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For once, me and my cadre arrived in Chicago while the sun was still up we had a chance to take a walking tour of Chicago. We were armed.
Camera Fight

The tour was led by a docent from the Chicago Architecture Foundation who knew his tour but was much more an enthusiast rather than an expert. He covered the high points and my shutter flew. Chicago is architecturally unique because it needed office space at a time when modern building techniques were being developed. The skyscraper was possible but hadn’t been commodified and land was relatively cheap after the Chicago Fire. This led to frenzied building and a nearly unrivaled mix of styles.

Pylon
The above building I think holds up the sky.

Chicago buildings also have amazing lobbies as they tend to be more mixed use than say NYC skyscrapers. A Chicago large building will have multiple shops and restaurants or a grand foyer and the actual usage of the building may not be apparent at first blush.
Marquette Building Foyer
The above is the foyer of the Marquette Building.

I love Art Deco and am curious to know what would have happened to the developing style if WWII hadn’t gotten in the way. Here is an interior that conveys space and a feeling that everything’s worth a million bucks.
Grand Goldness

The same treatment for a simple hallway:
Highway of Light

At the end of the tour, I circled back to get a picture of a Winged Nike of Samothrace replica that had been treated in gold leaf that was inside the lobby of a building. An argument followed with the guard where I claimed as an invitee to do business with the first floor shops I could take a picture. He contented that I couldn’t as there was a sign that said “No Photography Allowed”. I eventually acquiesced and was harangued by Michael and Brad about what I had done. Suzie just smiled.

We met up with Peter, Audrey, and a TI friend and his girlfriend for dinner and the turn around he had made in a year was amazing. A year ago he was bragging about how he was kicked out of military training and how much he could drink and now was leaving dinner early to get to a jazz concert. I hope I can be as nimble when needed.

We returned to Peter and Audrey’s, drank (but me) and called it a night.

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Next week, 15 folks from my Team Fortress 2 team will be at the Radisson-Warwick in Philadelphia and I really have no intimate knowledge of where the heck we’re going, so my camera and I made our way into Market East Station to figure out how long it’d take to get everywhere and I took pictures along the way.

After exiting Market East station, I had a person ask me for 35 cents to get a breakfast sandwich.  Normally I’m willing to engage panhandlers up to about $5.00 if there’s a bit of showmanship but 35 cents proved to be an amount so small and also the exact amount of change I had on me that the asker was more rendering a service than an inconvenience.  I hate having change in my pockets.

Near Broad and Samsom

Near Broad and Samsom

Philadelphia is a polite city in that I think it is kind to the new arrival as it has a reasonable scope.  The buildings on Market at Liberty Place are the only buildings near 60 stories and they rise gently from the surrounding terrain.  One can see both the base and top of the building at the same time at a reasonable distance and the towers have breathing space.  There are unoccupied spaces and broad sidewalks in most places.  Compare this to midtown Manhattan where one is perpetually in an urban canyon where one feels not like the buildings rise around them but that the pedestrian is somehow buried beneath the actual cityscape.

Grass in Philadelphia

Holy crap, unoccupied space.

20110716-1402-HDRPhilly

Gentle Scale

The combination of reasonable sized buildings and open spaces along with most of the building boom occurring during the heyday of glass facades results in some neat light effects.  Buildings reflect off of buildings off of buildings making the streets around City Hall the only ones where I’ve ever felt the term “sun-dappled” applied  like some thousand foot tall semi-invisible banyan tree towered over the skyline.

Reflection Explosion #2

Sun-Dappled #1

Reflections Explained

Sun-Dappled #2

Normally, a hall of mirrors shows you nothing as meaningless reflection bounces off of meaningless reflection, I don’t believe that applies to the second photo above.  The light moves back and forth enough that the repeated iterations of scattering and diffusion create a painterly effect (rendering it to a tone-mapped HDR didn’t hurt either).

I feel I’ve been remiss in not spending more time at ground-level in Philadelphia, a place where I can get a day of photography, lunch, and train fare for under $30.00.  I hope to fix this.

William Penn Tower

Obligatory Shot of William Penn Statue

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Hamburg Design Center by OMA from Dezeen.

The Guggenheim in New York is nice but the one in Bilbao, Spain is even nicer.  But between the Hamburg installation and the Atomium I now have a reason to visit Germany/Belgium.  The blather on Dezeen is eyebrow-raising.  The building is composed of 10 modular blocks yet changing the configuration of the structure is done by moving internal partitions using technology that’s probably not much more advanced than a high-school gymnasium.  You figure you could move the blocks around Lego-style. One day, one day.

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Hamburg Design Center by OMA from Dezeen.

The Guggenheim in New York is nice but the one in Bilbao, Spain is even nicer.  But between the Hamburg installation and the Atomium I now have a reason to visit Germany/Belgium.  The blather on Dezeen is eyebrow-raising.  The building is composed of 10 modular blocks yet changing the configuration of the structure is done by moving internal partitions using technology that’s probably not much more advanced than a high-school gymnasium.  You figure you could move the blocks around Lego-style. One day, one day.