Chicago home of skyscrapers and The 'El' winds through the Loop

Chicago home of skyscrapers

Chicago home of skyscrapers: There is an excellent ensemble view of the varied skyscraper styles around the vicinity of the Chicago River from Michigan Avenue Bridge. The white terracotta, clock-towered building just north of the bridge is the renovated Wrigley (www.thewrigleybuilding.com) of chewing-gum fame, which is particularly attractive when floodlit at night. West along the river are the twin towers of Marina City, resembling two huge corncobs. The circular concrete towers, with apartments shaped like slices of pie on the upper floors, go all the way down to the river's edge.

Chicago home of skyscrapers

They provide mooring spaces for 500 residents' boats or the businesspeople who commute to work by motorboat from the lake's North

Shore suburbs. Providing a stark contrast behind them is the black-steel-and-glass monolithic slab of Mies van der Rohe's landmark AMA Plaza (formerly known as IBM Building) The Loop: With the El' (elevated railroad) rattling around its periphery of Wabash Avenue, Lake, Wells, and Van Buren streets, the Loop means business. LaSalle Street, the heart of the financial and banking district, has the same canyon-like quality as New York's Wall Street. The major Downtown department stores are on State Street and Wabash Avenue.

The 'El' winds through the Loop

The most successful feature of Chicago's business district is the space devoted to its many open plazas to monumental modern sculpture and mosaics rather than statues of famous men. This plaza art, as it has become known, began with Picasso's great Sculpture (1967) in front of the Richard J. Daley Center (Washington and Dearborn streets), a complex of a courthouse and local government buildings named after the late mayor. Like the elegant skyscraper courthouse, the 50ft (15m) sculpture is made of CorTen steel that weathers to the color of rust, but without the corrosion. To people who want to know whether the sculpture is to be understood as a woman or a horse, Picasso himself said they might just as well 'try to understand the song of a bird. At any rate, it draws to the plaza a constant flow of admirers and locals who just like to eat their sandwiches around it.

Chicago home of skyscrapers

Other notable pieces of plaza art are Chagall's Four Seasons, a 70ft (21.5m) long mosaic on the Chase Tower plaza (Monroe and Dearborn streets); a 53ft (16m) high bright-red Flamingo Stabile by Alexander Calder (Adams and Dearborn streets), gracing what is regarded by some as the most elegant set of US Government buildings in the country, the Federal Center, designed by Mies van der Rohe; and, perhaps the most provocative, pop artist Claes Oldenburg's filigreed Batcolumn, a 100ft (30.5m) high baseball bat made of 1,608 pieces of welded steel (just outside the Loop at the Social Security Administration Building, 600 West Madison Street).

On the edge of the Loop is the Willis Tower "(Wacker Drive and Adams Street, formerly the Sears Tower), which with its 110 floors rising 1,454ft (443m) in the air, was once the tallest building in the world. Actually the building consists of nine towers packed together, as its de-
signers Skidmore, Owings & Merrill suggest, like squared cigarettes; they pop out of their packet at different heights. The structure's steel frame is sheathed in black aluminum with 16,000 bronze-tinted windows. Then there's the 103rd-floor Skydeck observatory.
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