Chic Chicago

Chic Chicago, 20^th August

Chicago is by far the most exciting city we’ve visited. It is a place whose action mostly takes place above one. By that we mean a lot of the time one’s head is peering upwards, to what must be one of the interesting skylines on the planet. Every building appears to have an architectural provenance as we discovered on our cruise on the river, led by a ‘docent’ from the Chicago Architectural Foundation. The trend upwards began with Louis Sullivan, was consolidated horizontally by Frank Lloyd Wright, and was given an international focus by Mies van Der Rohe whose 860-880 Lake Shore Drive is across the road from our DeWitt Place apartment, conveniently located close to the Magnificent Mile (a paradise for the chic minded), Museum of Contemporary Art and Lake Michigan. (Although we haven’t to date managed to get across Lake Shore Drive to the lakefront as there are few underground crossings and the drive is an impenetrable traffic barrier, an example of poor urban design.)

We enjoyed the new wing of the Art Institute Chicago (designed by Renzo Piano). The post-1900 European collection rivalled those in Washington and Philadelphia. The Cartier Bresson retrospective demonstrated the camera’s power and influence in the twentieth century. Adjacent to the Art Institute is the Pritzker Pavilion designed by Frank Gehry (of interest to us as Sydney may soon to have one of his buildings on the site of an old ice-cream factory site in Ultimo). Another highlight of our stay was a visit to Frank Lloyd Wright’s home and studio in Oak Park—the architect who attempted to “break the box” of home design. Inspired by the visit, Claire is reading a biography of Wright and tomorrow we plan to visit Robie House.

For the first time on this trip we are staying in an apartment. We are experiencing a version of home away from home. It is so refreshing to cater for ourselves but only after discovering a farmers’ market and Treasure Island, which claims to be America’s most “European supermarket”. The helpfulness of Americans continues and here we have had useful advice from older Chicagoans, many of whom have visited Australia. Even so, our accents are not easily understood, particularly by bus drivers and voice recognition devices.