Originally Posted by
chgoeditor
Oh, that it was.
I've always enjoyed pointing out the
Blue Cross Blue Shield building to visitors. While the building doesn't look particularly noteworthy from an architectural perspective, it was intentionally designed so that it could be expanded not outward but upward, and in 2007 the building went from 33 stories to 57 stories tall.
Yeah, that's a fun one. "see that spot in the middle? It used to be the roof."
Originally Posted by
fastflyer
Chicago is one of the great world cities for architecture.
Even if you want to see one particular style, Chicago often has multiple examples. For example, the subset of modernist architecture known as "brutalism"
http://chicagobrutalism.com
I'm hit or miss with liking brutalist buildings. Goldberg's stuff is usually pretty interesting (obvious is Marina City, but River City is cool too). Some of the Netsch' buildings on the UIC campus are pretty depressing, but his libraries at UofC (Regenstein) and Northwestern are both interesting.
Random aside, I'd never been to the aforementioned Regenstein Library at UofC before this past spring. My daughter's class studied the 1893 World's Fair. Regenstein has a good collection of artifacts from the fair including maps, guidebooks, big picture books (similar but not quite what we'd call a coffee table book today), souvenirs, etc, so her class took a field trip there. I was one of the chaperones. Got off the bus, saw the library ... hmm, this looks just like Northwestern's library. Yep, both Netsch.