The White City

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In 1893 the soot-blackened, hog-killing, rather foul and grimy -- but vibrant -- city of Chicago beat out New York and Washington DC to become the host city for the great World's Fair of that year, also known as the World's Columbian Exposition (commemorating the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's discovery of the North American continent). Even back then, Chicago was a hotbed of talented architects, a characteristic it kept through the twentieth and into the twenty-first century.

Flocking to the World's Fair, Chicago, 1893(source)

To produce this massive fair - and make sure that Chicago and the US of A kept up with, or preferably surpassed, the city of Paris (which had hosted the previous World's Fair) - a band of dedicated architects and rich (very rich) entrepreneurs got together. It was touch and go for a while, but they did it, and spectacularly. The resulting Fair Grounds, built to the south of the grimy city in the Jackson Park area, was comprised of mostly temporary buildings in grandiose neo-classical style. When time was running short, the decision was made to basically whitewash the lot of them. The result was very wonderful and very white. The Fair was dubbed "The White City".

The Rookery, Chicago

The lead architects on the project were Burnham & Root, though Root passed away before the Fair (he died of pneumonia early in the planning process). Their firm had nurtured several up and coming men who later became architectural 'names', including Louis Sullivan and a young Frank Lloyd Wright. The shape of the Fair was formed from the 'control room' on the top floor office of Burnham & Root in a landmark building they'd built in the Chicago Loop, on South La Salle Street not far from the Board of Trade Building, named The Rookery. Today you can visit that top floor office - at the soaring height of eleven stories, where Burnham & Root conferred with their fellow architects, and the famous landscape architect from New York, Olmsted, over plans and schemes. The group could see the Jackson Park area from the windows, if they looked.

THE office, of Burhman & Root, 11th floor, The Rookery, Chicago.

Visiting The Rookery is fascinating in itself. Take a guided tour and learn all about it:

The Rookery...was revolutionary in several respects. Its architecture was unique and much more ornate than had been seen to date in commercial buildings. The Rookery successfully implemented many new and breakthrough building technologies - including metal framing, elevators, fireproofing, electrical lighting, and plate glass - that established the commercial acceptance of the modern skyscraper. At 11 stories tall, The Rookery was one of the earliest examples of metal framing with masonry walls on such a large scale. Today, it is considered the oldest standing high-rise in Chicago. 

Moorish, Romanesque Commercial, Indian, Venetian, Arabian, Islamic, Byzantine: all these words have been used to describe the Rookery’s exterior motifs. Some critics said that the mix of styles lacked unity, but others felt that the repeating patterns were an interpretation of American culture, reflecting a spirit of conquest.

Frank Lloyd Wright's idea of an office building atrium.

FLW's decorative touches, Rookery atrium.

The oriel staircase, The Rookery

The building is probably still great to work in - it has a wonderful large atrium letting in light to interior offices. These were favoured in the early days, since it was better to look inwards than outwards onto the dark, stinky streets. The atrium was remodelled in 1905 by none other than Frank Lloyd Wright, who covered it in light marble and delicate art deco decorations.

The first Ferris Wheel (source)

But back to the Fair - people flocked to it, 27 million visitors in 6 months. "Sell the cookstove if necessary and come. You must see the fair." wrote author Hamlin Garland in a letter to his parents in 1893. And what did they flock to see? The grandiose white buildings, the landscaping of a previously marshy area, the artificial lake with an island and a steam boat. But above all the exhibits - examples of the latest technology in the Electricity Building and the Manufactures Hall. The whole fair was powered and lit by the new-fangled electricity -- not using coal and gas allowed The White City to stay white.

They also came to see new inventions, like Wrigley's Juicy Fruit chewing gum. They came to see and ride the amazingly huge world's first Ferris Wheel (designed by a Kansas engineer named Ferris, expressly to out-do the Paris Fair's Eiffel Tower). And they came to see curiosities (including native peoples) from far-flung countries around the world which they'd be unlikely ever to visit, and to see animals and crafts, minerals and plants, that were strange and curious.

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At Chicago's Field Museum.

You might pause to wonder what happened to all those stuffed wild animals, mineral specimens, fossils, jaw-bones, Indonesian gamalans, Japanese kimonos. Answer: many of them ended up forming the initial collection of Chicago's natural history museum, called The Field Museum (after business man and department store pioneer, Marshall Field, who donated the wherewithal). The Field Museum has rummaged in its basements and curated a fine exhibition (runs until September 2014) where once again you can marvel at the things that made the eyes of 1893 pop. I was particularly taken with the stuffed animals, in excellent condition even after 120 years in the basement. Many are the work of the man who became the Museum's own taxidermist, Carl Akeley. (Two of his elephants are on display in the Field's main hall).

