Cairo720

Chicago, Illinois

King Tut’s Jazzage influence drives the design of a jazzclub and an underground danceclub.

 
the 7,500-square-foot  
Cairo 720 was built on three floors
of an existing corner building in
Chicago’s River North entertainment
district, featuring a bar and jazz
club on the ground floor and dance club
in a basement that was enlarged
by annexing vaults under
the sidewalk

Trish and I were in graduate school. One evening day after I caught some hell in a critique she took me for a sabbatical to her boyfriend’s house, just down the street and a world away.
 
We walked up Indiana limestone steps and into a Lincoln Park home populated with antiquities and an understated gentleman who offered me a whiskey an unexpectedly intimate look at ancient artifacts from Rome and ancient Egypt.
 
A few years later, a charismatic hustler named Jerry asked JMA to renovate a local antiquity, a corner building with a cast iron façade - a rarity in Chicago, where buildings with cast iron structures melted in the Great Fire of 1871–the disaster that led to the visionary modern planning and architecture of Chicago.
 
Jerry had leased the building from Trish’s boyfriend.
 
We developed permit drawings to build a ground floor jazz club, a courtyard and a  basement dance club orbited by private catacomb-like rooms rebuilt from brick vaults under the sidewalks—remnants of the raised and widened streets after the Great Fire, which we leased from the City.

Back Bar Shelving composed of
steel and mahogany.

The aesthetic catalyst was delivered by Jerry’s elegant girlfriend, Seymore, who attended a design meeting wearing oxidized bronze ankh earrings. Their patina suggested the rusted cast iron structure of the building and similar buildings in London. The motif recalled the landlord’s Egyptian antiquities I’d seen years ago with Trish, and an Englishman’s rediscovery of King Tutankhamen’s tomb in 1922 and the influence the discovery had on early modernism in the 1920s and 30’s, and the exhilarating contrast of old and new in old north African cities...
 
An Egyptologist from the University of Chicago’s Oriental institute introduced us to the ancient Egyptian zigzag hieroglyph for liquid. We translated it into three dimensions for the bar design.
 
As ancient Egyptian tulip columns flare at the top, so do the big shouldered arches, the conic entry vestibule, the cracked plaster bandshell sculpture and the sarcophagus for spirits behind the bar….

Industrial Egyptian modern foot rails, shelving and seating brackets
 
All made of raw steel, wood, concrete and brick 

 

Ground floor Jazz Club Floor Plan

Cairo Back Bar Concept