Day 20 was our last day in the windy city, and with so much left to do it was hard to have to cut so much out of my stay. We started the day with a walking tour of the modernist architecture in downtown Chicago. The city features a large number of buildings designed by, or influenced by, Mies van der Rohe.
The tour shows how after WW2, when the US Government wanted to modernise it’s offices and public spaces, Mies van der Rohe designed a number of office buildings and complexes and paved influenced a large number of Modernist building to be built in the downtown. Eventually the architectural style shifted to postmodernism, anachronistically applying the old styles of Chicago school and classical skyscrapers with elements of the modernist building. Eventually this changed again with a swing back to new-modernerism which takes the modernist approach and applies a level of humanism and contextual awareness to the architecture.
To put that another way, buildings are being designed to flow and acknowledge the land and surrounding buildings rather than simply being monolithic structures planted on a site.
After the tour and a light snack we had a look through the rest of the Chicago Architecture Foundation, where they have a model of the city. The model was made from a combination of technical drawings and specifications of as many buildings that they could get as well as official documentation and lots of photographs.
Designed in Google Sketchup and made using automatic prototyping machines, the model is easily scalable (so they say) and has a high degree of accuracy.
We then walked down to the other end of the city for sightseeing and food reasons. On the way, while walking past the Van Buren street bridge we found more evidence of Transformers 3 being filmed. They had closed the whole bridge off and were redirecting pedestrian traffic away from the bridge.
Dinner and a walk back and that ends our last day in Chicago. We have another early start, with an 8:50 flight to Washington DC where we begin our 4th proper city.