The Morning After of the (Not-Entirely)Great Chicago Fire Festival

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If only 1871 had been so anti-climatic . .  .

The morning after Saturday night's Great Chicago Fire Festival, the three structures representing the city that been floated into the middle of the Chicago River to burn up in dramatic fashion as the event's spectacular grand finale, remained dispiritedly intact, the letters of the messages that were to be revealed still largely secreted inside (Surprisingly, they did not spell out �Brought to you by Rahm�.)

Sunday, a flotilla of techs boarded all three barges for the postmortem . . .

With electricians contemplating the wiring that had failed to set the river ablaze . . .

Tens of thousands of spectators had crammed the sidewalks and bridges to catch a glimpse of the $2 million spectacle, mounted by Chicago's storied Redmoon Theater Company.

Earlier, to be sure, there had been music and food, fiery cauldrons, flaming buoys, and a floating locomotive that breathed fire, and after the bonfire fizzled, the crowd came alive for a final fireworks show. Read Chris Jone's review here.

And the interminable waits for not much of anything to happen gave the spectators time to take in the architecture of Chicago's spectacular riverfront, which was still there in its full glory and without a single singe the following morning.

Towers, Skylines and Clouds on a Brisk Fall Day

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Chicago Under the Dome, only through Sunday. The urban visions of Level Chicago 2013

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You have only through Sunday night to see the installations of Level Chicago 2013, at five separate locations along the Chicago.  As we wrote recently, it's a project of L.A. based LERATA (Laboratory for Experimentation and Research in Art, Technology and Architecture) and is intended to be a preview of a far larger project next year.

image courtesy LERATA

The one installation I haven't seen at all is Julio Obelleiro and Wildbytes Building Music, at the plaza of the 2 North Riverside, a/k/a Daily News Building at the river and Madison Street.  It projects images against the blank wall of the Civic Opera Building on the opposite of the river.

What I thought was the Level event at the Daily News Plaza is, instead, Butterflies and Buffalo, which features both the world's largest camera and the images it creates for photographer Dennis Manarchy.  BandB runs all the way through October 31, so we'll discuss it in a separate post, soon.

The other installations of Level are along a stretch of the river from Michigan Avenue to Clark.

Skip message, by Daniel Sauter + Ketai LLC, is on the lower riverwalk between Clark and Dearborn.  It also features a projection, along the concrete wall that separates the walk from lower Wacker, and it features a mobile phone weblink that allows you to send text to appear on the display.

A block east, between Dearborn and State, there's Sabrina Raaf's Meandering River, based on mathematical equations scientists use to predict a river's morphology.  To create this installation, these snapshots are etched onto thermal material, hung down at the center, and trailing off to bottom and the sides.

The last two installations,  by Daniel Miller, are in abject utility room under lower Wacker near the Bridgehouse Museum.  Site A takes video shot at a suburban site where the world's first nuclear reactor was rebuilt in 1943 and uses a rotating projector to cast the images across all the interior surfaces of the service room.

Perhaps, the most detailed and intriguing of all the installations is Miller's Contained.

In a small, otherwise empty room, under a clear dome, you'll find an incredibly detailed model of Chicago, drawn from images on Google Earth.  Two spare metal arms hold lighting that complete a full rotation every 40 minutes to simulate light from the moon and sun falling on the city throughout the course of a day.  There's even a humidifier to create �smog.� �In this dome I am exploring the closed system that we live in called earth,� writes Miller.  The dome's image is also picked up by a camera that feeds to a video screen just outside the room.

Between the model that is both exact and abstracted, and its sealing beneath the glass dome, in a closed-off room just steps from the actual skyline and the movement of human beings along the walkways, and in cars, buses and boats, Contained captures the mystery that lies between our physical world and the energies and desires that animate it.

If this is what Level can accomplish with just five installations, a full-up version next year could be a very grand thing, indeed.

Level runs through Sunday at the locations on the map below.  Stated time is 6:00 to 10:00 p.m., but it seems that many installations really don't get started until the sun goes down.

A Special Tour with the Architects Redesigning the Chicago River; scenes from river via Chicago Water Taxi from Goose Island

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If you want an expertly guided water tour of Chicago architecture, go with the Chicago Architecture Foundation's  First Lady, which docks along the south bank riverwalk just east of the Michigan Avenue bridge.

