In an attempt to ward off our jet lag, we met at the hotel lobby to go on an early morning neighbourhood exploration. Except for Ben. There are a lot of amazing cute little Art Deco buildings in the neighbourhood we are staying In – more on this later!
PART A:
Post our morning walk we jumped in cabs downtown to explore the skyscrapers of Chicago through a river based boat tour run by the Chicago Architecture Foundation. Highlights include towers by SOM (who we are going to visit tomorrow morning) and learning how Chicago has a predilection for passing off their buildings form as ‘contextualism’.
PART B:
Then we met Larry. Larry was our exceptional tour guide who had a background in architecture history, and more notably, worked as a voice over artist. Larry drove us 1.5 hours down to Plano, where he took us on a tour of Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth house (given we begged Bernadette to add it to our jam-packed itinerary).
The two things that stood out to us were its positioning against a noisy highway that now backs onto the property, and how the building is showing a few wrinkles – particularly due to the flood damage over rising river levels over past decades.
Ps: We definitely recommend visiting – Google ‘off the map architectural excursions’. As a true Mies aficionado, on our way home Larry detoured us past the Lakeshore Drive apartments – in which he fortunately used to own an apartment