IKEA Monkey

Valencia, Spain, is a place of many good festivals. For example, every March they do this festival called Las Fallas where all the neighborhoods in the city construct these beautiful, elaborate, occasionally gigantic papier-mâché figures and scenes that fill most of whatever intersection or square or park in which…

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The first hint the world gets of a North Korean nuclear test is seismic activity.

Grocery stores are at a confusing juncture. Amazon is Whole Foods’ dad now, Publix expands ever northward, and Trader Joe’s prices keep creeping up. Thank goodness for ALDI, which has always had exactly one goal—to keep prices extremely low—and after more than a century in business, they’ve got low prices down to a…

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The upcoming transit-oriented development will feature 134 apartments and 7,000 square feet of retail space

A week doesn’t go by where there isn’t news regarding new construction and development in Logan Square. And within the last week the developer CRG, a subsidiary of Clayco, has received formal permission from the city to begin constructing what will ultimately become a seven-story mixed-user at the southwest corner of the Milwaukee and Armitage intersection.

Located near the Western Blue Line station, the new development falls under the city’s transportation-oriented development ordinance which allows the developers to reduce the number of parking from the typically mandated 1:1 ratio of parking spaces per residential unit. The upcoming development for the site will contain 134 apartments with just 16 parking spaces. In addition, the development will feature 7,000 square feet of ground-level commercial space.

Not without controversy, the development received an aesthetic makeover during its planning phase which incorporated the facade of the John Ahlschlager-designed structure which was located at the site. Built in 1907, preservationists launched a campaign last year to have the building saved. Last month, crews were spotted at the site demolishing the historic building. However, the developer has since clarified and vowed to rebuild the structure and include it in the facade of the new development.

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Update: CRG’s communications lead has reached out to offer some clarification and their firm’s views on the John Ahlschlager-designed Weyland Building which stood on Milwaukee Avenue before it was removed last month.

“While we respect and appreciate the work of Logan Square Preservation, the Weyland Building is not a historic building,” CRB comms director Brittany Burke writes via email. “It is not on the City’s historic register and it is not orange-rated. However, it is a really old building with a façade the neighborhood group wanted to save. We’re glad to do that.”

• New construction permit [Chicago Cityscape]
• Controversial Logan Square Building Gets Construction Permit [Chicago Architecture Blog]
• Developer vows to reuse historic Milwaukee Avenue facade in Logan Square TOD [Curbed Chicago]

A Utah nurse said she was scared to death when a police officer handcuffed and dragged her screaming from a hospital after she refused to allow blood to be drawn from an unconscious patient.

After Alex Wubbels and her attorneys released dramatic video of the arrest, prosecutors called for a criminal...

The president has suffered withering defeats in his short tenure at the hands of Republican leadership, the U.S. courts, and in some—but not all—of his handshakes with foreign leaders. We can add to that list of foes who have matched wits with the president and found him wanting the category of “monosyllabic words,”…

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Experts say the unique nature of Harvey's devastation means most home owners aren't covered.

A new national survey is offering hope for American kids waiting to be adopted: More people than ever are becoming parents in nonbiological ways, according to a new report.

Human hair burrito Donald Trump, who used Hurricane Harvey as a ratings ploy to pardon former Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio and claims to have seen the storm’s devastating effects “first hand” even though he didn’t, is now donating one million of his own hard-inherited dollars to relief efforts. Though that’s a not…

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The slow-to-sell historic mansion has seen its price widely fluctuate for the better part of a decade

The historic and architecturally significant Morton estate is once again up for grabs in suburban Lake Forest, Illinois. Designed by renowned Chicago area architect David Adler for Morton Salt Company founder Joy Morton’s daughter in 1915, the neo-French Provincial style mansion imitates the sort of 17th century opulence commonly associated with King Louis XVI.

Situated on two-plus acres of wooded North Shore real estate, the 11,000-square-foot manor features a gated private driveway, eight bedrooms, eleven bathrooms, formal gardens, a tennis court, and a swimming pool—inflatable golden swans presumably sold separately.

The slow-to-sell property first hit the market in June 2010 asking $7.9 million. After receiving new electrical, plumbing, and HVAC systems, the home re-listed for $8.9 million in 2014. The sprawling estate subsequently raised its price as high as $11 million before taking a huge chop all the way down to $4.9 million last summer.

Reappearing this week for $7.9 million, Lake Forest’s famous Morton Estate seems to have come full circle by returning to its original 2010 price. After a year of failing to land a buyer at $4.9 million, the home’s sudden $3 million price increase might be a rather optimistic move on the part of its owners.

• 275 Sussex Lane, Lake Forest IL [Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices KoenigRubloff]
• David Adler-designed Morton Salt Estate returns with huge price cut [Curbed Chicago]
• Own the Palatial Adler Designed Morton Salt Estate for $8.9M [Curbed Chicago]

The average ComEd residential customer can expect to see a credit of about $14 on October's bill.

The refunds, which amount to about $80 million overall, were approved Wednesday by the Illinois Commerce Commission as part of ComEd's energy efficiency program.

ComEd, an Exelon subsidiary, said it...

