Page 5 of 7
Chicago, Illinois
I made a lot of mistakes in my mind, in my mind
Logically the next place to go after late Fall in the Berkshires is summer in the city of Chicago, where balcony living either in Bertrand Goldberg’s Marina City (first picture) or Jeanne Gang’s Aqua Tower (second picture) is easy.
Everyone loves Chicago and, like everyone else, I’m always looking for a reason to visit. Luckily there is a reason to go every June or, in my case, every other June.
Chicago holds an annual office design and product show called Neocon every June at the Merchandise Mart, one of the largest buildings (by area) that you’ll ever find yourself trapped in. Neocon is a chance for furniture manufacturers to show their most current products and, despite all of the annoyances and difficulties associated with attending, it’s something that has real value in understanding trends and where the industry is headed. As for the annoyances and difficulties attending, well, there certainly are a lot of them. First off are the crowds. There are a lot of people attending, meaning that simple things like riding elevators or getting food are nearly impossible tasks that take forever. Each individual booth (or store) is packed and the floors are huge with so much to see that it all quickly becomes downright exhausting. And unless you’re directly at a window, it’s nearly impossible to get a good signal on your phone and, despite what the pictures may look like, there are really not all that many windows. And with all of those people coming in from out of town for this, good luck finding a downtown hotel or even a room way out in Rosemont.
After attending several consecutive Neocons and balancing the value versus the annoyances and difficulties, an idea came to me, possibly on the forever long blue line commute back to my hotel in Rosemont. Maybe Neocon is something best experienced every other year, this way you can better see trends and track changes better. Yeah, that’s it. Not because it’s so damn annoying and so damn difficult and so damn exhausting that going every year is just no longer a desirable possibility.
One bonus about Neocon’s scheduling is that in coincides with Ribfest Chicago, a packed street festival that is all about ribs and barbeque. Ribfest Chicago closes eight blocks of Lincoln Avenue (take the Brown Line up to Irving Park) and luckily most of the samples are small enough that you can try a few places before becoming disgustingly full. The only downside isn’t the crowds but instead that annoying food/drink ticket policy that Chicago seems so damn fond of. All of the booths only sell things by tickets that you have to wait in a separate line to buy first. It’s an unnecessary step that takes time and, in the end, makes it harder to buy what you want as you’re trying to best use whatever tickets you already bought.
There is enough happening in Chicago that no matter how often you go, you can usually find at least something new. This time around there was the new Apple Store on Michigan Avenue to see. Designed by Norman Foster, the store steps down to the Chicago Riverwalk and with its all glass walls, you have great views from the Michigan Avenue Bridge all the way to the christmas tree. Wait- christmas tree? Didn’t I just say it was June? Something doesn’t seem quite right.
And now we’re looking at ice skaters in Maggie Daley Park. Ok, what’s happening here?
To answer my own question, this page of 2017 Chicago trips includes pictures from two 2017 Chicago trips, one in June for Neocon and Ribfest Chicago, and another in December for a completely different reason. As for that completely different reason, you’re going to have to read on to the next picture to find out what it was.
Starting two years ago, the city of Chicago began an Architectural Biennial, taking place every other fall in odd years and running to (just about) the end of the year. So in December 2017, in the closing days of the show, I finally figured out how to get a trip into the city into my schedule, which (especially in December) is harder than it sounds. All of that trouble just so I could stand in rooms like this to see “Vertical City,” a current take on the famous Chicago Tribune Tower Competition and the signature exhibition at the biennial this year.
If you are running a biennial, the first thing you need to do is come up with a good subtitle that reflects the overarching themes of the exhibition, something that people can remember years and years from now when all of those years and years start to blur together. The theme of the 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial is “Make New History,” which seems memorable enough, even though honestly it doesn’t immediately make you think of the exhibits.
The biennial is more than just a fun room of giant skyscrapers, there are room after room of work from architects and artists (and architects who think they’re artists) with display after display after display after display, enough to numb the mind of even the most optimistic visitor. Many of the exhibits are complicated, but it’s the simple ones that quickly become your favorite. So whether it’s a model of the ceiling of the Pantheon with a mirror in it (yes, that’s a cameo of me and my trusted Sony RX100 M4 camera in it), or models (or renderings) of too many skyscrapers, or even a wonderful photo printed on metal of the Neue Nationalgalerie, there are definitely memorable things to be seen for anyone brave enough to look.
So even if you’re mind is getting numb from display after display after display after display, there’s (possibly) a better exhibition in the public spaces all around you. The balance of the biennial is housed in the Chicago Cultural Center, an unbelievably beautiful building that is an attraction in it’s own right. So, if your mind starts to shut down trying to read a lot of text on another presentation board so that you can attempt to understand whatever image you’re supposed to be looking at, just step outside the gallery and enjoy the building.
Speaking of unbelievably gorgeous buildings, we’re going to close out these two Chicago trips with a view of the inside of Helmut Jahn’s landmark State of Illinois Building on Clark and Randolph, now known as the Thompson Center. It was built in 1985 and it’s still 1985 inside, which you can easily tell by its color scheme. And even though I just called it a landmark, it’s not really a landmark and that’s a problem. There are constant murmurs that the state (which owns the State of Illinois Building) wants to sell and demolish this space for two reasons. The first is because they can, and the second is that most people, instead of seeing a rich, complicated, generous interior public space with a dated color scheme, see something they would immediately call ugly. There is really no other comparable public space in The Loop, and it is painful to think of people being ok with it being destroyed and replaced with another commercial or residential tower. To quote Ada Louise Huxtable in 1963 (when talking about the imminent destruction of New York’s original Penn Station): “Any city gets what it admires, will pay for, and ultimately deserves... We want and deserve tin-can architecture in a tin-horn culture. And we will probably be judged not by the monuments we build but by those we have destroyed.”
