July 12-15 Innovation and imagination

You look at the collection of Chicago’s building and it’s rather like a game of logic roulette. Impossible shapes and foundations, ingenious constructs enabling wonderful and weird edifices.  Over to you to graze and glaze. 

This is a reminder that Chicago was primarily a port shipping out timber and other riches from the mid west to Europe via the Great Lakes. The Chicago River was once lined with warehouses now being converted into condos.

The Corn Cobb buildings. The highest car park open to the world - all those bottom levels are car parks. Once Steve McQueen drove off one of the levels (or his stunt man did).

This architect didn’t believe in angles but preferred to emulate nature’s curves

And then there’s the neo-goths of the Tribune building - currently being converted into apartments!

This dinky green and gold building is the Carbide and Carbon building. The owner had it built like a bottle of champagne 🍾 I like his style.

Still there’s the cubes which raise sharp angles to the sky.

The overhang of this building .... we’ll you can see how it is supported. Amazing but a little scary. We saw a few building balanced on ‘points’.

Ah and the reflections. The glass buildings provided a confusing continuum of shake and shades.

This building was curved to reflect and mimic the river and it works!! Beautiful.  Something else I wanted to point out is the layer under the buildings.  There seems another layer of Chicago running under many of the buildings. This sub layer carries traffic and gives building access to services.

If you look closely you can see that this building cuts on at its base providing a watery reflection of the river. It was rather awesome. To stabilise the building they had to bury the foundations 120 odd feet into the bed rock and then added 1000s of water on the roof to dampen the sway. Wow!

This is concave ‘screen’ set into the centre of this building reflected back the activity on the river. I wonder why we don’t reward/encourage such imaginative design. Come on Melbourne get your act together!

And some are just beautiful towers stretching into the sky reflecting tiers of surrounding buildings.

This one seemed to melt into the sky.

The skyline seems minuscule at this distance but it is rather magnificent. Three times each year the entire skyline is lit at night - Memorial Day (Blue), Pride day (rainbow), Independence Day (red, white and blue). Would be awesome!