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 No, 24
이름:김성호 (sunghokim@yonsei.ac.kr)
2003/9/22(월)
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 NYT on Chicago's ArchiTour
New York Times에 실린 Chicago의 건축투어 프로그램에 대한 기사입니다. 얼마전 게시판에 Chicago 정보가 필요하다는 글을 본 기억이 나서요.
Admiring Mies and Modernism, Up Close
By WAYNE CURTIS
IF you sign up for the occasional urban architectural tour, you have most likely noticed that modern buildings tend to get short shrift. Tour guides typically offer vague apologies when standing in front of a tinted glass monolith, as if accounting for an uncle who's eccentric but not in a particularly interesting way.
Not in Chicago. This city loves its modern architecture the way Rome loves its fountains, and with good reason. Chicago is one of the few cities that make a plain glass box look good. It was home to Mies van der Rohe, the alpha-modernist, who brought a level of fine craftsmanship to simplified architectural forms. And there are lots of excellent vantage points from which to admire its buildings -- from the lakeside lawn at the Adler Planetarium, to Grant Park, to the Michigan Avenue Bridge over the Chicago River.
Chicago also has a great resource in the Chicago Architectural Foundation, a nonprofit group dedicated to educating the public about architecture and design. Some 450 foundation volunteers lead 65 types of tours each year. In 2001 the foundation opened a visitors' center, called the ArchiCenter, in the graceful and historic Santa Fe Building on Michigan Avenue, just down the block and across the street from the Art Institute of Chicago.
The ArchiCenter makes a worthy launching point for an exploration. In the compact visitors' center there's a detailed diorama of the city skyline, which visitors can hover over to get oriented. There's an illustrated time line, with an encapsulated history of the city's architecture, from Louis Sullivan through Daniel Burnham and Frank Lloyd Wright and on to Mies and beyond. Computer kiosks allow the more curious to dig deeper into buildings of interest.
There is also a gift shop, naturally, with upscale garden gnomes, architecture-theme refrigerator magnets and ample proof that anything that can be emblazoned with a Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired design already has been. I was taken by the ''Great Buildings of Chicago Knowledge Cards,'' a set of pocket-sized flash cards featuring photographs and brief histories of 48 landmark buildings.
Many of the downtown tours depart from the ArchiCenter and you can get information and sign up for many of the tours here.
Over the course of a summer holiday weekend, I went on three tours -- by bike, on foot and by boat -- all focusing on the buildings of downtown Chicago, hoping to learn more about the city's mid- to late-20th-century architecture. On a previous visit I'd toured many of the Chicago area's best-known Frank Lloyd Wright structures, so I passed on the several Wright-theme tours this time around. (That would be a mistake for first-time visitors, of course.)
The boat tour departs hourly during the summer from a landing on the Chicago River just below the Michigan Avenue Bridge. Mine left promptly -- so promptly that one lagging family was split, with half on shore, half on board, to which the deck hand responded by shrugging and pointing to his wrist before we motored upriver.
Traveling at a lively clip, the tour served up architecture in a keep-it-moving, cafeteria-style narrative -- the docent mentioned more than 50 buildings during the 90-minute trip. The crowded upper deck at times looked like the spectator galleries at Wimbledon, with heads swiveling in unison from port to starboard and aft, as our guide pointed out key buildings. I was happy that the boat backtracked down the river, allowing a second look at buildings seen but briefly the first time.
The Chicago River has three downtown spurs, and we explored up the urban canyons of each. The river offers an ideal viewpoint for ogling buildings, and you soon realize that part of Chicago's glory is its pleasing mix of styles, including Beaux-Arts and Chicago school (a sort of transition into modern), examples of which now serve as an understory between the modern and postmodern towers. A complexly layered cityscape is the result.
From the boat I was impressed with our duck's eye view of Mies's I.B.M. Building (1971) and Bertrand Goldberg's radical corncob-like Marina City, completed in 1967. We caught glimpses of Philip Johnson and Cesar Pelli buildings and got a healthy serving of the local iconoclast Helmut Jahn, including a look at his improbable showroom in a cupola atop a fussy wedding-cake building.
It's to the foundation's lasting credit that even if you had never heard of these architects, you might still find the tour entertaining and enlightening. The docent provided an Architecture 101 commentary about early Chicago, modernism and postmodernism as we chugged along, coaxing a story out of the skyline. (This story apparently lacked appeal to the younger kids on board, two of whom spent the tour prone on a bench near me, marveling only at the depths of their boredom.)
Back at the ArchiCenter, I inquired if the modern skyscrapers walking tour had space available, and the clerk said yes without even checking. ''That one never sells out,'' she reported.
An hour later our group of 11 gathered in the Santa Fe Building. It included architecturally savvy travelers from Italy, the Czech Republic and Germany, countries where modernism is taken more seriously. (Several actually nodded knowingly when the phrase ''Miesian influence'' was uttered.)
Our no-nonsense docent, Helen Lewis, announced that she would rather spend time at buildings than between them, and we thus set off at a brisk pace. She brooked no stragglers and had the cunning and skill of a border collie in keeping us in a tight pack as we forded busy intersections in search of fertile architectural pasturage.
