Saturday, November 17, 2012

Bird's eye view of Chicago's lakefront

In the years following the Great Chicago Fire, which had destroyed much of the city in 1871, Chicago rebuilt and became America'a first Mid-American City of Commerce. Today, Chicago is listed as an alpha-global city, and ranks seventh in the world in the 2012 Global Cities Index.

The city's location on the shores of Lake Michigan, one of the world's largest freshwater bodies, adds to the beauty of Chicago's panorama. The collection of over 1,000 skyscrapers, lined up along the beaches, appears as one of the world's largest and most impressive skylines.


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Wednesday, November 14, 2012

Through the haze Chicago shines

How can you be in "Skyscraper central" and not go up to the Grandaddy of them all? If you don't mind heights then this is the place for you! From the 103 floor of Chicago's Willis Tower (formerly the Sears Tower), accessible via a super fast elevator, you get a 360 degrees panoramic view of the entire surrounding area 1,353 feet below you.


Chicago is laid out before you - the panorama is a breathtaking sight, and you see and can feel the rich layers of history that define this city. When the visibility is good you can see for miles and miles and miles - four states at once. The views are spectacular, and if you time it right you can see get them in daylight then watch the sun go down and see the lights come on, strings of lights stretching out into the distance - skyscrapers full of light.

There's nothing quite like seeing an urban landscape from a bird's eye view that can make things feel a little less heavy.




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Taste of Chicago from above

Willis Tower in Chicago, the Western Hemisphere's tallest building, was conceived in 1969 when Sears Roebuck & Company was the largest retailer in the world, with about 350,000 employees. It remained the Sears Tower until 2009, long after the company had sold it and moved out; it was renamed after the Willis Group, a London-based insurance broker, leased part of the building and obtained naming rights.


Standing on Willis Tower's Skydeck, looking down on rooftops and traffic helicopters, and leftward toward the haze over the lake, and outward along the city's grid stretching toward the South Side, is a weird sensation. When you look out through a window at the metropolis laid out before you, the city becomes a map, allowing you to make some sense of its immensity.

Window vistas on the world are beautiful. They help make sense of the world, not disrupt it.




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Monday, November 12, 2012

Fisher Building - A neo-Gothic Chicago landmark

Inspired by the Gothic cathedrals of Europe, Chicago's Fisher Building was one of the city's earliest skyscrapers and is a wonderful example of the Chicago School of Architecture.

Named for paper industry magnate Lucius Fisher, the first phase of the Fisher Building opened in 1896. The 18-story building was about 230 feet tall (70m). Chicagoans were awed by this structure, whose steel frame took only 25 days to complete and weighed 12,000 tons.

The original building, as well as the 20-story addition opened in 1906, is known for its interesting terra cotta tracery, which is 15th century French Gothic-inspired. Around the upper floors, you'll find figures such as giant eagles and mythical beasts. The terra cotta ornamentation on the lower floors is much more whimsical, featuring fish, crabs, sea shells and other sea creatures - a play on the name of the original owner. The interior of the building was decorated with some of the most expensive materials of its day. The wainscoting is of Carrara marble and beautiful mahogany wood was used in much of the trim. Many of the floors were of an ornate and colorful mosaic design.

The beautiful Fisher Building is now the Fisher Building City Apartments. It still retains its early 20th century charm and some of the condo entrances even boast the original mahogany trim and the opaque glass doors engraved with names of some of the Fisher Building's original business tenants.


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Sunday, November 11, 2012

The Chicago Lighthouse

The Chicago Harbor Lighthouse is the city's only remaining lighthouse (and one of only two lighthouses in Illinois).


Built in 1893 and relocated to the breakwater in 1919, the Chicago Harbor Lightwas originally built at the Chicago River entrance. While fully automated in 1979, the light still exhibits its original prize winning Third Order Fresnel lens, and while most of today's vessels use Loran, Radar or GPS to find their way into the safety of Chicago Harbor, the proud tower still displays its reassuring beam to welcome mariners to the Windy City.

Chicago Harbor Light stood watch over Chicago Harbor and watched the city grow from a small military outpost to the third-largest city in the United States.


