Thursday and Friday involved lots of walking and some great tours, the perfect cap to an amazing first week. Thursday started out in the sweltering heat at millennium park for a tour by Professor Geiger. She led us around the whole park, starting at Wrigley square, heading over to cloud gate (the bean), around the Pritzker pavilion to the BP bridge, through the Lurie garden, and then of course, cooling off in the Crown fountains. I don’t know how we managed to get through the whole park without having anyone faint, it must have been nearly 100 degrees without a cloud in the sky.
After the tour packed with knowledge from Professor Geiger, the students headed back to studio to grab some lunch and cool off. For the rest of the day we had the students present their beautiful color collages, and then set them off working in groups on their next assignment : a triangulated truss newspaper structure!
Friday started with a bang… of thunder… and then one minute after getting of the train, a bunch of rain. Running through the rain we all got completely soaked and ended up having to stop off by the public library’s overhang for awhile. Of course, we had told the students that it was going to be 95 and sunny all day long… a little bit off of 80 and thunderstorm – oh well… its a memory. Eventually we got to walk through Frank Lloyd Wright’s home and studio which was nothing short of amazing. Its extremely rare to be able to say that you have walked in the same place as a great architect, and also where the prairie style of architecture was born; yet it is even more rare to say that all of these artifacts are only 45 minutes away on a train ride from campus!
After the Wright home, we had a delicious lunch at a pizza place nearby, and then headed over to Unity Temple (also designed by Wright) for our guided tour there. Before we headed into Unity Temple, Victor and Katie brought the students into a church across the street. Here the students sketched in the church, soaking in the style of architecture, to be able to contrast and compare it with Unity Temple’s. The guide did a wonderful job of taking us around the Temple, and not only explaining the architecture and thought behind the large wall, delayed entrance, or arrangement in the seating (ask your student – hopefully they can explain it more!) but also brought to light the current building issues they are having with restoring this truly remarkable landmark to its original luster. Eventually, we got on our way home, however, after a long day of rain, walking, and then the hot beating sun, we all stopped at Oberweis for some much needed ice cream 🙂
PS – Make sure you check out day 3 and 4 pictures on flickr!
Experiment in Architecture 