Kudos to Rick Jakusz for his essay on a winter night’s walk in a city park (“Tranquility Base,” Feb. 1). He has captured a magic so rarely found in a city–something I quietly thrilled to on many a night’s walk under the spell of the star-strewn sky in my beloved Door County.
Ed Weig, Lincolnwood
WHO WEARS THIS?
The Magazine’s fashion feature, “The Body as Canvas,” on Feb. 1 was downright silly.
Indeed, “Yohji Yamamoto is the high priest of fashion.” His head is in the clouds, like so many other fashion designers.
Pants with a “twist tail” hanging off the back–yuck! Wrapping that tail “around the back like some space-age coil that then is tied around the neck like a scarf”–double yuck!
How about the skirt featuring “a stiff front panel” sticking out? Sleeves that bury the hands for inches (maybe feet)?
They all look to be the innovations of a seamstress who had leftover fabric–but not quite enough to make another garment.
I know these fashions weren’t intended for the bourgeoisie, like me. Still, I see them as having no more tangible appeal than did the emperor’s new clothes.
Even if I had a fifth of the world’s riches, I wouldn’t be caught dead in anything that looked so ridiculous.
Cynnde M. Nielsen, Lombard
I have been doing women’s alterations for the past 30 years, and these outfits are the worst I have ever seen. Or are these Halloween costumes? I think the Tribune, the World’s Greatest Newspaper, could do a lot better.
Victoria B. Dal Santo, Dolton
Surely your Feb. 1 spread of Yamamoto’s sweater with the knee-length sleeves and the pants with tails was misplaced. Shouldn’t it have been in the comics section?
Janet McGlynn, Neenah, Wis.
STOP THE BLAMING
What’s this spurious Blair Kamin allegation (“Drawing Power,” Jan. 25) about the James R. Thompson Center as “evidence” supporting “the case against” Helmut Jahn?!
There hasn’t been a day I’ve been at Randolph and Dearborn and not seen enthralled tourists snapping away, or awed and exhilarated throngs inside, heads tilted upward. This is such an “insult” toward the “classical dignity” of City Hall across the street? Full of its sullen crowds scurrying through those dark, yellowish rat tunnels?
As a professional architecture critic, Kamin does a disservice to the average reader by merely repeating that rehashed, trite, decade-plus old tale about the Thompson Center’s horrendous air conditioning nightmare, once again conferring full responsibility on the architect, when the engineering was done by Lester B. Knight & Associates.
(And why “blame” anybody? Who’d have known how such a uniquely configured building would function? It’s fixed now.) Very few architectural firms anywhere design their own mechanical systems for such large structures.
Jahn is not yet the new Mies? I sat for a year as a freshman architecture student in Mies’ aging Crown Hall surrounded by garbage cans placed to collect leaks seeping through the flat roof–since remedied by an infusion to the Illinois Institute of Technology’s reroofing budget.
Instead of this small-town, you’re-nobody-’til-we-say-you-are back-stabbing, let’s move into the world arena; Jahn obviously has.
Lee Kay, Chicago
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