For my last birthday, my parents gifted me a membership to the Chicago Architecture Foundation. Membership gives you free access to nearly all their 65+ walking tours and discounted rates on the famous boat tour, and so far, I’ve taken three tours, all with my mom (and two of which my dad joined as well): Art Deco, Must-See Chicago and Historic Skyscrapers.
I highly enjoyed all three tours and just wanted to share a few pictures and fun facts. I look forward to taking many more tours over the next year!
Art Deco style originated in Chicago after the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs Industriels et Modernes in Paris…a time when people were recovering from WWI and wanted to embrace a new artistic, glamorous lifestyle. The style is characterized by vertical lines and geometrics, clean colors and contrasts, and symmetry.
Ask anyone to name some of the iconic buildings or structures in Chicago, and you’ll likely hear mentions of the Sears (okay fine, Willis) Tower, Wrigley Building, Art Institute and the Water Tower. On this fast-paced tour, we covered a lot of ground and I appreciated hearing about how even newer buildings like Trump Tower made very intentional design decisions in order to pay homage to traditional Chicago architecture and landmarks like the Chicago River.
The Historic Skyscrapers tour started with history, appropriately; the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 destroyed most structures in Chicago (nearly 18,000 buildings!), setting the stage for a new era of building and construction. Rather than rebuilding most structures with load-bearing design, which could only support so much weight. steel frame construction had its beginnings, enabling the buildings to go higher. It might be hard for us to imagine this now, when the Burj Kalifa in Dubai is the world’s tallest building at over 160 stories, but a 10-story building in the late 1800s was an architectural feat. This tour covered highlights like the Rookery, the Monadnock building and the Marquette building (first picture in post).
After finishing this historic tour, we hopped over to a more modern skyscraper, the Aon Center, for dinner and drinks at the Mid-America Club. A great way to cap off an afternoon of walking and learning! 🙂 I highly recommend you check out the Chicago Architecture Foundation’s many offerings.
Kristen says
I love these pictures of our experiences. It has been both fun and educational hearing the history and back stories of places I’ve seen so many times through the years but from the outside only….and that while driving by dealing with traffic!
Nice summary and I hope to do several more this summer 🙂