Exterior surface of a Chicago building, including distorted window reflections
This is another small bit of Chicago urban landscape, this time a detail of a downtown building that contrasts the very regular and geometric shapes of textures of the vertical and horizontal features against the wildly random and distorted patterns in the windows.
This is another of my architectural detail photographs from our summer 2014 visit to Chicago. We decided to cross the continent the old-fashioned, slow way — we took the train from the San Francisco Bay Area to New York City. The first leg was on the venerable California Zephyr to Chicago, and we decided to take a few extra days in Chicago before boarding the Lakeshore Limited (also apparently known as the Late Shore Limited…) to Manhattan. We stayed right in downtown Chicago, just a few blocks from Millennium Park, so there was plenty to see and do. One morning we took the architectural tour up the river, something that I had not done before.
I enjoy Chicago. Part of it appeals to my long-ago midwestern roots, I think. But it is also a cosmopolitan big city with a quality all its own. While the buildings are as huge as those of any other big city, the urban center sprawls in a way that is quite different from, say, New York City or from our familiar San Francisco. It seems like views of the architecture are a bit more opened and varied, and much more light seems to get down to street level. I’ve long been fascinated by close-in photographs of building details, especially when they include windows like these. When I look at them initially I see a big, sturdy building. But looking more closely I see that most of what I’m looking at is not-the-building, but instead is a series of reflections and reflections of reflections in the windows, and the whole structure starts to take on a more insubstantial quality.
Distorted reflections on Chicago downtown building windows
Once you start looking at the windows of modern urban towers, you begin to see them in a very different way. Instead of seeming like isolated structures or merely individual architectural forms, they start to relate to their surroundings and to take on changing and whimsical qualities. I first noticed this on my many trips up to San Francisco to photograph in the downtown area, where I became more and more aware of the reflections and the ways that light plays across the buildings and reflects down to the street level from their glass surfaces.
This was a handheld “grab” from the boat on the Chicago architecture cruise we took early one morning. In a way I wish that I had carried a longer lens so that I could have isolated the wild reflections on either the right or the left side, but since I couldn’t I instead decided to go ahead and split them with the section of reflected blue sky.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more. Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email
Distorted reflections of a crane and Chicago buildings
Every so often I wonder about architects. For the most part we think of them — or at least I do — as folks who are as much about logic and structure as they are about design and form, and when they are about design they don’t usually seem to be particularly whimsical. (With notable exceptions.) Whimsical doesn’t fit the image or the expectations of the typical big business clients who might commission such towers as those found in an urban center like Chicago — these see like people who are more interested in cultivating an image of stability and wealth and power.
But then I look at the window reflections that are the inevitable result of placing plexiglas covered buildings in close proximity to one another and I have to wonder. Are these folk aware of the almost hallucinogenic shapes and forms that appear on the sides of these buildings? In fact, how many people on the streets are away of the abstract and bizarre visual show that is often going on overhead? Here, against the clean and mathematically perfect face of this building, neatly divided into equal grids of alternating shades of blue, appear bizarre visual monstrosities. A red construction crane warps upwards and leans precariously to the right as its upper elements simply fall apart into twists and curlicues. Sections of the reflected buildings are alternately minimized and expanded to gross degrees, and if you look closely at the resulting patterns you might find anything from aerial fish to faces to whatever else you want to imagine.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more. Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” is available from Heyday Books and Amazon.
