99% Invisible - 99% Invisible-58- Purple Reign

Episode Date: July 14, 2012

What’s the difference between what the public sees and what an architect sees when they look at a building? The hotel on the very prominent corner of Touhy and Kilbourn Avenues in Lincolnwood, Illinois used to be the town’s most … Continue reading →

We get support from UC Davis, a globally ranked university, working to solve the world's most pressing problems in food, energy, health, education, and the environment. UC Davis researchers collaborate and innovate in California and around the globe to find transformational solutions. It's all part of the university's mission to promote quality of life for all living things. Find out more at 21stCentry.ucdavis.edu. This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. At a very different Kickstarter message written and recorded yesterday. We launched the Kickstarter campaign for season three

of 99% Invisible on July 11th. And about 24 hours later, we reached the Kickstarter goal. I can't thank you enough. It was one of the most amazing things I've ever been a part of, really stunning. I didn't even have time to release an episode announcing the Kickstarter. But now I have a new goal, a personal goal. 5,000. I want 5,000 Kickstarter backers.

Pledge at any level. The minimum is a dollar. Just a dollar. But any level, there are amazing prizes at all, different kinds of levels. You can go up to $10,000. There's awesome t-shirts and posters and notebooks. It's all stuff that I had someone design because I wanted these items myself. But I'm not even talking about those levels necessarily.

I'm just counting backers, people who pledge on Kickstarter for the show at any amount. This is my new, crazily ambitious personal goal of 5,000 backers. And unlike the original Kickstarter goal, this one will likely fail. But if you hit every goal easily, you're not setting them high enough. Fortune favors the bold, my friends. Always remember that. You can go to 99% of visible.org to find the link to donate, or go to Kickstarter and do a search on the show. So, 5,000 backers, that came to me as a number because I want to send a message to the people who control the money in public media that if my little show conceived it, my little radio station of KLW in San Francisco can be this successful and get massive widespread support from people online.

Then they will all learn to take risks and fund people who make things that are personal and authentic. I'm not talking about Thamine, my nose nose at the man I want to inspire everyone else to be bold and know that if they take the leap and try something great that's maybe a little different like in a regular length video show about architecture will that there are people out there who will help at least 5,000 people that will be something amount. 5,000 people. I want to break Kickstarter. I want to crash the servers.

I want one of those crazy Kickstarter success stories to be about a little public radio show instead of a high tech gadget. Wouldn't that be cool? 99%Avisible.org or just do a search on Kickstarter. And be one of the 5,000. Thanks. Here's the show. This is 99% Invisible.

I'm Roman Mars. The hotel on the very prominent corner of Tué in Kilburn Avenue in Lincolnwood, Illinois used to be the town's most famous building. The first high at Hotel and all of Chicago land, premier accommodations, top notch restaurant. It was swank. Roberta Flack stayed there. Barry Manelow stayed there.

Perry Como. Michael Jordan stayed there on his first night in Chicago. And every 13-year-old boy in the area had his permits for there. and every 13-year-old boy in the area had his permits for there. The hotel was built in 1960, and it looks it. So if you're wondering how much potentially an agronistic lounge music I'm going to cram into this episode, oh, it's going to be a lot. Then slowly over time, it became Lincoln Woods' most infamous building.

It changed hands, got seedy, and run down. It was the home of the Midwest fetish fair and marketplace convention. There were drug-fueled sex parties attended by shady Chicago politicians later convicted of things like extortion. And of course, there was the convicted mobster Alan Dorfman, who was gunned down in the parking lot. But that's not why everyone in the area knows the building. If you know nothing of its history, it's still pretty hard to miss.

Because it's purple. Really, really purple. Growing up nearby, I always thought it was really, really ugly. Lots of people did. To be fair, lots of people didn't, but everyone had an opinion about it. McGuin Maxi, that's what I'm talking to now, by the way.

Noted S.A.S.D. in public video host, and she even created a sitcom once. She has a secret about the purple hotel. My father designed it. My name is John Maxx. I'm a retired architect and former professor at UIC. I designed a lot of... Just a building. Don't enter up. You I see I designed a lot of just the building

Nothing to rob Okay, I designed a lot of apartment buildings in Chicago We're here to talk about the purple hotel. I need to say I designed my name is John Maxx. I'm an architect I designed the purple hotel My name is John Maxxx. I'm an architect. I designed this purple hotel. My name is John Maxx, I'm an architect, and I was the designer of the purple hotel. Finally, now you have to understand that when I say the building is purple, I don't mean the kind of purple of say an iris or a plum.