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There's a great review of the Exhibition from the new York Times here, with pics of some of the exhibits. The Museum's display is enlivened by some rather intriguing animated postcards. Video artists have taken postcards from 1893 and added in some moving figures. It's just like being there. Sort of.

The White City is said to have inspired a whole movement focussed on urban planning:

The White City is largely credited for ushering in the City Beautiful movement and planting the seeds of modern city planning. The highly integrated design of the landscapes, promenades, and structures provided a vision of what is possible when planners, landscape architects, and architects work together on a comprehensive design scheme...Where the municipal art movement focused on beautifying one feature in a City, the City Beautiful movement began to make improvements on the scale of the district. The White City of the World's Columbian Exposition inspired the Merchant's Club of Chicago to commission Daniel Burnham to create the Plan of Chicago in 1909, which became the first modern comprehensive city plan in America. (from Wiki)

The Fair had more than 200 buildings, almost all of which were designed to be temporary. Their facades were made not of stone, but of a mixture of plaster, cement, and jute fibre called staff, which was painted white, giving the buildings their "gleam". Architecture critics derided the structures as "decorated sheds". (Wiki) In any event, the whole lot burnt down in a big fire in July 1894, about six months after the fair closed. A couple of survivors, which were intended to be permanent, remain: the Palace of Fine Arts (original home of The Field, now Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry); and the World's Congress Building in Grant Park (now the Art Institute of Chicago).

And in the Art Institute you can find, if you look closely, a few more remnants of the original fair, including these panels from the Japanese Pavilion, restored and displayed in the oriental art section of the galleries:

Panels from the original Japanese pavilion at the 1893 World's Fair, Chicago.

Aqua, The Building

Aqua, The Building

Chicago is a city of extraordinary twentieth (and 21st) century architecture, from the earliest skyscrapers, through the ornate neo-classical, art nouveau and art deco confections of the 1920s and 1930; to the beautiful "less-is-more" International Style of Mies Van Der Rohe's elegant tall buildings; to what was, in the 1970s, the tallest building in the world, Sears Tower (now Willis Tower.)

But let's pause just for a moment and admire a particularly gorgeous skyscraper, 82 stories high, in downtown Chicago's Lakeshore East development: named 'Aqua' by its management, the tower is a mixed hotel and residential building. You can buy or rent an apartment there if you have the cash (this article discusses the prices in 2010).

Aqua was completed in 2009, and was designed by architect Jeanne Gang, principal and founder of Studio Gang Architects, and it's her first skyscraper project. Chicagoans get excited by the fact that the designer is a woman - Aqua is the largest project ever awarded to an American firm headed by a woman. For reasons which are not clear to me (perhaps they did the hard work of interpreting the design and overseeing construction), Loewenberg & Associates are the architects of record. It's won a few architecture prizes.

As you can see by the pictures, the most distinctive feature of the building is the undulating balconies, each different from its neighbour. They make the building facade look like it's flowing, as in water ('aqua' - geddit?) The architect said she was inspired by shelves of rock around Lake Michigan, and the waters of the lake; but the balconies also, it seems, have some practical purpose. They help shade the glass and "confuse" the wind, and are arranged specifically so that residents can have views of city landmarks unobscured by the surrounding structures.

It's a beautiful thing.

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Lyric Opera in Chicago

Marrina Rebeka as Violetta in Chicago Lyric Opera's 'Traviata'.

A couple of opera firsts for me in Chicago: wearing a beanie to the opera (it was below freezing); and an opera house that provided an orderly cab queue after the performance (well done).

The company was the Chicago Lyric Opera,  the production was Verdi’s ‘La Traviata’, with the excellent Maltese tenor Joseph Calleja singing Alfredo. Our Violetta - a demanding role for a lyric soprano, the classic ‘singing while she’s dying role', a tough one to pull off well - was a Latvian soprano, Marina Rebeka; and the baritone Germont was Quinn Kelsey, a product of the Chicago Opera’s young artists program.

My verdict? I thought Alfredo was smooth, easy, rich and nuanced. I thought Violetta was a huge effort, acting needs more work, a lovely voice but could be modulated a little more (read = loud); but it’s a tough role, and a bouquet for Miss Rebeka. I thought the Germont was well sung but not inspiring. [PS I heard later that Ms Rebeka was not well. If true, she deserves a second bouquet]. On a good night at a 'Traviata', the second act (where Germont and Violetta have their big confrontation) should have me in tears. This one didn’t quite achieve that, but was nevertheless enjoyable.