A five-story building at Fullerton and Maplewood is ready to begin construction

Another nineteen rental apartments are headed to Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood as a new five-story building at the corner of Fullerton and Maplewood avenues prepares to break ground. Designed by Chicago-based Vari Architects, the newly-permitted project at 2529 W. Fullerton replaces a pair of older two-story buildings.

The new development will feature a mix of two- and three-bedroom apartments ranging between 1,100-1,300 square feet in size. Rents are expected to run around $2,500 per month, reported DNAinfo during the project’s approval process. The mixed-use building will also include a ground floor commercial space where developer Stuart Miller plans to locate management offices.

While much of the new apartment construction taking place in Logan Square has been driven by transit-oriented developments near the CTA Blue Line stop along the hot Milwaukee Avenue corridor, the project at 2529 W. Fullerton is too far from a train station to qualify for a parking reduction under Chicago’s TOD ordinance. Instead, the building’s 19 residential units will be joined by a parking garage for 19 cars and 10 bicycles.

Google Street View

• New construction permit at 2533 W Fullerton Ave in Chicago [Chicago Cityscape]
• Proposed 6-Story Project On Fullerton Calls For Rents Around $2,500 [DNAinfo]
• Previous Logan Square coverage [Curbed Chicago]

Email correspondence, flight manifests, hotel bills, credit card statements and Federal Election Commission filings will all be deployed as evidence of an alleged bribery scheme carried out for seven years by Democratic New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez and an associate, according to a new brief filed by prosecutors in federal court Wednesday.

A nationwide coalition of 153 evangelical Christian leaders released a statement Tuesday affirming their conservative beliefs regarding human sexuality.

“today’s the Feast of St.Guinefort: a greyhound who saved a baby from a snake, was martyred & became a saint. let us honor this very good boy https://t.co/haI4VPgrpL”

A lot of people and organizations have been chipping in to help the Hurricane Harvey relief efforts in Texas, and one particularly charitable famous person is Sandra Bullock, who recently donated $1 million to the American Red Cross. That’s according to People, which says that Bullock released a brief statement saying…

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The Internet is choked with nostalgia for the youth-oriented entertainments of the not-too-distant past: Tumblr blogs regurgitating images of half-forgotten toys; YouTube compilations of long-lost TV-show intros; countless blogs playing “Remember when?” with movies and video games whose rose-colored recollections…

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Joy-Anna Duggar, who wed Austin Forsyth earlier this summer, is already pregnant with her first child, the two announced Wednesday.

Kane County Animal Control is looking for information as to how a stray goat was found in Burlington last Friday.

The goat, who an agency employee named Alfonso, will be up for adoption on Friday if the owner or owners do not claim him.

Administrator Brett Youngsteadt said it is one of the oddest...

It took Antonio Stradivari months to create one of his instrumental masterpieces, but you can make yourself a tiny wooden violin in just a few hours using popsicle sticks, toothpicks, coffee stirrers, and string. It can’t be used to play Mozart, but you can still pretend to play it whenever your friends start…

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When there is flooding along the Gulf Coast, there are fire ants. The invasive ants congregate into living rafts, drifting through water until they reach solid ground again. It’s a time-honed survival strategy.

But when there is Hurricane Harvey-level flooding, there are not just small rafts but huge, dense mats of fire ants.

“Holy crap. I have never, in my entire career as an ant researcher, seen *anything* like this,” tweeted Alex Wild, curator of entomology at University of Texas at Austin, in response to the image below.

Meanwhile, in Cuero, the river has brought my aunt all of the fire ants. Yes, those are all (of the) fire ants. pic.twitter.com/dEibWYxAdl

— Bill O'Zimmermann (@The_Reliant) August 29, 2017

Of course, Wild told me, it is all perfectly logical. “They actually love floods,” says Wild. “It’s how they get around.” Fire ants displaced by water form rafts; a lot of fire ants displaced by a lot of water will form really big rafts. But still! The sheer size of them is incredible.

After Hurricane Katrina, Linda Bui, an entomologist at Louisiana State University, remembers seeing evacuees from New Orleans come into a field hospital with bands of unexplained rashes around their legs and waists after wading through floodwaters. “They were like something none of the medical professionals had ever seen,” she says. “I was like, ‘Those are literally fire ant stings on top of fire ant stings.’”

The episode stuck in Bui’s head, and later, she investigated the venom of flooded fire ants. The study, published in 2011, found that flooded fire ants deliver higher doses of venom because they have 165 percent as much venom inside them as normal fire ants. The flooding made them more aggressive and dangerous. It is also important, she says, to be careful during post-hurricane cleanup. Piles of debris can act like islands, where fire ants have congregated during the flood.

Fire ant rafts do have a kryptonite: dish soap. “Dawn is a not a registered insecticide, but it will break up the surface tension and they will sink,” says Bui.

Hurricane Katrina ended up permanently depressing fire ant populations around New Orleans. The rafts can last as long as three weeks, says Bui, but most start to fall apart after a week. Because parts of New Orleans stayed flooded for weeks in the time it look water to be pumped out from behind the levees, a lot of those ants ultimately drowned. Afterwards, Bui and her colleagues also initiated a pesticide program to prevent fire ants from returning and colonizing the previously flooded areas. It seems to have worked so far.