And next Thursday, September 12th, you have a rare opportunity to take the boat tour with the very people who are designing the Chicago river's future: CDOT's Michelle Woods, Carol Ross Barney, Gina Ford of Sasaski Associates, the team working on the new riverwalk, Tom Kerwin of bKL, about to break ground on their Wolf Point apartment tower, and Claire Cahan of Studio Gang, whose Clark Park boathouse is scheduled to debut in October.  More info here.

But if you're one of those people who also like to explore on your own, there's no better way than the distinctive yellow boats of Chicago Water Taxi, which will take you from Michigan Avenue all the way to Ping Tom Park in Chinatown.  And, as we wrote last June when we took one of the inaugural runs, there's now also a new route that takes you north on the river all the way to the Cherry Avenue Bridge, the gateway between North Avenue and Goose Island.

As hard as it may be to believe, summer has already drawn to a close, and you have only another couple weeks to take the Water Taxi between the Daily News Building dock at Madison to/from Goose Island, before the route shuts down for the season.

As we mentioned before, the great thing about this run is how it gives you a visual counterpoint between vestiges of the old industrial city and the newer, more ordered mixed-use city that's fast replacing it.  Following the links are a few photos of some of the sights you'll encounter, taken this afternoon, on a exceptionally blue-skied, bright day that made even the old Morton Salt/General Growth building look crisp and fresh.

Read More:

Hour of the Goose: New Water Taxi run offers fresh Architectural Portrait of the City.

Hour of the Wolf:  The Transformation of the Pivot Point of Chicago

 Finishing the Riverwalk

Studio/Gang's Clark Park Boathouse:  A Century of Urban Transformation flowing down Chicago's River.

And now, Scenes from a Early Fall Afternoon Cruise from Goose Island . . .

more after the break . . .

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

. . . and a few bonus shots after leaving the boat . . .

 

Chicago Under Construction: The Park at River Point Makes Train Tracks Disappear

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For the better part of the past century, north from Lake Street was where the Chicago River began to again show its natural roots.  To the east and south, the river had long before a constructed ditch with towers on either bank often coming right to the edge.

At Wolf Point, however, and along the western bank, the river retained what at least appeared to be a natural shoreline, hugged by trees, shrubs and plants that arose free from the guiding hand of any landscape architect.  For those long decades, this assuming structure, just north of Lake Street, was the most ambitious building on the site . . .

All that's history now.  There are big plans for all those last empty sites along the river in the Loop.  No fewer than three buildings are planned for Wolf Point, and renderings of a new office tower at 150 North Riverside were unveiled just last month.

That brick Metra building - and the ramshackle wooden stairway leading down to the river -  is now only a memory, as another massive tower, River Point, is about to go up in their place.  It's been designed for Hines Interests by Pickard-Chilton, architects of the 60-story 300 North LaSalle, completed in 2009.  The actual building, to be set back from the river along Canal Street, has yet to break ground.

First the developer is creating a 1.5 acre riverfront park, for which they've shook down the city for a $29.5 million TIF subsidy.  (150 North Riverside, to be constructed on the other side of Lake, is also making a riverfront park part of their project, but without recourse to TIF money.)  The park at River Point is being built over the existing train tracks leading into Union Station.

On a chilly day back in April, a painter was already documenting the vanishing surface tracks clinging to the river.

Soon, the construction equipment was rolling into place.

Things begin, slowly and deliberately . . .

. . . cranes flew in on barges . .  .

. . . basic contours began to reveal themselves . . .

. . . and by July, there was no longer any mistaking but that this was the start of something big.

By August, there was enough green rebar in sight it might as well been St. Patrick's Day.

 The irregular riverbank has already been replaced with a new river wall . . .

 

. . . even as concrete walls quickly began to rise to support the surface of the new park, and swallow up the accustomed, almost lullaby sound of locomotive bells forever . . .

 

When it's all done, it will look something like this . . . 

Read More:

Hour of the Wolf: The Transformation of the Pivot Point of Chicago

First Renderings for 150 North Riverside office tower and park