The rest of the cast all seemed to be from the company and to have come up through the young artists program. The singing was patchy (what I could hear - some were too faint); and the young singers, bless them, looked like they were playing dress ups in a high school show - not comfy in their 19th century outfits. I also thought the direction lacked a little. One’s principals shouldn’t be turning their backs to the audience, or putting their hands to their mouths quite so much (as Violetta did). This was a debut opera for a theatre director, and it showed a bit. The production, a co-production with Houston Grand Opera and Canadian Opera Company, was...ok. I think designers should be braver about putting something IN the era. It doesn’t need to be ‘time-less’ to be timeless, if you know what I mean.

Act One.

It was opening night. I see that the reviewer in the Chicago Tribune agrees with me:

It would be nice to be able to report that Lyric's new production of this melodious tearjerker, which opened Wednesday night at the Civic Opera House, got such special treatment. What we had instead was an uneven "Traviata," unobjectionable on musical, dramatic and scenic grounds, that failed to touch the heart in the way exceptional performances of Verdi's middle-period masterpiece can do.... 

A striking beauty blessed with a bright, ravishing timbre and top notes like laser beams, Rebeka had what it took to nail her big aria (with its restored second verse) and florid cabaletta in Act I. The rest of her performance disappointed. The emotionally buffeted Violetta of Act 2 and the dying Violetta of Act 3 needed more oomph in the middle and bottom registers and a keener sense of dramatic involvement in the characterization. Neither Violetta's noble act of self-sacrifice nor her farewell to earthly things, the aria "Addio del passato," really tugged at the requisite heartstrings... 

Not that the emotional punch of the Violetta-Germont confrontation in Act 2 was helped by Kelsey's somewhat growly, if voluminous sound and the condescending smugness and lack of sympathy with which Alfredo's father treated his son's lover... 

Thank goodness for Calleja, a handsome Alfredo whose easy outpouring of burnished tone and ardent manner were everything one looks for in the role of the naïve country boy who seeks true love in the fleshpots of the Parisian demimonde. Calleja is the main reason to catch this new "Traviata."

Act Three: drama in red.

The Chicago Sun-Times reviewer was also unimpressed, even criticising Italian conductor Massimo Zanetti (with whom I had no quibble). He complains about Ms Rebeka:  "after Violetta’s Act 1 half-hour mini-opera, the wan singer just does not have the voice for the next two highly demanding acts. She is even almost inaudible in the famed letter-reading introduction to the Act 3 signature, “Addio del passato..” and says of Mr Kelsey that he "fails to stake his claim on the elder Germont.." and "is generally hulking, skulking and one-dimensional in both his singing and in his acting."

It's nice to find the critics agreeing with me! However, it was an enjoyable if not great 'Traviata.' I have seen Calleja sing this role with Reneé Fleming as Violetta and Thomas Hampson as Germont, and that’s a very high bar.

Act Four: the death scene.

Check out the lavish production  and a little of Verdi's fabulous music, in this trailer:



The Chicago Civic Opera House is delightful - an Art Deco and Art Nouveau confection festooned with decorative touches. The seating seems to all have good sight lines (it's not a traditional horse-shoe with the usual sight-restricted side boxes). I had front row of the dress circle, which was an excellent view, though perhaps closer might have been better. It’s a large house.

Civic Opera House, Chicago
"a giant throne..."

It’s not Chicago's original opera house - that was built in 1885 but demolished after a number of fires in 1913.  The current building, the Chicago Civic Opera House, was built in 1929 (and restored in 1996), and is described on its website  as “one of Chicago's historic landmarks and among the world's most beautiful buildings...a hybrid of Art Nouveau and Art Deco designs”. Here’s a description of the Opera House (which is topped by offices) in rather purple prose:

The Civic Opera Building is a majestic limestone skyscraper with a 45-story office tower and two 22-story wings. Shaped like a gigantic throne facing the Chicago River between Washington and Madison streets, it was completed after just 22 months of planning and construction. The auditorium and its backstage areas occupy approximately one-third of the total space of the building. The distinguishing feature on the Wacker Drive side of the Civic Opera Building is the colonnaded portico that runs the entire length of the building. 

At the south end, large bronze doors open onto the grand foyer of the Civic Opera House, whose gilt cornices glitter beneath the sparkling lights of Austrian crystal chandeliers and elaborately stenciled ceilings. The magnificent space features a floor and wainscoting of pink and gray Tennessee marble, and fluted Roman travertine columns and pilasters. The 40-foot-high columns are topped with carved capitals covered in gold leaf. ..An imposing grand double staircase leads to the mezzanine foyer, where there are thirty-one boxes. Above this box level are two more balconies, each with 800 seats. The Civic Opera House seats 3,563. 