What will happen to the fire ant rafts in Texas will depend in part on how fast the waters recede. It could also depend who exactly is in these rafts. Fire ants originally formed colonies around a single queen (monogyne), but somewhere along the line, some populations lost the ability to recognize other colonies. These mutant fire ants live in one big interconnected colony with multiple queens (polygyne). “If they’re polygyne, then that’s basically one giant interconnected colony and they’ll disembark and spread out but they’ll be fine,” says Wild. “If they’re monogyne, it’s going to be a territorial mess. Fights. Battles.”

Whoever lives will have the land all to them themselves. There is at least one possible upside: Fire ants love to eat ticks. The area where the fire ants landed may be crawling with stinging ants for while. “But it’ll have absolutely no ticks. So it’ll be lovely from that perspective,” says Wild.

An architect, an author, and a house that’s new and old

When architect Thomas A. Kligerman of Ike Kligerman Barkley talks about shingle-style homes, he waxes a bit romantic. “If you asked a child to draw a cartoon of a house, it would likely look like a shingle-style dwelling,” he says. “Everyone has one in their history, so they all appear familiar. Homes like this are like a soft, comfortable sweater.”

So, when his client Jeanne McWilliams Blasberg (author of the novel Eden) and her family approached him about building an modern, flat-roof home on the water in Watch Hill, Rhode Island, he asked them to rethink the concept. “The area is full of classic Shingle style homes, and I urged them to build something that respects that,” he says.

Blasberg and her family had been living in Switzerland, where they fell in love with clean lines and uncluttered interiors. “We toyed with building a glass box, but we are also fans of the charming homes you find in these summer communities,” she says. “Tom convinced us we could blend both aesthetics—and that we could have that clean box inside a Shingle style house.”

Kligerman explains what that looks like: “On the outside, you see a huge, exaggerated, triangular gable and an overhang that flairs out, also in an exaggerated way. It’s a detail we hadn’t seen before, and it reminded us of origami,” he says. “There’s no molding on the roof or around the windows, which is modern, but we do have the wide porches that you’d see on classic homes.”

William Waldron

That plural language extends to the interior, where there are classic forms (think paneling and wide-plank flooring), but large windows and an open floor plan. “One thing about shingle-style homes is that they are usually very dark,” says Kligerman. “But in this house, there are five times as many windows as you’d find in an old house, and they are much larger.”

Another interior feature: The quirky details that make these homes the stuff of children’s storybooks. As Kligerman laughingly puts it: “There’s a little bit of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe here.”

Blasberg agrees. “For me, the most whimsical parts are the large entry and generous landings, the window seats tucked throughout the house, and the screened-in porch that is in the perfect spot to capture the orange sky in the evenings,” she says.

A pair of rooms seems to invite coziness and introspection. “The house was so white, we decided to have two rooms—a den and an office—be dark. We were inspired by the hull of a wooden boat to paint the walls a glossy black color. The black we chose isn’t totally black, it has undertones of blue and green,” Kligerman says.

Blasberg adds: “The black space is a very warm, cozy place to be at night or in the winter. It’s where my husband does his work and where we gather as a family to watch a movie or play board games.”

Cladding a pair of rooms with horizontal paneling and painting them a high-gloss black may seem like a risky move, but the Blasbergs encouraged this type of thinking. “We never approached this house like one we might sell someday,” she says. “Instead, we encouraged the architects to do things that were one-of-a-kind and special.”

That brand of originality helped the architect make federal requirements an attractive feature. “The home sits in a hurricane zone, and the new FEMA rules are stringent,” says Kligerman. “We had to raise the house 15 feet in the air, and the space underneath it can’t be living space. We embraced the situation by making part of the area a garage with slatted doors and part of it an outdoor living space that’s framed by arches. The new rules are changing the face of coastal architecture, but we wanted to make it look natural and archetypal.”

Blasberg counts the space as one of the most pleasant in the house. “It became an asset,” she says. “It’s where the kids entertain their friends in the summer.”

The family looks at the home as their forever house, but perhaps the building has cast a similar spell on its creator. “I bicycle all around this area, and about six or seven times a year I’ll ride down and look at the house,” Kligerman says. “As the shingles weather, the color changes—and of course they look different depending on the weather and whether they are wet or dry. To me, the one thing a Shingle style always looks is wonderful.”

The Trumps are going to Corpus Christi, Texas for a briefing on the catastrophic storm that continues to bear down on America’s fourth largest city, and these are the outfits they have chosen to wear, because we are living on the set of a Christopher Guest movie whose release was indefinitely postponed.

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It looks like the new CEO of Uber will be a step up for women at the company, though the bar for success is pretty low.

The hike could climb as high as $130 million per year. [ more › ]

In 1987 Prince Diana helped to break down stigmas around HIV/AIDS when she was photographed shaking the hand of a man with AIDS.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson declined to say Sunday whether President Trump’s values align with the United States’ values, instead maintaining that Trump “speaks for himself.”