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Friday, November 09, 2012

Chicago skyline from Millenium Park IV

From left to right (the big guys only)
Trump International Hotel and Tower
401 North Wabash

One Prudential Plaza
Also known as: One Pru
130 East Randolph Street

Two Prudential Plaza
Also known as: Two Pru
180 North Stetson Avenue

The Aon Center
Formerly: Amoco Building
Formerly: Standard Oil Building

Blue Cross-Blue Shield Of Illinois Tower
Official name: Health Care Services Corporation Building
300 East Randolph Street

340 On The Park
340 East Randolph Street

Front:
Buckingham Fountain



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Tuesday, November 06, 2012

Chicago skyline from Millenium Park II

First row:


Left: The Metropolitan Tower
Formerly: Britannica Center
Formerly: Continental National Insurance Company Building
Formerly: Straus Building

Motorola: Railway Exchange Building
Official name: 224 South Michigan Avenue
Formerly: Santa Fe Building

Borg-Warner Building
200 South Michigan Avenue

Peoples Gas Company Building
Official name: 122 South Michigan
Formerly: The Gas Building
Formerly: Peoples Gas Light and Coke Company Building

Tall blue building - The Legacy at Millennium Park
Also known as: 21-39 South Wabash
Also known as: 52-64 East Monroe

77 West Wacker
Formerly: United Airlines Building
Formerly: R.R. Donnelley Building

Second Row:

Left from The Legacy: Mid-Continental Plaza
Also known as: The Park Monroe
Formerly: 55 East Monroe Building

Behind Motorola: Chase Tower
Formerly: Bank One Plaza
Formerly: First National Bank of Chicago Building


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Sunday, November 04, 2012

Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT)

One of the best examples of Art Deco is at the bottom end of the La Salle Street Corridor: The Chicago Board of Trade Building (CBOT) (141 W. Jackson Blvd.).

Outside and in it is the summit of Art Deco elegance, complete with a pyramidal roof crowned by an aluminum statue of Ceres, the Roman goddess of agriculture.

Being the world's oldest futures and options exchange as well as a national landmark, the Board of Trade in Chicago is a must-see for any history buff, or anyone with interests in the history of the stock market.




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Friday, November 02, 2012

Hilton Chicago and Blackstone Hotel

The Chicago Hilton and the Blackstone Hotel are two of the best hotels of all times with an enormous history.


Left: Hilton Chicago
Formerly: Chicago Hilton and Towers
Formerly: The Stevens Hotel

When the Stevens Hotel opened in 1927, the newspapers wrote of a new Versailles rising on South Michigan Avenue. The colossal building soared 28 stories and occupied an entire city block. With 3,000 guest rooms, it was the biggest hotel in the world, and with its brick-and-limestone walls, decorated inside with hand-painted frescoes, fine restaurants, exclusive shops, vast ballrooms, bowling alley, hospital, a special private room for pets, an 18 hole golf course with real grass on the roof, a 1,200 seat theatre with "talking motion picture" equipment, a three-story laundry, and 5 sub-basements, the most opulent. The Stevens could produce 120 gallons of ice cream per hour. No one had seen anything quite like it before.

Yet, just a few years later, the Stevens Hotel plunged into a disaster - the hotel went bankrupt, the State of Illinois charged its owners with financial corruption. One of them was crippled by a stroke; another committed suicide. In 1942, the hotel was requisitioned by the U.S. Army, and guest rooms became barracks, the Grand Ballroom a mess hall, and other rooms were turned into offices and training rooms. After the war, Conrad Hilton bought the former Stevens Hotel and named it for himself.

Few, if any, of the thousands who pass through the cavernous Chicago Hilton and Towers, as the Stevens is called today, know the dramatic episode of Chicago history that unfolded there. Completely renovated in the mid-eighties, at a cost of $185 million, the hotel still features the two-story entrance hall with grand staircases on either side that so astounded visitors in the Roaring Twenties. But the original 3,000 rooms have been consolidated to 1,544, so the hotel is no longer the biggest in the world. Still, for all the trouble and even tragedy that attended the its early years, the landmark has endured, vindicating the dream the Stevens family envisioned so many years ago.

