Postcard from Chicago, part one
John Wyver writes: Although posts of this kind are not directly related to the company’s operations, I occasionally scratch out accounts of my travels and other doings. In this case, my wife Clare and I are now on a long-planned holiday, with first of all a week in Chicago and then a 10-day road trip through the mid-west searching out architecture and art. Were I only a touch more pretentious I might say that, with the song, we have gone “to look for America”. More on that to follow, as there are likely to be four or five Postcards of this kind over the next fortnight or so.
My kind of town (Chicago is)
Let’s agree first off that the visual density and intensity of Chicago’s cityscape is simply overwhelming. At least right in the centre, around the river, the astonishing architecture creates an environment unlike anywhere else I’ve been. Every towering building seems remarkable, but more than anything it’s the mix of styles that delights, with neo-classicism, Deco, modernism and PoMo jostling up against contemporary achievements, like Jeanne Gang’s truly incredible St Regis, completed in 2020 and currently the tallest building in the world designed by a woman.
Given this, I love the pride that the Chicagoans take in their architecture. There are plaques celebrating pretty much every building, the guides we’ve had LOVE their subjects, and there’s an indefinable sense that the city is special because of its buildings. But there’s also a recognition that this isn’t just about structures and starchitects, but also all about sensitive city planning and zoning decisions and the like.
There’s much that’s wrong here. I know it’s a deeply inequitable city, with homeless persons, often with kids, on every corner, but for this tourist so much is right too, down to the almost incidental beauty of the lamp standards and elaborate clocks on building corners.
A good day for a boat ride
Not quite the first thing that we did, but on our first afternoon we took the boat tour organised by the Chicago Architecture Center – this is the real deal, although there are several competing offers, which only goes to show how popular architecture is. With the afternoon sun ensuring that everything looked spectacular, this was 90 minutes traversing the central stretch of the river, briefly up both north and south branches, and then out to the lake. Our guide was a native Chicagoan who introduced us to some 90 buildings, every time with a salient design fact or anecdote.
One structure sways so much in the wind that it has large tanks of water at the very top to dampen the swing. The old Chicago Post Office had a floor area of 2.4 million square feet. The vast Merchandise Mart structure was owned by the Kennedy family until – was it? – the early 1990s. The unique Marina City (below) was built as affordable housing, and today you can supposedly buy a studio flat there for $300K.
And then there’s the Chicago Tribune printing plant, which housed 14 vast presses capable of turning out 1 million newspapers in 24 hours. The day of our tour was the final day on which presses there were printing a paper. Soon the huge plant will be razed to the ground in preparation for the construction of a casino.
You could tell that our guide, whose grandfather and father worked in the Chicago stockyards, regretted this, but he also accepted it as part of the constant renewal of the city – and best of all, he was completely confident that because this is Chicago, the architecture of the casino will be distinctive and distinguished.
Mmm skyscraper I love you. mmm skyscraper I love you
On the ground, I have a digital copy on my iPad of the American Institute of Architects Guide to Chicago, which is the nerdiest city guide you can imagine, packed with info and listings and maps and photos and history, all laid out in a frustratingly opaque manner. But if you work at it, it’s the best possible companion (loved ones excepted, natch) and it means you can simply stumble across glory after glory. Like the old Chicago Motor Club building at 68 E. Wacker Place, now a Hampton Inn, but with exquisite Deco detailing, automobile echoes in the styling of the facade, and in the lobby (and there are so many lobbies to walk into!) a glorious touring USA mural by John W. Norton.
All the central area is very walkable, but the CTA transport pass for all the subways and buses, including to and from the airport, is an incredible bargain at just $25 for 7 days. And pretty much anywhere you can sit and look for the longest time at more or less any building, as I did with what was the Railway Exchange at 224 S.Michigan (below, with the Motorola sign), a Daniel Burnham structure from 1904, with a white-glazed terracotta skin, a concealed air well and a top floor of porthole windows. It was here, I discovered, that Burnham and colleagues worked out the details of the hugely consequential 1909 Plan of Chicago.
Next door, again almost randomly, is Metropolitan Tower (below), the first building to take advantage of the city’s 1923 zoning ordinance which permitted the erection of occupied towers above 260 feet. This was the headquarters of the investment firm of S.W. Strauss & Co, and the glass beehive just visible on the top was intended as a symbol of industry and thrift. It also housed a directional beacon signifying the company’s global reach.
All that said, the street names aren’t always as obvious as they might be and some of the subway stations have the same names despite being literally miles from each other – as Clare found to her cost when I sent her to Grant on the Blue line when it should have been Grant on the Red. I’m so sorry, my love.
