AIA Chicago invites you to attend a Saturday morning tour of two new projects on Chicago’s North Shore: Writers Theatre in Glencoe by Studio Gang Architects, and the renovation of Rosewood Beach in Highland Park by Woodhouse Tinucci Architects. Leading the tour will be Juliane Wolf of Studio Gang and David Woodhouse, FAIA and Andy Tinucci, AIA of Woodhouse Tinucci. The tour will begin at Writers Theatre, after which attendees will be taken by bus to Rosewood Beach. After the tour of Rosewood Beach, the bus will bring attendees back to the theatre.
Writers Theatre
Theater’s ability to bring people together across boundaries has made it an important force in urban life since ancient times. Studio Gang’s design for the new home of Glencoe’s Writers Theatre is designed to maximize this potential for a 21st-century theater company, creating an architecture that energizes the daily life of its community and becomes an exciting, region-wide cultural destination. Organized as a village-like cluster of distinct volumes that surround a central hub, the building’s form resonates with the character of Glencoe’s downtown. The theater’s two performance spaces — a main stage and a smaller black box venue — employ innovative staging and seating configurations to maximize the sense of intimacy between actors and audience and to enhance the immersive experience of Writers’ productions.
Rosewood Beach
Rosewood Beach is Highland Park’s pride and joy-its only public beach for the experience of Lake Michigan’s water, sand, sun. It needed an environmental education center (also used for parties and summer camps), snack bar, lifeguard station, restrooms, and improved access from the neighborhood park atop the bluff. Woodhouse Tinucci wanted to root the design in the elemental experience that draws us to the lake-a leisurely stroll along the beach. The design started with a canonical waterside element – a boardwalk that meanders 1500-ft, connecting access points at each end and giving visitors an ever-changing journey along Lake Michigan. Then, to minimize bulk, only functions needing privacy or separation are enclosed. Everything else, including circulation, is outdoors on the boardwalk itself, which wraps up and over to form simple, low-profile pavilions and site furnishings.
