Saturday is Anzac Day, and not just any anniversary, but the centennial of the landing at Anzac Cove. Here’s a remarkable collection of images from last year’s commemorations (published by a British tabloid, no less).

Speaking of anniversaries, I’d never heard of this disaster until today, the 75th anniversary of the Rhythm Club Fire in Natchez, Miss.

Last Saturday our tour took us inside Carl Schurz High School, which is on the Northwest Side of Chicago. Its library has something few other school libraries can claim: a domed ceiling and murals by Gustave Brand. The murals were painted in the late 1930s by Brand, a German immigrant who was then pushing 80, so he had some help by former Schurz students. Brand had originally been sent to Chicago by the German government to paint murals in that country’s pavilion at the 1893 Columbian Exposition, and he must have liked it here.

The works were restored in the late 1990s. At the back wall is a large alcove featuring “The Spirit of Chicago.” The text under the painting says: “The Spirit of the Pioneer lingers here. Where once the Redman roamed, a City vast Lifts its proud Skyline to the Morning Sun. A Monument to service nobly done.”

A closeup of the centerpiece.

Looks like a collection of allegorical figures under the protection of the Spirit of Chicago. I take that to be the City, not Columbia with her torch and flag, because of the Y on her chest, the Municipal Device of Chicago. To the left is the Fire, and to the right the ’93 world’s fair, among other things.

On the ceiling, around the dome, are four more murals by Brand, who clearly had a lot of energy for an elderly man. They depict the evolution of the written word, fancifully done, but fitting enough for a library.

Here are Stone Age men — presumably — carving in stone.

Egyptians devising their hieroglyphics. Seems like Brand had a thing for fancy headgear.

Medieval monks doing their part to preserve the written word. And Gutenberg.

What I did see at my high school library when I looked up at the ceiling? I don’t remember exactly, but it must have been acoustic ceiling tiles.

One of the other destinations on the Schools by Bus tour was Carl Schurz High School, a Chicago public school at 3601 N. Milwaukee Ave. As the name suggests, the neighborhood used to be heavily German. Work on the school began in 1908, with wings on either side added later that look a lot like the original structure.

Without a wide-angle lens, it’s hard to get an image of the whole structure, so expansive is it. This is the original building, plus part of one of the wings on the right. All together, the structure forms a squared C shape, with a large lawn filling in the C.

“Commissioned by a reform-minded school board headed by Jane Addams, the project was one highlight of a broad program for rescuing the immigrant poor from the ignorance and isolation engendered by the industrial city,” the AIA Guide to Chicago says about the building.

The school board’s architect from 1905-10 was Dwight Perkins, who did the original Schurz structure. “Chicago’s typical Dickensian public school before 1905 was a poorly lighted and ventilated box, set into the city grid with no significant playgrounds,” AIA continues. “Toilet facilities were archaic and located in the basement.

“The forty-odd schools that Perkins designed between 1905 and 1910 changed all that, creating a building type with grass and trees, sunlight and fresh air, safety from fire, and good sanitation.”
Good for him. From our fairly comfortable perch here in the 21st-century First World, I doubt that we really appreciate the squalid conditions that spurred action in the Progressive Era.

I didn’t know this until I read about Perkins, but he also did the Lincoln Park Zoo Lion House. We were there earlier this month.
A nice use of brickwork.

Inside El Centro, a campus of Northeastern Illinois University, you not only can find gender-neutral restrooms (see yesterday), but also a lot of cool pipes near the ceilings.

It’s something more buildings ought to do, at least if their pipes are exposed. El Centro has more surface colors than most buildings, certainly most educational facilities, and on the whole it works.

The hallways put natural lighting to good use. That, by contrast, is no rare thing in newer buildings. Turns out that cutting people off from natural lighting isn’t considered good for them any more. How is it that took decades to figure that out?

Anyway, in the afternoons, one side of the building catches light like so.

Some of the artificial light placements were interesting, too.
As our tour group wandered down one of El Centro’s halls, we encountered another tour group. They were architectural historians in town for the Society of Architectural Historians 68th Annual Conference. The conference seemed to have a lot of tour options, one of which was “Provocative New Architecture in Chicago: The Work of JGMA,” led by Juan Moreno, the designer of the building we were in.
He paused and spoke to us for a moment. He didn’t say anything earthshaking, but it was a nice thing for him to do.

I came across this sign on Saturday afternoon. That’s the first usage of “gender neutral” I’ve ever seen at a restroom. (There ought to be a hyphen, but never mind.) I wondered whether it’s an up-and-coming usage to replace “unisex” or merely is supplementing it.

The gender-neutral restrooms  — one of three options, along with standard gendered rooms — were at El Centro, a satellite campus of Northeastern Illinois University that was completed only last year. It was one of the schools we visited as participants on the Chicago Architecture Foundation’s Schools by Bus tour. Unlike the Churches by Bus tour last fall, only one bus was enough for everyone. As the docents explained, this was the first tour of its kind by the CAF, compared with the churches tour, which has been going on for 20 years.

The schools were interesting, but the churches were more beautiful. There’s no escaping the utilitarian nature of a school, even if the overall design is good. Still, El Centro was well worth a look. The glass structure’s covered with fins: blue on one side, yellow on the other. Stand at one spot and it’s yellow.

Move, and it starts a transition to blue.

Then it’s blue. Or move the opposite way, and it goes from blue to yellow.

Just as remarkably, the building manages to work well despite standing hard by the always-busy Kennedy Expressway.

Last fall, Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin wrote that, “Chicago architect Juan Moreno, a Colombian native who in 2011 won attention for a striking charter school built for the United Neighborhood Organization in Chicago’s Gage Park neighborhood, wisely saw the Kennedy as an opportunity, not a monster.

“Instead of setting his three-story, steel-framed building far back from the highway and sticking a parking lot in between, Moreno slid El Centro almost alongside the road. Rather than turning out an ordinary box, he bent his long, linear structure like a boomerang to turn its southern end toward drop-dead views of the downtown skyline. Then he sculpted its exterior for reasons both formal and functional…

“In the crucial move, 20-inch-wide fins — their faces blue to the south, yellow to the north — are layered atop El Centro’s glass skin, ostensibly to shield the building from the sun’s glare. But there’s no denying that the fins endow the building with visual rhythms that express the highway’s rushing motion and reveal the influence of the Pritzker Prize-winning London architect Zaha Hadid.”