Last Thursday, just a few hours before the Chicago Architectural Club was to announce the winners of its global contest to design a reuse for Bertrand Goldberg’s iconic but doomed Prentice Hospital building, things took a dramatic turn.
The plaintiffs in the case are Landmarks Illinois and the National Trust for Historic Preservation. They’re suing both the city and the Chicago Commission on Public Landmarks, which on November 1 granted landmark protection to the building, only to rescind it the same afternoon.
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News of the judge’s ruling spread quickly, lifting spirits among the overflow crowd that gathered at the Chicago Architecture Foundation for the awards. “Reconsidering an Icon,” the accompanying CAF exhibit, showcases the winners along with ten invited solutions, offering a slide show of all 71 entries, each of which preserves Goldberg’s building while accommodating Northwestern’s desire for a new medical research building on the Prentice site.
As you’d expect, Northwestern says its plan has been guided by the latest research on facility design. But you might be surprised at the source. When I asked about it, I was directed to “Groupthink,” a breezy article by Jonah Lehrer that ran in the New Yorker earlier this year. It’s this piece, among others, that prompted Lehrer to resign from his job as a staff writer there, after admitting that he’d fabricated quotes and lifted statements from other sources. In “Groupthink” the dicey quotes are from Noam Chomsky and a Chomsky associate, reminiscing about the fertile atmosphere of MIT’s Building 20. But they’re arguably not as problematic as the stuff that didn’t get Lehrer in hot water—like his freewheeling use of anecdote and snippets of research to arrive at oversimplified conclusions the data wouldn’t necessarily support.
Also, as noted in Kohane’s study, the number of coauthors is a better predictor of impact than physical proximity. The more authors, the more citations, even if those authors are spread around the globe.