That’s BIG.

Michael Black

In other news, the program informed me that the chorusmaster from Opera Australia, Michael Black, has decamped to Chicago to become concertmaster for the Lyric. That will be a loss to the Sydney company. In an article about Black, the program expressed surprise that Opera Australia produces about 500 performances a year, and that Australian public schools place so little importance on music. Yup. Apparently Black worked as 'interim chorusmaster' in Chicago in 2011, and is now back full time - they liked him.

As with so many great US opera companies, there’s an impressive list of donors and supporters. And an advertisement in the program headed: “Let’s Leave It All To Lyric!” Given the size and scope of Chicago Lyric Opera, and the fact that it has Reneé Fleming as its artistic advisor, I was a bit surprised to read a comment in an program article insisting that, in comparison to other US and European houses, “we can hold our head high, high, high. We’re every bit as fine as any of them.” Hmm...who would have thought that wonderful, brash, fabulous Chicago would have a bit of a  cringe complex?

Art Deco meets Art Nouveau in the Chicago Civic Opera House (source)

Duelling Sunsets

Sunset, Key West, Florida, USA

I was told that November (in the northern hemisphere) is the best month for sunsets. I never knew it mattered, but this photo blog says:

Time of year is an important consideration for getting the best colours at sunrise or sunset. Because the earth is in transition more in the spring and fall, these are ideal seasons for spectacular vistas of sky, cloud and earth colours as the sun rises and sets. My experience has been that fall is a great time for reds, yellows, and orange variations in the sky and tinting of clouds as they move across the horizon, during, and just after the sun sets. A window of opportunity for great shots is longer for a sunset than a sunrise. 

Hmm..well if you're serious about photographing sunsets (or sunrises), there are plenty of tips on the web. For me, it's more a matter of chance -- being in the right place with a camera when the sun does its spectacular thing.

Here are two very different sunsets snapped this November in different parts of the world.

Sunset, Amalfi Coast (Capri on the horizon), Italy.

Sunset, Key West, Florida, USA.

Butch blows a conch shell to mark sunset, Key West.

Admittedly it's important to enjoy a delicious 'sundowner' with your sunset, but lest you think I'm lazy, and just to prove that I can get up early, here are a few November sunrise shots...

Sunrise, Amalfi Coast.

Sunrise, Amalfi.

Sunrise, Amalfi.

Hemingway's House

I thought I'd post some more pictures of Hemingway's house in Key West, Florida, for the literary aficionados out there. A brief recap of Hemingway in Key West, and beyond:

Hemingway had it good in Key West. A boy from Oak Park, Illinois, he'd served and been wounded n WWI ("A Farewell To Arms"); lived his 'Paris years' with his first wife Hadley, making forays into Spain ("The Sun Also Rises", "For Whom The Bell Tolls"); dumped Hadley and married Pauline. From Key West he took big game hunting safaris in Africa ("The Snows of Kilimanjaro") and he kept a custom-built deep-sea fishing boat. He liked to go fishing in Cuba ("The Old Man and the Sea"). Yep, the Key West years were prosperous and the lovely old island-architecture house (with huge swimming pool) attests to that. You can visit 'Papa's' writing studio in the old stable.

In Key West you can also gawk at Sloppy Joe's Bar (the original site and the later site) where Hemingway drank (a lot), and where he met Martha Gelhorn, his third wife. He dumped Pauline and moved with Martha to Cuba. Pauline got the Key West house. (Martha was later dumped for fourth wife Mary; Cuba had its revolution and the Hemingways moved to Idaho, where Ernest eventually shot himself).

Here's Wiki on the author's life.

And in Oak Park, Illinois, a 'burb of Chicago, you can visit the Hemingway Home and Museum.

And here's the NYT report from 1961of Hemingway's death - reported as accidental, after treatment for hyper-tension and malaria. He had in fact been treated with electroshock therapy for depression or a bi-polar condition that ran in his family, and had shot himself, as did his father.

A curious personality. A readable, stark writer. Check out a few quotes here. I'll leave you with this one, probably written in the studio in Key West, to ponder, as you take a walk around the Hemingway House in Key West:

“Each day of not writing, of comfort, of being that which he despised, dulled his ability and softened his will to work so that, finally, he did no work at all.” 
― Ernest Hemingway, The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories

Pretty in Pastels

A photo-journey around the streets of Old Town, Key West. These pretty wooden houses must be strongly built to have lasted through many hurricanes over the years. Feeling the tropical island vibe in the USA...