into his new house, when work routinely included late-night arrivals at his apartment followed by multiple runs to unload shirts and board bags from his truck. Covering a nine-state territory required a real home base. The fantasy —a home with storage space and a showroom to demo new gear for clients and reps—would be the ideal live-work setup, a space- and money-saving move.

“I could have rented a showroom, but that’s basically a glorified, unused storage space most of the year,” says Hoffman.

Hoffman’s unlikely savior first presented itself in 2006 in the form of a former funeral home-turned-biker hangout near Chicago’s Wicker Park neighborhood. Built in the 1880s, the aged building once even sported a carriage house for the horses that drew the hearse. In the ‘60s, the building functioned as a biker chop shop. Hoffman kept the jury-rigged, dumb waiter-esque elevator in use to transport stolen bikes to the basement, which contained a homemade shooting range and more than a few copies of the Anarchist’s Cookbook. It was definitely a fixer-upper.

Hoffman turned to Morlen Sinoway, owner of an eponymous local design studio and store, to help transform the space. The straightforward brief called for about 3,000 square feet of storage, another 3,000 square feet of showroom space and separate, well-defined living quarters. By the time the gut rehab and reconstruction was finished nine months later, just a few of the structure’s original doors remained.

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Dwell

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July 16, 2014

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Louis Kahn at the Auditorium of the Kimbell Art Museum, 1972  

The architect famously asked, “What does this building want to be?” when starting a project. In the case of this museum, Kahn incorporated skylights to diffuse natural light throughout as a way to illuminate the artworks.

A master of turning simple forms and classic motifs into extraordinary monuments, American architect and profesor Louis Kahn created a spartan body of work that’s become hallowed ground for his peers, influencing a generation. “It is important that you honor the material,” the perfectionist would tell his students, and for Kahn, that meant sculpting gorgeous curves and blocks of concrete and brick, massive structures large enough to inspire awe but still deft enough to play with light. His work, now the focus of an exhibition at the Design Museum in London, was inspired by a visit to Roman ruins when he was in his fifties, and still achieves the soaring spatial poetry of his peers without the advantage of more lightweight material.

An Estonian immigrant who settled into Philadelphia, Kahn took to drawing as a child, working with burnt twigs and matches when his family couldn’t afford proper materials. He was educated at the University of Pennsylvania, where he later taught before moving to Yale. His first commission, the Yale Art Gallery, was a template of sorts for later work, eschewing the International style for a new monumentality that juxtaposed airiness and emotionality with heavy forms of brick and concrete. As later works would showcase—from the tranquil pathways of the Jonas Salk Institute to the resonant silhouette of the National Assembly Building of Bangladesh—Kahn’s obsessiveness was not just over buildings, but in creating experiences.

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Chicago Reader

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July 29, 2014

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Every week during a stretch of the Chicago Seed‘s 1967 to 1974 print run, staffers would make the trip: a pickup or VW Minibus loaded with hand-mixed ink and negatives for the next issue—diligently pasted up and typed out twice on an IBM Selectric—would drive two hours north to Port Washington, Wisconsin, so William Schanen, a free-press advocate, could print roughly 35,000 copies overnight. Loaded down with so much weight on the return, the van would often fishtail on the highway.

Editors and artists both described the process of making the psychedelic Seed as chaotic. The paper could hopscotch from a naked woman (the cover of the first issue) to an interview with George Harrison to a detailed drug guide (“domestic monster dop . . . $85.00/100 per pound”) in the space of three pages. But with daring covers and split-fount inking, which produced subtle changes in color over the course of a print run, the paper stood out amid the colorful artwork of the time.

“There was something in the air those days, it was everywhere,” says Skip Williamson, a famous underground cartoonist and Seed contributor. “The Seed was a part of it, but then it was gone.”
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Chicago Reader

July 24, 2014

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The worst winter in decades inspired a design firm and frame builder to fashion a bike tough enough for this town.

During last winter’s polar vortex, the brave souls who cycled through the ice, snow, salt, and sludge could be viewed as examples of midwest resiliency. They also could be seen as bundled-up question marks, daring us to explain why we endure a Hoth-like landscape.

To a team of Chicago designers participating in a five-city competition to build a better bike, those cyclists were something else entirely: inspiration. As part of this year’s invite-only Oregon Manifest Bike Design Project, Minimal, a Chicago design firm, along with Garry Alderman, a local frame builder who works under the name Method Bicycle, teamed up with the goal of building a city-specific ride, one that would beat competing prototypes from similar teams in Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, and New York. The winning team will see their bike produced in a limited run by Fuji.

While starting in January—with a blank slate and a fresh blanket of snow—may appear to be a disadvantage, the shitty timing inspired the radical, high-tech prototype the Chicago team will reveal this Friday night at Minimal’s West Loop studio. All five teams will host simultaneous release parties, the first time the bikes will be seen by the public.

“We found a lot of people riding at 20 below,” says Chris Watson, a project manager at Minimal, recalling the team’s early research. “We didn’t want to focus on winter, because that was a downer, but it does exist, right? It’s an obstacle to biking year-round.”

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