It's purple as in lavender. Lavender purple glazed brick all over pretty much the entire thing. Which Needless to say makes it stand out. Depending on how you look at it, like a prize jewel or a sore thumb. You know, that's one of the few buildings that if you see it once, you know, it's, you've seen it forever. You can't, you know, get the image of it all you want. It is so purple that after it changed hands, the new owners renamed it the purple hotel.

WB Easy Architecture Critic, Lee Bay. I think that it's worth looking at absent the brick. The brick I like, but I wish you could sort of put on glasses, I could filter it out so you don't see the brick at least in one trip and really see how the building holds this up together structurally. I mean mean I think it's really good. The way the John was able to put those supports on the outside of the hotel to give larger floor plates in the middle, which is what you want. You want big functional spaces instead of a set of a hotel. And then again the little nooks of green

space and the way that the sort of the building is kind of fit together, the complex fits together. I mean really there's really a lot of good things going on there. You know, I say, come for the purple, but stay for the architecture. The thing that everybody notices first, including architects, would be the color. I mean, I think that if anybody is saying that it's not the color that they're lying, because you can't really look at the building without noticing that it's purple. So it's the only purple building around, but then, you know, after that initial wave of

color hits you, you notice really what a great modernist structure it has and how the structure is expressed on the outside, which is also not something you see every day anymore. And I think it's a wonderful building. That was Jackie Koo, founding principal of the architectural firm Koo & Associates. We'll get back to her in a minute. But first, the story of why and how the building got to be so purple. My dad, John Maxi. It was commissioned by the Pritzkers, the very rich family in Chicago, and it was the first Hyatt Hotel in the Midwest. It was called Hyatt Hoss. Nothing to do with the purple.

By the way, the purple came because one of the Pritzkers, A.N., the big man among the Pritzkers in the family, as we, what color-glace style I want to use. And I wanted to use gray, and he said said that's dull. I like something brighter. So I made a mistake of showing him the samples of books, having on it some 35, 40 colored samples and sure enough, you picked a purple and you don't argue with Ian Fritzkerr. My father tells me this story, but I suspect differently. He's always gravitated toward bold color choices. Our current argument is over bright orange balconies on a building that we always pass,

he loves them, and I hate them. When I was growing up, his favorite color was blue. A color that, to me, is suspiciously close to purple. In fact, every house we ever lived in, brick bungalow, summer house in the woods, suburban barn-shaped house with mustard-colored siding, all had bright blue front doors. That my father painted. My elementary school bus driver used to call me blue door.

Upon interrogation, my father coughed up his strange Hungarian logic. In the Near East where ultimately I come from, the blue color on the doors, blue and green, is to keep the evil spirit away. So that's a reason I always expected the entrance door of our houses blue to keep the evil spirit away. And it did. Do you think it worked for the hotel? So you don't think the purple kept away the evil eye from the hotel? Not really, because there was a murder in the hotel.

Actually, there were two, but I digress. The beauty of that building is the exposed concrete frame. How the columns are pulled out of the structure, showing this... It's like a human being whose skeleton will be on the exterior partially. That would be weird, right? Well, that's the way that building is. The columns are pulled out. The slabs are slightly pulled out.

It's a building which reveals its structure. And that is architecturally the interesting thing about it. The purple is totally irrelevant. It could be green, okay? It would be the same good or bad building. So as an architect, I have to ask you, this is a perfect example of what the difference between what the public sees and what the architect sees. Oh, absolutely.

Because the public sees Purple Brick, the architect is sitting here saying the purple is so unimportant in the scheme of the building. It means nothing. It's just such a tiny thing. But to the public, that's all it is. That's right, because the public is ignorant. That truly ignorant. Well, you can't really argue with them there, but in our defense, and I count myself as

one of the public in the scenario, it's really, really purple. And despite how far the purple hotel fell from its original glory, the dilapidation, the murder, the drug-fueled sex parties, and a demolition order. It was not torn down. Time passed, the economy fell to pieces. Mid-century architecture slowly came back into vogue. Mad Men was on TV. The Purple Brick was kind of retro-cool.