Right: Blackstone Hotel Chicago
Opened April 16, 1910, and located at 636 South Michigan Avenue, in the heart of the city's arts and theater district - adjacent to the world class Millennium Park, The Blackstone represents yet another significant development milestone in the renaissance of Chicago's South Loop downtown.

The Blackstone was the temporary home of the rich and famous, the politically connected and kings and princes. It was, and is again, renowned the world over. In the early years of the twentieth century there were few hotels that could compare. Twelve presidents - from Taft to Carter - have stayed at the Blackstone, some at times of national crisis, e.g. John F. Kennedy learned of Cuba's nuclear capabilities while eating a bowl of chowder.

The nearly century-old 22-story Blackstone Chicago hotel, a work of art in itself, is now part of the Marriott Renaissance chain. It is one of the most history-rich hotel properties in the U.S.


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Thursday, November 01, 2012

Art Deco Buckingham Fountain Chicago

Buckingham Fountain, officially known as the 'Clarence Buckingham Memorial Fountain' is one of Chicago's most popular landmarks. It is located in Grant Park at the center of a formally laid out garden. During the dedication in August of 1927, John Philip Sousa conducted while his band played "Pomp and Circumstance" before an audience of 50,000 people.


The fountain rises more than 7 meters high (23ft) and consists of 3 layers of basins surrounded by four pairs of bronze seahorses. Each sea horse symbolizes a state bordering Lake Michigan (Illinois, Indiana, Michigan and Wisconsin) while the fountain represents the lake itself.

Chicago's landmark is considered one of America's finest fountains due to its Beaux-Arts-style landscape design, finely wrought bronze sculpture and innovative use of technology.


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Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Chicago - What a beautiful city

Right: Aon Center (Amoco Building, Standard Oil Building)

The Aon Center is the quiet, dignified supertall in the Chicago skyline. From a distance, the building feels like another boring grey 1970's stone block. To really appreciate it, you have to walk right up to it and crane your neck to see the top.
Just after the building was completed in 1973, its famed marble facade began to buckle. Stainless steel straps were wrapped around the building to keep any large chunks from falling off. From 1990 to 1992 the building's 43,000 marble cladding panels were replaced by white, two-inch-thick Mt. Airy granite panels at a cost of $80 million - half what it cost to build the tower in the first place. That left the owners with 5,900 tons of unwanted marble.

2nd from right: Two Prudential Plaza
At the time of completion in 1955 "2 Pru" was the world's second tallest reinforced concrete building and the first skyscraper erected in Chicago after WW II.
The distinctive shape features stacked chevron setbacks on the north & south sides, a sharp pyramidal peak rotated 45°, and an 80-foot spire. The building has a terraced one-acre plaza on its west side with fountains and landscaping.

3rd from right: One Prudential Plaza
One Prudential Plaza was the first high-rise office building completed in Chicago since the LaSalle Bank Building in 1934. It was built above and beyond office standards of the day. When the Prudential Building was finished in 1955, it had the highest roof in Chicago, included one of the largest parking facilities built within an office building in the world, and the tower featured the world's fastest elevators.
The Two Prudential Plaza is joined at the lobby level to the much older One Prudential Plaza.

For names and descriptions of its neighbors to the left please visit my image titled 'Chicago The Beautiful'




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Monday, October 29, 2012

Cloud Gate Millenium Park Chicago

"Chicago, the wonder city, has a new wonder." -Chicago Tribune, 18 July, 2004


Cloud Gate - referred to by locals as "The Bean", for obvious reasons - was the first public sculpture of Indian-born and London-based artist Anish Kapoor. He designed a stainless steel construction consisting of 168 stainless steel plates, each 1 cm (0.4 inch) thick and seamlessly welded together. Cloud Gate's seamless surface is the result of thousands of hours of polishing. The structure weighs 100 tons and measures 10 meters high and 20 meters wide (33 x 66 ft). People can walk through the 3.7 meter high central arch, where they can look up to the large 'dent' and see numerous distorted reflections of themselves.

