Chicago! Home of the skyscrapper! This beautiful city, is adorned by an equally beautiful skyline and varying architectural styles...
The city is also adorned with a canal which wanders around at its leisure it seems through the downtown core. We took a boat tour at sunset and watched for an hour the sun setting afire these cement gods.
This building looked to me like a giant honeycomb (appropriate for all the honeybees buzzing to and from their offices) - if you look closely, you'll see that the bottom portion is an above ground parking lot, and the rest are offices. Anyway, I thought it looked neat.
Here's our boat tour map, it gives you a sense of our journey along the shore and right through the city.
An interesting old-style church of some sort, almost engulfed by the skyscrappers surrounding it.
Mmm, Chicago deep pan pizza - 1 inch thick. 1 hour to bake. And, I bet you can't finish more that 1 or 2 (max) slices!! Uno is one of the best restaurants from which to order this feast!
Chicago has a strong polish population -- in fact, as we were visiting some polish friends, they took us to this fun polish meeting place Cafe Lura.
I love learning about the ideas of people who think differently in new, interesting and progressive ways. Frank Lloyd Wright is one of those people and I had the joy of learn a little about him on a tour to Oak Lake (a Chicago suburb) where he created his own home / studio. Through architecture, Wright created illusions and designed rooms particularly for their purpose. Particularly, he always liked to (and was good at) making rooms look bigger than their actual size.
His Home/Studio, was an interesting place. With his office in the fore front, a visitor would have two doors from which to choose from to enter the building.
I found it so inspiring that, even though both doors ended up in the same room, the visitors needed to make a conscious decision about which door to choose. They had to interrupt whatever they were thinking about and pay attention. Fantastic !
Here is a sculpture which located near the entrance of Wright's Studio. Our tour guide shared that Wright had an artist produce this as a reflection of "man" breaking through societal norms (Wright always seemed to reinventing life and the rules that drive it!).
Here is a collection of other houses within the area that Wright developed. While they are all unique in their own way, Wright was the architect who invented the large prairie style houses (wide houses vs. tall skinny European formats.
He used many geometric shapes to design his houses.
However, he also liked the "floating" (and more curvy) Japanes style structures. This one is my favourite.