A light, however dim, was starting to shine on the building of its future. Then, the Purple Hotel was nominated for landmark status, a place on the historic registry. There was talk of finding a buyer, talk of renovation, and then while I was searching and interviewing for this very story, the purple hotel went up for auction. There was a lot of pomp and circumstance in the beginning of, you know, the auctioneer, yelling and saying, are you ready and, you know, in the booming voice and then really there was only one bitter, so. And that bitter was Jake Weiss of Weiss Properties in Skokie, which happens to be right next

to Lincolnwood. He bought the purple hotel, and while Weiss is a shrewd businessman with a keen eye and good instincts, this particular purchase was also a labor of love. When you have something that really is just not realizing its value and its potential that has such a prime piece of property, it bothers you, you know, it's part of your neighborhood, it's part of your community, and it's something that you really want to see be an asset to the community instead of a blight. Here comes the love part. Separately from that, when my, and more importantly, I think,

we almost lived at the purple hotel for a period of time, when my grandfather had passed away and my father was saying the traditional kathish. That's the Jewish prayer for the dead. When my grandfather had passed away in my father was saying the traditional kathish. That's the Jewish prayer for the dead. There was no synagogue anywhere in close proximity to where he lived at the time. And because we're Orthodox and we're going to drive on a Sabbath, that was a little bit prohibitive to say the kathish. There's a very convenient shoulder right down the block.

Also known as a synagogue. The congregation in Houtamosa. So on every single shop is for a year, we would move into the purple hotel to accommodate my father's responsibility to say the cahdish for his father. So we lived there for about a year every single weekend. And you know, me and my sister, the hotel was our playground. And the architect Weiss has chosen to redesign the purple hotel and bring it back to its original

luster is Jackie Koo of Jackie Koo and Associates. Also, a former student of my father, the original architect, John Maxi. One of the things that we're looking into is more of a historic restoration of the building. And it would be wonderful. And especially since we have some of the building. And it would be wonderful and especially since we have some of the old drawings, the original drawings from the 60s, 1961, when it

was constructed. And there are a lot of pieces that are still left in the building such as this wonderful monumental Tarazo stair with this wood wall behind it. I mean you can really see it as this kind of late 50s, early 60s kind of madmen, era, pan-am sort of hotel that really could be very current in today's hospitality environment. The culture today, especially in the hospitality market, for some reason purple is a predominant color, not necessarily in the color of the brick, but in older marketing. I mean, you'll look at the neon lights and the color of the key fob cards

and the brochures that get printed for some reason purple is popping, and I'm not quite sure why. Have any of your buildings had this kind of history, this kind of life cycle that you know of? No, none of them. The same way that a person they go through life and you might go through different cycles yourself and everybody goes through different rebellious times and ups and downs,

I think the same holds true for a property like this that really was a character of itself. The building was really a product of the environment around it at any given time. And, you know, to a certain extent, the fact that the building did change with the decades and the environment around it, it really is the building's character. And longs true that this character, this building, this structure of nine lives sits empty at the moment, surrounded by bored traffic and an empty parking lot, it may just be crouching, gathering its muster, ready to spring back to life, arresting that traffic, and strutting like a proud peacock. A purple one. 99% invisible was produced this week by Gwen Maxine, host of ReCend,

from the Third Coast International Audio Festival, with a little help from me Roman Mars. It's a project of KALW-91.7 local public radio in San Francisco and the American Institute of Architects in San Francisco. Support for 99% of visible is provided in part by the Facebook design team who believes that design can bring positive change to the world and is at them at facebook.com slash design. Support is also provided by Tiny Letter. Email for people with something to say. My boy Maslow always has something to say.

What do you have to say Maslow? There's way to say things on my name. What does that mean? It means not today. It's not me. It's not me. It's not me. It's not me. TinyWetter.com, the simplest way to write an email newsletter from the people behind MailChimp. This program is distributed by PRX, the public radio exchange making public radio more public online at PRX.org.

You can find the show and like the show on Facebook. I tweet at Roman Mars. But this week, you're going to want to go to 99%invisible.org and look at pictures of the purple hotel and become one of the 5,000. Come on, don't think. Just go. Go to Kickstarter. Let's make this happen. Right now, I'm optimistic. I might feel differently in the except the same. But let's do it happen right now. I'm optimistic all might feel differently except this But let's do it. Come on. Thanks

Does the name mad men mean anything to you mad man Mad men no Nothing no association with that word. Repeat it again. Mad men. Mad men. Mad men. Mad men.

Easy. Yes. But it's also the name of a television show? No, no, I haven't watched it. you