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| The Third School of Chicago Architecture -by Lynn Becker Is a Third School of Chicago Architecture emerging from a new, talented crop of local architects? What are the rules, and how do you have to know get in?
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The Bengt Sjostrom Starlight Theatre at Rock Valley in Rockford, Illinois could said to be Jeanne Gang's breakthrough commission. It was won when Gang was partnered with architect Kathy O'Donnell as Studio Gang/O'Donnell, and it involved an expansion of the schools existing theatre. In 2001, the seating was nearly doubled, to accommodate 1,050 people. An 18 foot high structure, added to house restrooms and ticket booths, became a striking “starwall”, where the curving concrete is punctured with a series of porthole windows, which also can be seen in the walls of a house in Bordeaux, France that Koolhaas began just at the time Gang was about to leave OMA. "The ideas come up in groups when we do a project," recalls Gang. Some things that come up when you're together, you can't say that you own that idea. It's more of a brainstorming thing. Even if it was one person's idea, every project is a combination of people." At the Star Theater, the windows, in different sizes, form, are backlit at night, forming a “constellation.” “We were trying to find a way to have a donor wall without putting names all over the building. They have a star and then there's a key” - a kind of registry that lets you know which star belongs to whom. The A copper-clad fly tower was added in 2002 to support scenery and provide a full proscenium. Curtains were replaced with translucent sliding doors of the same type used on airplane hangers. In summer of 2003, Gang added the crowning element, a roof that “opens like a helix.” It consists of six stainless steel, Douglas-fir inlay panels which overlap at the edges to form a tight seal. The triangular panels, 15 tons each, were pre-fabricated on site. They branch off of a central column that acts as a pivot. As the cap of the column rotates, the individual panels slowly open in sequence, like the petals of a flower, to reveal the night sky and its stars. (If you sit directly underneath the center of the roof, the sky itself looks like a six-pointed star demarcated by the open panels.) In the year before Gang's additions were completed, four tour buses were booked for trips to the theatre. The year after, the number jumped to 300.
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porthole windows had also previously been used at a convention center OMA designed in Lille, France. “It's in a very hidden place,” says Gang. “It was a kind of a test. That's where we first did something with punching holes into the concrete.” Square holes and their corners create more stress; the round ones allow the surrounding concrete wall to be lighter.