It’s curtain time and away we go
The boat tour reinforced the visual overload of the city, but on Sunday morning we had the chance to focus on just a single building: The Auditorium. Built by Louis Sullivan and Denkmar Adler as a mixed-use theatre, hotel and office block and opened in 1889, this was one of the earliest high-rise buildings in the city after the catastrophic fire of 1871.
The centre-piece, and the bit you get to go round on a tour that for us lasted nearly two and a half hours (and wasn’t a minute too long) is a cavernous auditorium of 4,000-plus seats, arrayed amphitheatre-style, and facing a vast stage (and yes, that’s the traditional theatre ‘ghost light’ in the centre). The space housed the 1888 Republican Party Convention before its opening; Sarah Bernhardt, Alicia Markova, Liza Minelli and Elton John have played here; but it was also the site of flower shows and, on a raised platform built out over much of the stalls, baseball (well, softball) games back in the early 1900s.
The structure was built, like all of Chicago’s buildings at the time, on a kind of raft, intended to float on the sandy, slushy soil of the city. It was expected to sink on this raft some 18 inches, but in fact across its first two decades it subsided between three and four feet, meaning that some of the floors and ceiling slope in the strangest ways.
Sullivan and Adler employed 19 year old Frank Lloyd Wright to oversee the team of 20-plus draughtsmen, which he did for five years, and it seems the only element of the building he might have actually designed (at least, he signed just a single drawing) was this decoration at the bottom of one of the staircases.
We climbed right into the very highest seats, which were absurdly vertiginous, and usually aren’t put on sale, and we went through the decidedly unglamorous dressing rooms, and finally onto the stage itself. And we learned so, so much, including that Sullivan decided to use exposed electric light bulbs, which are everywhere, as a form of modern decoration. Concealed walkways in the ceiling allow these to be changed as necessary.
Our excellent guide, John P., was as he told us, 72, and as a 15-year-old already fascinated by the stage he had persuaded his Mom to send part of his allowance to the fund for restoring the theatre after its closure since the Second World War. He was there on the re-opening night in 1969, and since then he has seen literally thousands of performances in the house, including some 700 by the Joffrey Ballet that until recently was the resident dance company. Now the theatre is largely a touring house hosting popular music, road shows, comedians and the like, but no longer, to John’s regret, grand opera and major ballet companies.
John’s passionate investment ln the house made the tour intimate and delightfully personal. Monday morning, we had a shorter, more conventional tour of another building from the late 1880s, The Rookery, now regarded as the oldest high-rise structure in the city. Built as a speculative 11-story office block, with a magnificent interior court and skylight, it was given a makeover by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1905. Inevitably, there’s much more Frank to come on this tour.
Let down and hanging around
Mostly the city has exceeded my (exceptionally high) expectations, but there have been a couple of modest disappointments. The area around Anish Kapoor’s great public artwork Cloud Gate, 2004, is closed off for building work, and we couldn’t get very close. But this sense was off-set by encountering the Jay Pritzker Pavilion next door, designed by Frank Gehry.
Seemingly everywhere there’s great public artwork, including Alexander Calder’s thrillingly good Flamingo, 1974.
Also to file under modest disappointments, the bar at the top of the building previously known as the Hancock Tower was underwhelming. The view was great but they could make the space much more appealing.
We never painted by the numbers, baby
If Sunday was largely occupied with The Auditorium and the boat tour, Monday was mostly all about the peerless collections of The Art Institute of Chicago. I could fill a hundred blog posts with the masterpieces I marvelled at here, but let’s recognise five of the icons:
Different areas of the museum have very different display practices, especially in relation to the labels, which are close up to the artworks and helpfully informative in the nineteenth century, but confusingly distant and blandly noncommittal once you get to the post-World War Two spaces.
One especially engaging yet weird juxtaposition of two modern artworks is Richard Artschwager’s Table with Pink Tablecloth, 1964, set plumb in front of David Hockney’s American Collectors (Fred and Marcia Weisman), 1968. The Artschwager is in exactly the position, and at the right height, for a seat to rest on while you gaze at David’s draughtsmanship. Which is what almost everybody must go to do, to such an extent that the museum posts a guard there every minute of the day to prevent exactly this. The young man occupying this role while we were there was engagingly wry about the necessity of the position, but we couldn’t help wondering why the Artschwager couldn’t be displayed elsewhere.
By our third evening, the visual overload had got to us, not to mention the walking and the jet lag. Adventures to come around the Illinois Institute of Technology, further close encounters with Frank Lloyd Wright, and a game at Wrigley Field will have to wait until Postcard from Chicago, part two.
Leave a Reply