When 'The cloud" was completely finished in May, 2006 its almost magical appeal became visible. Seamless and polished, it reflects and distorts the skyline of Michigan Avenue, the sky, and the people nearby, who always seem to have the urge to touch the sculpture's silvery surface.

What was once a gritty, blighted site in Chicago is now home to a glistening, cultural spectacle that delivers joy to its visitors. Cloud Gate instantly became an icon of Chicago, and an attraction that every visitor to the city wants to see.




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Saturday, October 27, 2012

Chicago Crain Communications Building - former Smurfit-Stone

The Crain Communications Building - Also known as: Diamond Building
Formerly: 150 North Michigan Avenue
Formerly: Smurfit-Stone Building
Formerly: Stone Container Building
Formerly: Associates Center

The Smurfit-Stone Building (now Crain Communications Building) in Chicago, Illinois is one of a kind. Some may argue it is the most unique building to distinguish the Chicago skyline from others. Finished in 1984, the 582 foot (177 m) skyscraper at the northwest corner of Grant and Millennium Parks, nestled between the classical columns of the Chicago Cultural Center, the cone-topped Two Prudential, and the plain boxes of Prudential headquarters and the AON Center, has a slanted top that carves through the top 10 of its 41 floors. The official count of 41 floors does not include 5 levels of unused space in the narrowest portion at the top of the diamond. Some wags have pointed out that the Crain Communications Building, with its diamond-shape top, looks like a skyscraper slashed with a knife.

This building is one of Chicago's signature structures, what it lacks in height, it more than makes up for in style. Its gleaming white exterior is accented with dark pinstripes of windows. Its orientation embraces Lake Michigan just a few hundred yards away, while at the same time it's characteristic slanted roof mimics, mocks, or yearns to be part of the sailboat crowd in the nearby Chicago Harbor.

The architects didn't merely take a square and cut a wedge out of it like a children's block. They cut it on an angle, using a simple subtractive motion to create a diamond shape in the sky. Closer examination reveals that it isn't even a simple diamond, but rather two nearly identical triangles, but that is a detail lost on most observers. What they delight in is the notion that the building is still not done inventing itself. That it is growing with a leading angle like a massive lily sprouting on the lakeshore. Others fail to see the beauty and whimsy intrinsic to this building. Instead, they see it as an affront to the other classic Chicago architecture on Michigan Avenue.

But if not for those buildings that stand out, would not the Avenue's marble cliff seem that much more ordinary and under appreciated?




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Thursday, October 25, 2012

Old iron fire escape Chicago IL

In Chicago (a city that has a special history with fire), people are so used to seeing the old iron fire escapes on the outside of buildings built anywhere from the late 1880s up thru the 1930s that they just blend into the rest of the noise.


Every facet of the urban landscape has a story to tell; so much so that we tend to take for granted much of our surroundings. Have you ever stopped to consider the history or unique composition of a fire escape? Within a year after the first patent for a fire escape was issued in 1887 (to Ms. Anna Connelly), the U.S. Patent Office had issued patents for 1,100 competitive designs and unique styles, encompassing many different forms and every conceivable material. The real beauty of Ms. Connelly's invention was that these inexpensive metal structures could be attached to both new and existing buildings.

Does the complex in which you live or work have a fire escape? Would you use this historical architectural curiosity if there was a fire in your building? If well maintained, a fire escape is still a life saving structure. Unfortunately, it's often difficult to tell if a fire escape is safe to use or not.

Residential buildings tend to have an additional, unique set of problems when it comes to their old emergency escapes. It seems that they get a lot of use ... just not for their intended purpose. City inspectors and fire escape maintenance companies commonly report the passages being exploited as urban gardens, personal balconies, clothes dryers, and smoking lounges.

Hanging there on buildings all over The Loop these Escheresque, geometrical structures, add yet another distinctive element to the facades of Chicago's historic buildings. Today, with the advent of new fangled construction materials and redundant fire prevention systems, Chicago's updated building codes have done away with the fire escape as a component of new construction, going so far as to prohibit them in all but very, very specific circumstances.




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