The View From Grant Park Keeps A-Changin’
If you’ve gone to a festival, played softball, or just walked around Grant Park in the last decade or so, you’ve been a first-hand witness to the changing of Chicago’s skyline. 340 On The Park, The Legacy, Heritage At Millennium Park, Roosevelt University’s Wabash Building, Trump International Hotel and Tower, and the 300 East Randolph vertical expansion all added drama to the park border. Chicago skyline...
What We’re Thankful For: Chicago Skylines
On this day when we remember that for which we are thankful, let us remember the architects, urban planners, developers, construction workers, visionaries, and others who made Chicago possible. Chicago didn’t just happen. It took people, working individually and together, to assemble an urban colossus that shaped the nation a century ago, and nurtures future generations today. To that end, we present this photograph from Joe...
See How Chicago Grows
It’s no secret that Chicago’s Near North side has grown by leaps and bounds over the last five years. But how do you show that visually? Some people try maps. Some use charts. Others write long-winded blog posts that seemingly have nothing to do with the topic at hand. (Guilty!) But Joe Zekas over at YoChicago! has a better way: A single photograph. Well, it’s actually two photographs. One taken in 2013, and...
What Apple Thinks of Chicago’s Architecture
Unless you also blew away every one of your news apps while you were deleting Facebook over the weekend, you know that Apple held a town hall meeting in Chicago. One of a very few that have ever been taken outside of northern California. The event was held at Lane Tech High School in North Center, a school known for producing everything from scientists to TV news anchors in abundance. During its presentation, Apple paid homage to the...
Three More Pieces of Chicago’s Skyline Headed to the Scrapyard
Add three more Chicago water tanks to the list of the doomed. All three were named in demolition permits within a two-day span last week, with their fates being sealed Thursday and Friday. The photo above shows the water tank at 350 West Kinzie Street, the home of Lock Up Self Storage. It has been contracted to Heneghan Wrecking Company for demolition. 404 South Wells Street and 412 South Wells Street are both home to the Cactus Bar....
Throwback Thursday: The Skyline in 1989
Funny things come into the Chicago Architecture Blog tip line, ever since we moved it from a loose tile in the wall of the third stall in the men’s room at Ogilvie Station to completely e-mail and text-message methods. Dave in Toronto sent in a picture of the Chicago skyline he took in 1989. And while you’re trying to remember what you were doing in 1989, here’s something the kiddies have never heard of: Dave took...
Frozen Chicago From Above
Thanks to Spy Tim for dropping a link in our Tip Line to this video by Soaring Badger Productions taken by one of those toy quadcopters. It’s a tour of the downtown Chicago shoreline on a frosty frosty Chicago day. Quadcopters were all the rage this past Christmas, and high quality videos are starting to flood the video sharing sites. Expect to see a lot more of these sort of videos. It’s a nice video, with lots of...
Slice of Life: Bright Lights, Big City
As much as we dread Chicago winters, they make for spectacular nighttime skyline shots. What? An architect in Houston once explained to me that skyscrapers in Chicago tend to be brighter than those in southern, warmer cities because those buildings use glass that is designed to aggressively keep the sun and heat of the day out. The result is dimmer office building windows at night, and less pretty nighttime skyline photos. This...
Slice of Life: The Other North Shore
Some of the best views in Chicago are from the John Hancock Center (875 North Michigan Avenue). And some of the most coveted views from that building are of Chicago’s north shore. Before you reach the “North Shore” communities like Wilmette and HighParkLakeOakForest, there is Chicago’s own north shore, a lovely string of beaches and parks lined with more residential high rises than most cities have in their...
Slice of Life: The Fountain of You
Chicago is a city in a garden, and that garden’s city has a number of great fountains. The big bad daddy of them all is, of course, Buckingham Fountain. Broad enough to entertain throngs of tourists, and bold enough to set the stage for Al Bundy. This photo of the behemoth bubbler was captured by our own Bill Motchan, in a 35-second exposure that turned the spatters and gurgles into smooth flowing ribbons of liquid...
