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Chicago, Illinois
I got the headlights off and the radio on, every window is down, here comes that song
Pre-pandemic, there were several annual events that I really looked forward to. There was PS1 Warm Up and their Young Architects Program, but PS1 killed that whole program just before the pandemic (maybe they had some inside information). There were also the immersive (and often overambitious) summer installations at the National Building Museum in Washington DC, but they looked to be downsizing well before the pandemic began (maybe they too had some inside information). Another event was A’20 in Los Angeles, the AIA Conference on Architecture, which was full steam ahead because (as everyone has often suspected), if anyone has inside information, it most definitely is not the AIA.
As expected there was no A’20 in Los Angeles, and while there was technically an A’21 in Philadelphia, it was some sort of virtual thing that I’m sure was super valuable but still had no interest for me. As for A’22, it was back in Chicago, and I was so excited to go that I braved an actual United plane to get there, which seemed the least that I could do.
I landed in Chicago late on Tuesday for various reasons that made sense at the time, and figuratively hit the ground running with ET109, a walking tour of the University of Chicago. I had been here before, specifically to the underground book lair that is the Joe and Rika Mansueto Library, but never really had a comprehensive tour of the campus, featuring buildings from a lot of the usual Chicago suspects like Mies van der Rohe, Helmut Jahn and Jeanne Gang.
I don’t want to slam the good folks at the University of Chicago ET109 tour, but their tour simply was, well, let’s just say not great. There was a lot to see on a hot day, almost everything was seen from the outside only, and most of the tour felt as it was something I could have done on my own by just finding some sort of self guided tour online. Sure it was great to see campus building designed by the usual Chicago suspects of Mies van der Rohe, Helmut Jahn and Jeanne Gang, but the tour really only got interesting once some New York outsiders entered the picture. This is the David Rubenstein Forum designed by Diller, Scofidio + Renfro, the only building that the Et109A tour entered, unless you count the campus gift shop where we started.
I got to the University of Chicago area early so that I could stop by and say hi to the Robie House (I don’t recall if I actually said hi out loud or not, but it is more likely than not that I kept my mouth shut). I have been inside a few times and briefly looked to see if I could get another shot, another chance to stand in its (just about) perfect spaces, but the Robie House was closed on Wednesdays.
And since I had visited before, when the good folks at the University of Chicago ET109 tour told us at the David Rubenstein Forum that our last stop was the Robie House, I took that opportunity to sneak away from the tour group and head back to the Metra Electric line and back downtown.
The way that AIA Conferences on Architectures are now structured, it is difficult to find all that much useful free time on your schedule. It’s usually a bit of a non stop push, which isn’t normally a terrible thing, but can get in the way if there’s something (like a Robie House tour) that you want to try and do on your own. So while the Robie House was out, I still was able to get in a Frank Lloyd Wright experience by finding just enough time to take the CTA Green Line out and back to Oak Park and to Unity Temple, a terrific, complex and recently renovated building that looked almost as good as new.
It’s hard not to like the Chicago Riverwalk, although I guess if you really like to complain you could probably always find a few things to complain about. Maybe it was busy and you hate crowds, or maybe you didn’t want to walk up the stairs, or maybe a boat passed you that was obnoxiously loud, or maybe you just hate pretty spaces and things like video projections on buildings. Luckily, despite my history of complaining about things unnecessarily, none of those apply to me.
