After a 20 hour train ride having crossed america, seated next to a styleless college kid from Boston, i landed ragged as a soppy rat in Chicago Illinois.
chicago is a pebble bed reactor of cooking architecture, harbouring the greatest tide turning edifices of modernity, defining an age, defining our thinking. two of the most renowned architects did work and established themselves in the Windy City- Frank Lloyd Wright the american womaniser and designer of the Guggenheim and Mies van der Rohe the german designer of barcelona pavilion and developer of steel structured glass boxes.
Chicago is the threshold to middle america, its the precipice, and from this point it's the drop-off to farming country and sunburned necks.
Here trains zoom above head, grazing past the upper floors of buildings, snaking, dodging towering edifices. the system was mecannoed years ago, it was the future then, and it's the future right now.
My exploration begins, it's downtown.
i'm in a queue,im on the way in. there's a bazillion (c) people in the elevator, and it's lift off. i'm going from zero, 73 floors up. just before cerebral aedema kicks in, i'm atop the Sears tower, light headed and weak. with a miserly budget, i barely ate.
the views of the city from Sears, constructed using the 'bundled tube' system, pinpoint my location. the blackened tower looking as cigarettes haphazardly protruding from john waynes box o smokes scrapes the sky as a former tallest building in the world. the tower becomes my beacon locating my position, orientating me. im in a queue,im on the way out.
im in a queue waiting for the boat. the river boat tour on the Chicago River which penetrates the city giving it a serene sense and an other heart beat. the river tickles the sides of buildings, creating an active shore front with glazed towering buildings and green emerald relax space. the shore depicts architecture of the ages, a development of building thinking, the old interacting sterlingly with the reflective new.i leave the boat. im in a queue.
im in a queue,' whole wheat footlong, cheese and veggies, please.' i wanna pay. im in a queue.
im on the platform, im drinking a Dr Pepper. im waiting. at the end of the Green line sits Oak Park. Oak Park with its genteel clap board houses nestled on peppermint green lawns, mottled in leafy darks and bottle blue skies is Frank Lloyd Wright territory. Oak Park became Wright's petri dish, his test tube for experimental thoughts, ideas and influences. Oak Park allowed him to create and redefine the architecture and building of the time. The four or so blocks on which he has birthed about 6 houses sets out his metamorphosis as a young architctect moonlighting to his steps towards redefining the world of residential architecture. Wright changed mindsets, defining a period of time. my travels have revealed to me once again: the greatest creatives-archi's, muso's, scientists, writers, and painters, are great because they reconfigured the human race's thinking.
my uncontrollable black pen and my controlling mind, struggled to sketch Wrights complex edifices, i was in the space of genius.
i didn't queue to see Wright's work, because i did a self guided tour.
Millenium Park, breathing space in a busy city is a respite from the rolling cogs of urbanity. it's soft to the touch and mirrored in Frank Gehry's bandstand.
there in the landscape sat on a plaza, is a Bean, a Cloud-a massive jelly bean of mirrored material reflecting the earth and the city that surrounds. i aint no jelly bean fan, but i licked this one. looking really hard at the city mirrored,the Art Institute addition by Renzo Piano defined the Flying Carpet by locals is a serated edge to the city, a building of vertical and floating roofs. crispy white and glinting bright. 
the queueing had ended and i found a place of solace. There at the Illinois Institute of Technology, Mies van der Rohe penned a building of nucleiaic proportions. The Crown Hall houses the school of architecture.its a rectangular box ribbed in blackened steel, sliced proportionally by the verticals that support it. 4 large I-Beams hold its roof, alleviating the interior of any supporting columns. the gushing natural light floods the interior allowing a volume of serenity and peacefulness. it's an expression of its materiality, an expression of structure. it is a refinement of a life times work.
the day was going to end so pleasantly but then i chowed a bag of super salty french fries and i turned into a raisin
Chicago was not only defined by building, city, a Bears cap and deap pan pizza, but by Jeremy, a steely lad, a Leadville 100miler, a sensitive, switched on personality with Elvisian lambchops and his wife Melanie, a sculptor sublime, a thinker, with a radiating heart, a creative soul, and dynamic DNA. both sublimely intuitive and inquisitive, together with their two wee offspring, warmed my Chicagoan senses for me. we'll be sure to reconnect Comrades 2013.
from the roar of the Russian Bear Hunter, a journey personified.
No comments:
Post a Comment