Chicago's River Architecture Tour

After seeing Barack Obama speak, my Mom and I took a river architecture tour of Chicago. There were lots of amazing buildings, but, from my vantage point on a boat with a bunch of other tourists, most of my pictures weren't that great. (For example, I was not able to get a picture of what was probably my favorite building, Chicago's old main post office, which is absolutely massive and currently abandoned.) Here are some of the best pictures I did take:



Bertrand Goldberg's Marina City and River City:

President Obama Addresses the AMA

I was in Chicago to visit my Dad (an early Father's Day present). He was in Chicago, because he is one of Maine's delegates to the American Medical Association. On the Thursday before I flew out, the New York Times reported that President Obama would be giving the keynote speech at the AMA the following Monday to kick off his push for health care reform. I was very excited that I would just happen to be there, and hoped that I could see the speech. Alas, the AMA did not have enough space in the ballroom for everyone, and only delegates, state medical society ceos, and delegates' spouses could attend in the main room. They had a ballroom next door set up with a live video feed for the medical students and advocates for various issues who were attending the AMA meeting but were not delegates, and I got to watch the speech there. It was still an incredibly cool experience.

Obama's speech was excellent, and it was great to watch it with such an engaged audience. Many members of the AMA are very conservative and are apprehensive about Obama's plans (you can hear boos at a few points in the speech), but a lot of the New England delegates I spoke to really liked the speech and are hopeful about the prospect of health care reform. They certainly see the need for it. After the speech, I ended up in an elevator with a number of delegates from Virginia, who were going through a passionate play-by-play.

Outside the hotel, a small group of protesters and curious onlookers gathered, along with police, secret service, and tv news crews. There were anti-abortion people and gay rights protesters, but I only saw one person with a health care-related protest sign.

Miwestern Gothic

Chicago's Lincoln Park

Some pretty buildings near our hotel

I took these pictures one evening as my Mom and I walked back to our hotel. I loved the complexity and visual variety of Chicago's architecture. The blue glass building with the undulating white balconies is the Aqua building, which is currently under construction. Why can't San Francisco have such interesting new architecture?

The Bean

Like every other tourist in Chicago, I could not resist taking a million pictures of the bean, a reflective, kidney-shaped statue in Millennium Park:

Millenium Park

These photos are of Millenium Park, which was planned in the late '90s and finished in 2004. The big metallic theatre is the Pritzker Pavillion, designed by Frank Gehry (and oh so Gehr-ish), an open air concert venue (where Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me taped from the week before I was there).

Chicago Art Institute

Next we went to the Chicago Art Institute. The new Modern Wing, designed by Renzo Piano, just opened last month. It looks suspiciously like San Francisco's new California Academy of Sciences, minus the red accent colors and the living roof (though there seem to be green roofs all over Chicago). The museum itself has some amazing and famous works of art. My favorites were the photography and European surrealist wings (no surprise there!).

The view from a garden tucked away near the museum's main entrance.


A giant tissue box pierced by a culvert in a room of sculpture (and wallpaper) designed by Robert Gober. What do they have in common? The flow of tears. (Sorry, I couldn't resist the culvert sculture.)

Charles Ray sculpture: a replica of a dead tree from California.

Saturday in the Museum with George. (Anthony Ha, this one's for you.)

The main stairway of the original museum wing.

Looking out from the Modern Wing.

Interior of the Modern Wing, designed by Renzo Piano.

The view from the roof deck of the Modern Wing.

Chicago Architecture Foundation

Last week, I flew to Chicago for five days to visit my parents, who were there for the annual meeting of the American Medical Association. My dad is a delegate from Maine, so he was in meetings most of the time, but my mom and I wandered around the city did the tourist thing. We would meet up with my dad and some of the other AMA folks for dinner. And I had to keep up my half marathon training, so I ran a total of 12 miles along Lake Michigan. Oh, and Barack Obama gave a 45 minute speech to the AMA about health care reform on Monday morning, which my mom and I watched, as well.

You know, just your average week. (Just kidding - it was an excellent vacation, if exhausting.)

The first place my mom took me was the Chicago Architecture Foundation, which had a brand new exhibit for the 100th anniversary of Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennet's Plan for Chicago. Published in 1909, this was one of the first large-scale urban plans, detailing transportation, parks, cultural centers, and neighborhood development. Supposedly, about half of the plan's recommendations were implemented. This was an important document in urban planning history.

To commemorate the Burnham plan, CAF has built an exhibition looking at the history of 100 years of urban and regional planning in Chicago. It is an interesting exhibit. At times, it is a very critical look at past planning decisions, examining the theories behind them and their unintended consequences. It presents how projects like the construction of Chicago O'Hare airport and the suburban highway system, as well as the "slum clearance" in Chicago's South Side in the 1940's and construction of large housing projects, led to greater suburbanization, loss of transit ridership, segregation, and a concentration of poverty within inner city neighborhoods. The exhibits end by asking what the consequences will be of future planning projects for Chicago. There is a bit of suspense here, since it acknowledges that a number of these projects have been put on hold at the moment, due to the economy. I really liked this exhibit. Rarely do you come across a critical history of urban planning as a tourist attraction!



This diorama was for the construction of a suburban highway constructed in the 1950s(?), which incorporated on old "L" line in the center median. The diorama looks optimistic for this new modern highway, but the older men next to me were saying how dingy the road looks now, and how a number of the L stations have been abandoned.

Kennedy Space Center, May 2009

On our last day in Florida, I went to the Kennedy Space Center with my parents and my Uncle John. We were there the day before the launch of the space shuttle Atlantis, so we could see bleachers set up and preparations afoot. The Endeavor, which was scheduled for a June launch, was also on one of launch pads. It was impressive to see how massive the complex was. The Vehicle Assembly Building, which is in the distance in two of these photos, is several stories tall and covers 8 acres. After taking the bus tour of the complex, we saw the new Star Trek movie at the Space Center's IMAX theater! It was very cool.






My parents and I, sacrificing our dignity.