October is barely a week old and already we have made our significant first step towards acclimating to our new home: of the ten core tours that will need adaptation, all Tour Directors concerned have submitted new routes that were preliminarily approved by the Move Task Force. Those tours are:
Historic
Treasures
Must-See
Elevated
Chicago Modern
Art Deco
Evolution
Masterworks
Hotel Boom
Millennium Park
Tiffany and Food & Architecture will become Neighborhood Tours and will start/end where the route dictates.
The Move Task Force evaluated the proposed routes for length, elapsed time, start/return locations and an overall eye towards ensuring that there was not excessive overlap of the buildings covered. The next step will be this week, October 11, when the Tour Committee meets to review and approved the work done by the Task Force. After that, your Tour Directors will be getting in touch with you specifics and the process of writing and revising manuals will begin.
Re-certification plans
How and when docents who give any of these tours will re-certify for the new versions is under review. There are questions of how, when and how many. For instance, over 200 people are currently certified to give the Historic Tour, whose new version is a completely new route. That’s the equivalent of EIGHT incoming classes. It follows quite naturally that the training will be comprehensive and it will have to be offered many times. On the other hand, Treasures’ route will be only modified, with many buildings repeated in the new route, so re-training will be quite different. Each tour is being evaluated individually. The guiding principles are to find the right approach, the right level of coverage, the right way to maintain certification – and the guarantee that everyone who wants to keep doing the tour will be able to do so. Such an extensive revision of ten tours could make winter and spring very busy times for most of us. In order to ascertain who is interested in continuing for which tours, within the next weeks you will be receiving a survey. We hope to use this as a metric for determining how many docents will need training and therefore how many people we will have to lead the new tours next summer. As you can tell, this is a huge task – but we can do it. That’s why we can start calling ourselves the Docent Class of 2018.
Chicago Architecture Center partners
Work on the Chicago Architecture Center (CAC) is now in full swing. On September 13, a kick off meeting was held with Amtrust (building owner), Lend Lease (Amtrust building contractor) and Turner Construction (CAF contractor). Permit drawings have been completed and submitted for processing. Selected vendors for the project include Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture – Architect; Turner – General Contractor; CBRE – Project Management; DDG – Mechanical and Engineering ; WSP – Structural; Grela – Permit Expeditor; ARUP – AV/Acoustics; Thirst – exterior sign and branding; Forcade – interior signage and wayfinding; Lightswitch – Lighting; Exhibition: Local Projects, Cathy Tinker, Model Options and 401 Interactive; and Edelman – PR. For those of us who make the point during tours about how complex building is in an urban environment, here is a great example of how many entities must come together.
Exhibitions initiative
Lynn is committed to keeping docents in the loop as plans unwind. Our new Exhibitions initiative will be a critical piece in the new CAC, and you can expect to hear about it as plans shape up. John Zukowksy, former curator for Architecture and Design at the Art Institute of Chicago, has been hired to develop the content for the Tall Exhibition, one of two permanent exhibitions. And never fear, we have brought up the idea of hardhat tours of the new space when the time is right.
Keeping you in the know
So much change can certainly seem overwhelming. Each of you deserves to ask, “How will all of this affect my docent life?” And each of you deserves an answer. Towards that end, the Move Task Force has established a communications initiative, led by Sandy Guettler and Leslie Clark Lewis, which will do everything it can to keep you informed and answer your questions, from now until the day 111 East Wacker becomes the starting place for tours. There will also be a series of programs – starting with Docent Day on November 18th, whose educational and informational content will be devoted solely to our new location. Watch for your evite and reply with a resounding YES. In times of great change, it is not uncommon for the rumor mill to go into overdrive, and there are some doozies out there. To address some of those we know about, I would direct you to several new FAQs on The Bridge. Please CLICK HERE to access.
Meanwhile, there is plenty of architecturally fascinating information all around us. The Biennial continues. Check out the new exhibit, Between States: 50 Designers Transform Chicago’s Neighborhoods. And Open House Chicago is almost upon us. The list of participating Open House Chicago sites launched online on September 11. Audience engagement broke records, with day-of-launch web traffic up nearly 350% over last year. The email announcement was opened by nearly 30% of recipients on the same day–that’s double the usual for CAF email blasts. Since the OHC website revealed the line-up of 2017 sites, there have been over 260,000 unique page views, and hundreds of itineraries have been created and saved. As of this writing, there are 259 sites. And only two days to see it all. Go.
Constance