Diary Hotel
Diary Hotel (2007) - Illinois Institute of Technology, Paul V. Galvin Library, Chicago, ILThe transient implications of the title Diary Hotel (sometimes also referred to as “My Dream of Home”) may seem unexpected for an exhibit sited on a campus with buildings by such recognized architects as Mies Van Der Rohe and Rem Koolhass. Chicago, however, is a city in a state of massive architectural transformation. Urban plans are frequently impermanent and even historical monuments and communities are vulnerable as local economies and political landscapes shift. Entire neighborhoods and their attendant histories disappear as newly designed condominiums are constructed seemingly overnight. Industrial corridors become residential and new businesses open reflecting the values of the new tenants.
The artists at Little City Foundation Center for the Arts have created their own model city that reflects their perceptions of civic design, home, landscape and the logistics of traveling from one site to another - from their campus in Palatine to the Illinois Institute of Technologies’ campus in Chicago.
The artists’ highly detailed and not-so-little city is fractured in some places and neatly ordered in others. Buildings and landscaping have been designed with deliberation, but then so have the clouds, yarn waterfalls, cars and traffic signs. Imagination and reality are blurred, creating space for a different kind of urban planning.
The dense architectural layout of Diary Hotel, which functions as a single total artwork by many creators, also reveals many distinctive individual features upon close examination. Luke Tauber has created two memorial displays. The first is a tubular tower, painted and adorned with photos of his parents who perished in the Holocaust. Elsewhere in Diary Hotel, Luke constructed a monument for another family: a mausoleum for the composer Paganini and his wife, with additional coffins containing the skeletons of other great composers in the landscape out front. Next-door is a library by Mike Lyon – constructed to house his multiple binders that are filled with many months of drawings and lists. Additionally, Mike has transformed an old walker into a recycling center that houses many coils of wire, pop tops, and his flattened recycled can collection.
Wayne Mazurek, an expert in creating automotive designs of the near future, felt that Diary Hotel needed a drive-in movie theater and he created a range of cars to populate it. The theater’s video display includes short animations as well as clips of the artists discussing their ideas with the studio’s facilitators.
John King has addressed the cycles of waste production and management through a vast garbage dump that threatens to overtake the surrounding landscape, while also providing a fertile living space for insects, rats and numerous paint and glue-encrusted people.
Barb Gregornik, an artist who is particularly sensitive to color, patterns, and geometry of Frank Lloyd Wright, created the Prairie style bright red Support Living Arrangement Apartment that include a duck pond as well as an indoor swimming pool. It is a sprawling complex with a stunning visual presence that is rarely seen in conventional apartment arrangements.
Harold Jeffries is also deeply concerned about the housing needs of all people, on earth and in heaven. His contribution to Diary Hotel is a home with legs that would be lifted skyward by a hot air balloon – a vehicle to bring people up to heaven where they could visit the influential Little City facilitator and studio co-founder Michael Piazza who passed away unexpectedly in 2006. Similarly, Julia Mundaine has also addressed the air space of the city with a cluster of black clouds that loom threateningly above a garden bed of her own design.
Diary Hotel brought the diverse imagination and decades-long combined living experience of this frequently disenfranchised population to the public. The needs and desires of artists with developmental challenges are rarely considered in the planning of cities and homes. Diary Hotel presented a model of urban space as it could be. It is our mission to offer up this artistic process to advocate for change, to celebrate civic imagination, and to foster personal growth and agency.
Marc Fischer
October 2008
(This essay is a reworking of a previous text that was co-authored by fellow Little City Facilitators Brian Dortmund and Jennifer Mannebach)