14. September 2017
All photographs by John Hill/World-Architects
Although the Chicago Architecture Biennial does not open to the public until Saturday, people passing by the Chicago Cultural Center can get a taste of the exhibition inside through the photos of James Welling that grace the building's large top-floor windows.
Welling's subjects in his Chicago series are the buildings of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, particularly the Lake Shore Drive Apartments and the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) campus. With a technique of experimental photography that saturates Mies's otherwise dark, monochrome buildings with splashes of color, Jesús Vassallo (curator of CAB's photographic contributions) describes the results as "psychedelic Mies." Relative to the CAB theme of artistic directors Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee, Make New History, the photographs ground that history as modern, going back to the middle of last century. With the photos' psychedelic colors, passersby on Michigan Avenue are invited to look at the architecture of Mies – and, in turn, the buildings of architects who influenced by him – in a new way.