One of our first destinations on the two-hour tour was the plaza of the Federal Center, three blocks west of the ArchiCenter, lorded over by the austere black boxes designed by Mies, completed in 1975. This is the public space famously enlivened by the tomato-red Alexander Calder stabile, ''Flamingo.''
Part of the trick of conveying modernism is to recapture what a grand experiment this break from the past once was, a brief period of wonder before builders striving to cut costs copied the style and littered cities and highway interchanges everywhere with squat glass boxes lacking grace or craftsmanship.
At the Federal Center, Ms. Lewis enthusiastically highlighted some of Mies's craft, and indicated subtle detailing with a sweep of her arms -- how the square granite grids seemingly moved from the plaza sidewalks through the glass exterior walls and up the interior walls of the lobbies, for example. For a moment, a fleeting sense of architectural daring flickered back to life.
We paused briefly by the timeless Inland Steel Building, on Dearborn at Monroe, constructed in 1957 but looking as if it could have gone up last week. We admired the Picasso sculpture at the 1965 Daley Plaza, three blocks north of the Federal Center between Dearborn and Clark, and wandered inside the exuberantly colorful and controversial James R. Thompson Center, designed by Helmut Jahn in 1985, which rises up at the corner of Randolph and Clark like a stadium of glass. The Europeans seemed to be particularly smitten by this structure, which provoked considerable oohing and a cicadalike volley of camera shutters.
The river and walking tours each had their merits, but my favorite way of touring turned out to be by bike. I signed up for a three-hour, six-mile lake-shore bike tour, offered on the occasional weekend in spring summer. It wasn't too fast or too slow, but just right, allowing us to pedal to vantage points for sweeping panoramas, then move in closer for a more detailed look.
The tour rendezvoused midmorning at the Navy Pier, where I had rented a hybrid bike in advance. We split into two groups, each with about a dozen bikers and two docents. Our group set off northward along the lake toward the neighborhood of Streeterville, paying our respects at Mies's 1952 twin ''Glass Houses'' -- a pair of sleek apartment buildings at 860-880 Lake Shore Drive -- before doubling back and winding southward toward Grant Park.
The day was glorious, and the lake-shore pathway crowded with fl?eurs -- it was my impression that some city ordinance requires every resident under 30 to spend the weekend simultaneously roller-blading and talking on a cellphone. As with the other tours, our docents employed a brisk ''chop-chop!'' approach, and we moved along alertly and swiftly. I'll say this about the foundation's tours: you need to stay focused and on point, or you'll be left behind.
At Grant Park we veered out of the flow and sat on the lawn, where a row of towering buildings provided a handsome backdrop. Tom Drebenstedt, a wonderfully articulate docent, told us the story of Chicago's early development, noting that early boosters wanted the city to be like Paris, only bigger. (The famed Buckingham Fountain in Grant Park is an outsized copy of one found at Versailles, and a rendition of Louis XIV's hunting lodge was added, somewhat improbably, atop a Hilton hotel in the 1920's.)
As we wound along the river and by the marina, Mr. Drebenstedt stopped from time to time to point out examples of how the older, more formal modernism of Mies and his school had been tempered by the softer, gentler modernism of more recent years, and of how a more human scale had returned to the streetscapes. It appealed to me that modernism here was already just another style -- like Richardsonian Romanesque -- and wasn't referred to in dark or dismissive tones.
From time to time, Mr. Drebenstedt would gather up the group, discuss one architectural trend or another in general terms, then suggest what to look for and say, ''Let's see what we can find!'' before speeding off. It gave the whole enterprise a sense of a grand adventure.
The tour finished up at the Grant Park Museum Campus, which recently benefited from a major landscape redesign. A skylighted pedestrian underpass brought us from the park, under rerouted Lake Shore Drive, to find the neo-Classical Field Museum and the John G. Shedd Aquarium rising above grassy hillocks, like some ancient center of learning.
At the Adler Planetarium, amid tour buses disgorging passengers, our docents bade us farewell and left to our own devices. It was early afternoon, and I happily realized that my bike didn't have to be returned until 8 p.m. I had hours left to explore.
So for the next few hours I did as I had been trained: I set off to see what I could find.
From Beaux-Arts to postmodern
The Chicago Architecture Foundation's ArchiCenter, in the Santa Fe Building, at 224 South Michigan Avenue, (312) 922-3432, www.architecture.org, is open Monday to Saturday 9 a.m. to 7 p.m.; Sunday 9:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. Admission is free.
The foundation offers a wide range of guided architectural tours by all manner of conveyance -- boat, bus, bike and even aboard the Loop train. Prices vary. The Architectural River Cruise, offered May through early November, is $23 on weekends, $21 on weekdays; the 40-minute train tour, offered Saturdays from May through September, is free. The charge for the lakefront bike tour is $10.
Reservations well in advance are especially encouraged for the river tours, which often sell out in summer. Boat tour tickets may be bought at the ArchiCenter, Ticketmaster outlets or at the C.A.F./Mercury Cruise Line booth below the Michigan Avenue Bridge.
Walking tours generally require one to two hours, and the charge is $5 to $15, with most $10. The one-hour Frank Lloyd Wright tour in Oak Park is offered on Sundays and costs $16, including admission to the Wright home and studio (you must supply your own transportation to Oak Park).
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