I agreed to do Stroll with the Stars, which I think is mostly a way of getting con-goers to get a little exercise instead of sitting all convention in panels. But it gave me an excuse to visit the Bean, which I rarely get to do; I’m very fond of it, despite the artist’s obnoxiousness. Great art does not necessarily require a nice person producing it, alas.
The wavy building in the center of the last photo is the St. Regis, currently the tallest building in the world designed by a woman architect, Jeanne Gang.
It’s lovely, but it also amuses me that male architects are so much more likely to try to design the tallest building. Learn more about the St. Regis at a NPR interview with Gang here:
https://www.npr.org/…/the-st-regis-chicago-is-the…
“SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
When Jeanne Gang ran into glass ceilings, she built skyscrapers…
Oh, my God. I’m just looking straight up at it. My God, this is flabbergasting.
…High-rises that make you gasp, like her latest creation, the 101-story St. Regis, a mixed-use building in Chicago. It is now the tallest building in the world designed by a woman. On the block is the 82-story Aqua Tower, which used to hold that title. Jeanne Gang has joined the company of giants in a skyline that bristles with buildings by Louis Sullivan, Mies van der Rohe and Helmut Jahn, with skyscrapers that can seem to change shapes and colors with sun and water.
I don’t know how to describe it – three columns, curvaceous, if I may, both reaching toward the sky and reaching up from, like, the center of the earth.
JEANNE GANG: Yeah. You know what? You said it was curvaceous, but there’s not one curve in this building. It’s all just stepping. It’s all straight, but stepping, like, 4 inches out, out, out.
SIMON: It casts the shadow of a curve.
GANG: Yes.
SIMON: It’s the way you have arranged it that casts like the shadows of a curve, so the building almost seems to change shape.
GANG: So you can do a little thing like that and multiply it over many floors, and you get an effect that’s much different than, you know, what it would be on a shorter building or smaller building…”
