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Chicago, Illinois
It was for freedom from myself and from the land
There are some places that I just seem to go to every year. One is DC (where I went four times) and another is Chicago (where I went twice). Somehow both Maine and Los Angeles didn’t make the cut this year, maybe that’s why I had to do that mileage run to DC on New Years Eve this year just to get to silver.
Anyway, we’re in Chicago twice this year (as I just mentioned), once in the late spring and once in the fall. The spring trip was for work, specifically to attend Neocon, a super busy commercial office furniture show. And while its hard to enjoy Neocon (there are just too many damn people everywhere), at least it takes place on the same weekend as Chicago Ribfest, where you can paint with BBQ sauce or eat ribs. Or both I guess.
It turns out that not only Neocon and Ribfest take place on the same weekend, but it also the weekend of the Old Town Garden Walk. The Old Town Garden Walk is exactly what its name implies, and it all starts with a map that sends you down streets and alleys you would never normally visit, and into secret gardens that weren’t all that secret that weekend.
Chicago now has their own High Line, or, to be more accurate, Chicago now thinks it has its own High Line. The poorly named The 606 is kind of like the High Line if the High Line had almost no design. That’s not as much of a put down as it might sound like, one could argue that the High Line is overdesigned (it kind of is) as a counterpoint. As a connecting path, or a place to run or bike real fast, The 606 is certainly fine. But it’s not a destination and it’s certainly no High Line.
Chicago may have given a back seat to design at The 606, but they certainly didn’t when it came to the Riverwalk. This was my first time on the new extension, and the way they weave under the bascule bridges is spectacular, with mirrors that give you a bit of that Fata Morgana effect is just spectacular. Good job, Chicago!
You may not be able to tell from the pictures, but we just fast forwarded six months or so to late November when there may be no Neocon or Ribfest or Old Town Garden Walks going on, but there is something else. I went back to Chicago to see their first ever architectural biennial, a celebration of architecture at venues throughout the city. Coinciding with this was a David Adjaye exhibit at the Art Institute called Making Place: The Architecture of David Adjaye, which was good but nowhere near as good as the Bjarke Ingels exhibition at the National Building Museum, although honestly, nothing ever will probably beat that one.
The theme (subtitle may be more accurate) of the first ever Chicago Architecture Biennial is The State of the Art of Architecture and it was headquartered at the Chicago Cultural Center, a fantastic building that I somehow always managed to overlook all the times I previously visited the city. The biennial was a great excuse to go inside and gawk at its spectacular architecture. which honestly was more impressive than the actual biennial.
To give you an idea of what it was like inside the biennial, here are just a few of the exhibits on display inside the Chicago Cultural Center galleries.
The biennial was more than just exhibits about architecture, there was also some actual architecture. Way out in Grant Park was a pavilion called Chicago Horizon by Ultramoderne, a wooden Miesian pavilion built just for the pavilion, The best feature was an observation platform that allows you to peek over the roof, but that part was closed when I visited, allowing me to imagine that it was more awesome up there than it might have actually been in reality.
Overall the biennial was interesting and worth visiting, despite the fact that it felt really scattered. Hopefully future ones will build on that idea. I guess we’ll find out in 2017 and (hopefully) every two years after that.
It’s still November and we’re still in Chicago, and even though we’re done with the biennial it doesn’t mean that we can’t enjoy the spectacular view from the John Hancock Tower, complete with its very own Fata Morgana effect.
We’ll finish up in Chicago at the new ice skating track at Maggie Daley Park, which now joins the Frank Gehry designed bandshell (pictured below) and Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate (also pictured below) as another must see stop, especially in the winter.
