As you know, we took an architectural boat tour in Chicago. I'll try to play tour guide (I am an architect after all):
Mies van der Rohe & the International Style
The architect of these towers was a pupil of van der Rohe & rejected the rigidity of straight lines as stifling.
Britannica Building displaying Prairie Style brick motifs, which are inspired by Native American art.
The renovation at this Louis Sullivan building's top references the front of a boat, calling homage to the river below.
Built by the Postal Service to mediate the massive amount of mail created by the Sears, Roebuck & Co. Magazine, this building used to have its own zip code!
Initially used for cold storage, the walls of this building were insulated by horse hair and had no windows.
This bridge is drawn because unlike the rest of the city's bridges, it doesn't open from the center into two parts, making it too slow to operate.
A few years ago a construction worker was working on the pilings around this bridge and broke a hole in an underground supply of coal. Most of the major buildings downtown had flooded basements, there were fish found swimming through clothes on the Macy's sales floor! The clean up cost $1 billion. Ouch.
Because of an underground service area, half of this skyscraper couldn't be built on a foundation. The architect resolved the problem by cantilevering the half from the rest of the building and creating the illusion it's firmly on the ground with massive columns. The cantilever's structure is expressed on the roof of the building.
This building was being constructed following the discovery of King Tut's tomb in the twenties. It was to mimic Egyptian design through massive sphinx sculptures on either side of the entrance. Unfortunately, because of the Great Depression, they weren't added to the facade.
Mies van der Rohe & the International Style
Postmodern expression of the river below. (Yuck!)
Another post office building, sitting abandoned because it's too large & expensive to use. Because it's listed on the National Register of Historic Places, it cannot be broken up and must have a single use & owner.
New skyscraper to the left, postmodern to the right.
Sears Tower peaking above. The very tall building is braced by its vertical exterior elements, which makes it lighter than the typical skyscraper, which stands around a structural core.
Interesting 60s expression of the exterior skeleton.
The Civic Opera Building was created to promote an egalitarian experience at the opera, there are no box seats and the view from all its seats are relatively as good as the next.
Center skyscraper is referencing Greek order in a postmodern way.
This building was built to protect diamonds and was so secure that you could drive your car into its central elevator and be lifted up to get your diamonds and leave. (Or so I understand? This may be outlandish actually.) During Prohibition Al Capone and other gangsters used its gold, central dome as an exclusive club, where I'm assuming they drank....
When there was a building boom of skyscrapers in the city, this building was the tallest in the world for all of a day.
After Mies van der Rohe was gone, a couple of his students found a sketch of this building he had done while still a student in Germany. They had it built in his honor along Lake Michigan.
