Tonight my friend Audrey came over and told me about a piece of art her mom received for Christmas. Ashley, Audrey’s brother’s girlfriend, has been studying urban planning and used a laser tool for cutting foam core to create a 3-D birch forest. The mention of architectural models and tools got me thinking that I should post pictures from the architecture tours I did when I was in Chicago two weeks ago.
In the novel I’m working on, the narrator Adelle is an architect. This made Chicago the ideal city for me to attend a writers’ conference since it’s known for its rich architectural heritage. Along with several conference sessions, I had the chance to tour the Louis Sullivan Auditorium Theater and then also do a bus tour of notable architecture all over the city, including Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House, several sky scrapers, and the Mies Bauhaus-influenced studio that houses the architecture students at Illinois Institute of Technology.
The tours were a wonderful opportunity to immerse myself in the vocabulary that Adelle would use every day and move around in the space the vocabulary describes. Here are some of my favorite pictures:
Architectural Model of Chicago
View of Louis Sullivan's Auditorium theater from my hotel room
Entrance to Auditorium Theater, interior
Auditorium Theater, view from the stage
Library in the Auditorium Theater
Fixture by Frank Lloyd Wright in the Rookery
Frank Lloyd Wright's Robie House
Tall.
Silencing tunnel for the El at IIT
Underground Archives
student project at IIT
