This exhibition shown last year at the Eric Arthur Gallery is now opening at the:

Chicago Architecture Foundation
The John Buck Company Lecture Hall Gallery
224 South Michigan Avenue
This exhibition is open to the public and admission is free

Curated by Charles Waldheim / Urban Agency
Featuring photographs by Robert Burley and Hedrich Blessing
Sound installation, "ORDnoise," by Rodolphe el-Khoury / Khoury Levit Fong
January 15 - May 1, 2009About the Exhibition

Charles Waldheim will present a brief overview of the exhibition at the opening on Thursday, January 15, 2009 at 5:30 PM with a full lecture on Friday, January 16, 2009.

O’Hare is Chicago’s Versailles. An inspiring diagram, speaking the poetry of flow, an unheralded masterpiece descended from such giant prototypical installations as the stockyards, the pier, the service tunnels, Soldiers Field, and so on, it recalls the generic style of the city itself.
- Alvin Boyarsky

In the second half of the 20th century, Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport was the biggest and busiest facility of its kind in the world. Characterized by a seamless integration of transportation infrastructure and architectural expression, O’Hare quickly became an international model for jet-age airport design. As one of the largest architectural commissions in Chicago’s history, O’Hare offers a unique lens on the relationship between public works patronage and the emergence of second Chicago school modernism in the public realm.

A team of Chicago architects led by C. F. Murphy Associates invested in innovative design strategies at O’Hare, such as the movable jetway bridge, two-tiered entry way drive, and central parking garage. Each of these strategies differed markedly from contemporaneous solutions developed for comparable facilities. While New York’s Idlewild (JFK) and Washington D.C.’s Dulles airports gained media attention for their evocative sculptural forms, they depended upon inefficient and ultimately unsustainable transit infrastructure such as mobile lounges and extensive bus routes to integrate the automobile with the airplane. As a result, the automobile-based infrastructure of O’Hare has emerged as a durable industry standard. In contrast with the airport’s modernist origins, recent work at O’Hare illustrates growing competition between airlines for brand identity through the commissioning of 'star' architects and signature works of postmodern architecture. Contemporary readings of O’Hare focus on the airport’s role in the decentralization of the city and its ongoing impacts on the region’s natural ecologies.

ORD assembles a collection of photographs by Toronto photographer Robert Burley and Chicago’s Hedrich Blessing firm. Hedrich Blessing’s iconic black and white images from the 1960s describe the Miesian second Chicago school modernism of Chicago’s largest public works project. Robert Burley’s color photographs of the 1980s describe O’Hare’s operational airfield as a complex managed landscape. Taken together, the exhibition illustrates over half a century of design at O’Hare and the photographers who have documented it.

ORDnoise (2008)

A sound installation for ORD: Documenting the Definitive Modern Airport Khoury Levit Fong; design team Rodolphe el-Khoury and James Dixon

ORDnoise complements the exhibition’s visual material with aural atmospherics sampled from O’Hare. It is a responsive sound installation programmed to adapt to the number of visitors in the gallery. The patterns and layers of sound are dynamically controlled by video tracking which modulates the volume and range of acoustic output in response to the movement of visitors to the exhibition. Responses range from silence or a dull background noise when the gallery is sparsely populated to a full-blown soundscape sampling O’Hare’s various acoustic environments when the gallery is full.