CHICAGO, ILLINOIS (December 15, 2015)...According to filmmaker Spike Lee, director of “Chiraq,” a new film about the deadly gun violence in the City of Chicago’s war zone, “Chicago’s population is half of New York with three times the crime rate.”

This year alone, there has been well over 2,500 victims of gun violence in the City of Chicago.

“The Mayor of Chicago,” states Christian Narkiewicz-Laine, human rights advocate and Museum President, The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design, “has staged an abysmal, three-month long architectural folly sponsored by a $2.5 million grant from the planet’s most notorious environmental polluter on record: British Petroleum Company.”

“Instead of the ‘First City of Modern Architecture,’ this Mayor and his ineffective directives on crime and violence have transformed Chicago into an urban war zone and the ‘Murder Capital of the World’.”

“While Chicago’s murder rate accelerates, the Mayor, according to the City’s press releases, thinks he has produced a design festival to outpace the likes of the internationally renowned Venice Biennale,” Narkiewicz-Laine continues.

“This intellectually light-weight Mayor is suffering from delusions of grandeur, while his city sinks into a deeper, darker despair around its surging and unstoppable street and gun violence.”  

“The Mayor’s vanity festival is a ‘let them eat cake’ to the most worried and frightened residents in Chicago’s highest crime-ridden neighborhoods, particularly the poorer, less-educated, black city areas of Austin and Englewood.”

According to statistics, Chicago’s street and drive-by shootings have skyrocketed by 40 percent during the first three months of this year. Through March of this year, there were 355 shootings, compared with 253 through all of March 2014.

The issue of street violence played a huge part of the recent mayor’s race Emanuel almost lost. Indeed, violent crime has been a political problem for Emanuel since homicides spiked at 504 in 2012, and he has sought to defend his crime policies while not appearing indifferent to the fact that residents in many parts of the city continue to feel unsafe. 

Democratic mayoral challenger Jesus “Chuy” Garcia tried to capitalize on what he believes is Emanuel’s vulnerability on the issue. He ran TV ads highlighting homicides and shootings during Emanuel’s first term, and Garcia repeatedly pledged to “keep the promises that the mayor broke” and hire 1,000 additional cop during the recent mayoral race.

With 391 murders in Chicago this year, the homicide rate is up 18 percent over a year ago — and victims include 40 children.

“This spike in homicides,” states Narkiewicz-Laine, “is the most intolerable example of Mayor Emanuel’s broken promises and wrong priorities — and comes in tandem with more than 10,500 shootings and 1,800 homicides under his watch. Parents worry about their kids playing outside in every neighborhood in this city, while rank-and- file police officers are short-staffed and starved of resources.”

“Meanwhile, the City’s architecture festival produced by the Mayor is like Rome burning and Nero playing the fiddle, while Chicago children are being slaughtered weekly on city streets. The situation is so catastrophic that local communities are petitioning for the Illinois National Guard to step in and take over where an ineffective Mayor of Chicago can’t do anything to serve and protect the general public.”

“Equally troubling,” continues Narkiewicz-Laine, “what does architecture have to do with the world’s worst environmental polluter in history?”

“This BP sponsorship is the most insensitive, outrageous political collaboration in the name of design that sets sustainability and the green movement back to the Stone Age.” 

“Evidently, the Mayor and BP are attempting to make us to feel warm and fuzzy about a company that has saturated the Gulf of Mexico with the world’s worst oil disaster while communities up and down the coast continue to struggle to clean the waters, beaches, and cities devastated by the 2010 oil spill over the last 5 years.”

“BP’s involvement in an architecture festival crosses all known ethics boundaries in the practice of architecture.”

“No BP executive has ever faced criminal charges for such large-scale destruction of the natural environment, but Chicago Mayor Immaneul feels comfy in bed with the most socially irresponsible corporation on the planet.”

Other contributors to the Mayor’s festival include S.C. Johnson and the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.

“I certainly don’t feel warm and fuzzy about British Petroleum. I feel a sense of moral outrage that this Mayor takes political contributions from a socially negligent, morally irresponsible company.”

“When I think ‘British Petroleum,’ I think of tar and oil soaked beaches, dying wildlife, the destruction of natural habitats, and the thousands of people who lost their businesses and their incomes in the Gulf,” states Narkiewicz- Laine. 

“Certainly NOT beautiful cities and NOT exhilarating architecture.”

“I surely do not equate BP to the built environment, serious urban planning, or the social design of homes and institutions for neighborhoods and communities.”

Beyond the residue of oil-soaked Mississippi and Gulf coast beaches, Chicago now has its own muck.

As a highlight of the Mayor’s architecture festival, the City presented a series of ten banal-at-best pavilions curated by the festival’s artistic director, Sara Hurde, on the shores of Lake Michigan.

“And while those aesthetically-deprived pavilions were being celebrated by the Mayor, another nine-year old Chicago child, the latest victim of street crime, Tyshawn Lee, was shot multiple times in the face, gunned down that same week.”

Simultaneously, another twenty-year old Kaylyn Pryor, just starting her career as a professional model, was murdered in a drive-by shooting while on a visit to her grandparents. A 15-year old gang member standing nearby was wounded.

“Instead the City should have used the $2.5 million BP monies to fund neighborhood programs against street violence, create more jobs in crime-ridden neighborhoods, inspire hope for the hopeless, and ultimately hire and better equipt more Chicago police and reform and re-educate the out-of-control Chicago police department. 

‘It is shocking that an elected official, the Mayor of Chicago, cannot think beyond his vanity project and come to grips with real urban problems that plague today’s city,” Narkiewicz-Laine continues.

“As a victim of street gun violence, I am profoundly incensed that this frivolous Mayor has turned his back on the war against urban crime and violence; and he, for sure, should resign”

“Without a safe and violent-free environment, a city’s architecture cannot function or thrive to achieve its true humanist goals and objectives.”

As a protest, The Chicago Athenaeum has launched a world-wide boycott of the City of Chicago’s “architecture festival,” calling on architects and architectural fans not to visit or participate in the Mayor’s “Chiraque Architecture Biennial.”

“This architecture fiasco signals a long fall for Chicago, whose official motto is the elegant ‘Urbs in Horto,’ or ‘City in a Garden’.”

“Once upon a time, Chicago even inspired poetry when Carl Sandburg declared it the ‘City of the Big Shoulders’,” continues Narkiewicz-Laine.” 

And as Spike Lee continued in discussing his film, “Chiraq,” Lee states: “Artists I love, whether it be painters, novelists, sculptors, writers, musicians, filmmakers, actors ... they hold a mirror up to what is happening in the world.”

“In the City of Chicago and in Chicago’s architecture today,” Narkiewicz-Laine concludes, “this is simply not the case.”