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Chicago, Illinois
We used to sing so loud at the top of our lungs, put the pedal to the floor, let the darkness come
I would now like to present the Chateau Frontenac Theory. Imagine that you are planning to visit Quebec City and are looking for the best hotel based on the view. The skyline of Quebec City is dominated by the beautiful Chateau Frontenac Hotel, which means that the best views of Quebec City will be of the Chateau Frontenac and, inversely, the worst views of Quebec City would be if you decided to stay at the actual Chateau Frontenac Hotel itself.
I took the Chateau Frontenac Theory into consideration when deciding to book a hotel in Chicago, and then pretty much discarded it by selecting the Radisson Blu Aqua Tower Hotel. The Aqua Tower, designed by usual Chicago suspect Jeanne Gang, is and always has been simply jaw dropping from street level. Inside it’s just a box with fun balconies, but outside those fun balconies make the building feel unreal, making it damn near impossible to not stop and take more pictures every damn time I returned from Millennium Station from McCormick Place or some other random Chicago destination. So maybe it’s time to rethink the Chateau Frontenac Theory- sure, you can’t actually see the Chateau Frontenac if you’re staying in the Chateau Frontenac, but it sure is nice to see it every time you’re going back to your hotel.
Some slideshows are slavishly designed to be in chronological order, but this one is most definitely not. Despite all appearances to the contrary, I carefully select the photos and their order in order to tell (what I believe to be) a better overall story. So even though we’re looking at the picture of this stairwell from the MCA in the middle of the slideshow, this was pretty much the last thing that I saw in Chicago before walking back to my hotel and then taking the frustrating slow Blue Line all the way back to O’Hare and home.
That “MCA” referenced in the last photo stands for the Museum of Contemporary Art, designed by Josef Paul Kliehues which is located in either the Near North Side or Streeterville (I still get confused over Chicago neighborhood definitions from time to time). I expected that the museum wouldn’t be too busy on an off and on rainy Sunday afternoon, but neglected to realize that its feature exhibition, Nick Cave: Forothermore was a blockbuster. The crowds (not pictured below) were there for good reason- the show was spectacular and worth the trip to Chicago, A’22 or no A’22.
For anyone aching to get back to A’22 and accumulating credits, I have some good news for you. When I was looking at potential tours and saw one called ET212 Chicago Vistas from Premiere Rooftops, I knew I had found the tour for me. If there is a high building I can go up I’m there. This tour (that somehow qualified for HSW credits) went up to four outdoor rooftops with spectacular views. And none were more premiere than the first one- Raymond Hood’s Tribune Tower.
ET212’s next rooftop was the LondonHouse Hotel, where a rooftop bar has a killer view down the Chicago River. I’m not quite sure why LondonHouse is spelled that way and not as London House, but then again no one ever accused me of being a marketing genius.
The view down the river is one I have always loved and one that I have seen many times. For years and years, my go to hotel in Chicago used to be right next door. It was called Hotel 71 and, despite being always kind of disorganized and operating the world’s slowest and most difficult elevators, it’s river facing rooms were worth all of the trouble just to get views like this. Hotel 71 is no more (it’s a Royal Sonesta now), although its views live on- not just in my memory but also in film. They were used for Bruce Wayne’s penthouse in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight.
ET212’s additional two stops had nothing to do with Batman, as least as far as I know. One stop (as shown in the first picture) was Eastlake Studio, an architecture firm located on the roof of the building with the Chicago Blackhawks store on Michigan Avenue (I am uncertain, but “the building with the Chicago Blackhawks store on Michigan Avenue” may very well be its official name). The other view is a bar, specifically a place called Cindy’s Rooftop, which the tour claimed had a month long wait for reservations (this mostly checks out on Resy).
There is a lot more to A’22 than tours. There are seminars (I never go to those), a massive trade show (I usually skip it) and all sorts of parties (I sometimes go to the AIA New Jersey one but that’s about it). A’22 also now offers something called Open Studios. Requiring a paid ticket, this program gets you into four different architectural studios (transportation on your own) where you can meet people from local firms, look at their displayed work and nibble on their provided food and drink their free drinks. When selecting among the available Open Studios options, there are many factors to consider beyond just the firms themselves. Chief among those factors is location, and in this case, location was king,
In one group was the Chicago office of Moody Nolan, a fine firm with nice people, quality work, tasty free food and solid free drinks, who also just happened to be located in the Rookery, a building by Louis Sullivan with a lobby renovated by Frank Lloyd Wright. So while it was certainly good to visit Moody Nolan, the walk down the stairs and through the lobby was far more worthwhile at every (literal) level.
