Lights Across America: Chicago

Chicago Theater Lights

Lights Across America: Chicago

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This is the first of a series of field reports on lighting, design and architecture across the United States of America. We start in America’s great architecture and design center, Chicago, Illinois.

The Windy City has much to offer in lighting. In fact, its legendary art institute’s a fabulous place to start in any season. This means seeing what’s best described as “dappled light dancing through the trees—in an intricate arrangement of vibrantly colored glass.”

“More than 100 years ago,” the art institute reports, “designer Agnes Northrop crafted a window for Tiffany, the studio named for artist Louis Comfort Tiffany. Agnes created Tiffany stained glass for a wife’s commission to honor her husband. The colorful window was installed at a baptist church in New England. It remained there until 2018, when the religious congregation opted to relocate the window to the Art Institute of Chicago for its “long-term stability and [to] remain on public view.”

Light shines through the beautifully crafted stained glass panels that were relocated to the Art Institute of Chicago

 

The Tiffany Window was relocated to the Art Institute Chicago in 2018.

Visit the Art Institute’s Henry Crown Gallery to behold the Tiffany window. It’s composed of 48 panels, each made of various glass types and combinations. The gallery’s located near the art institute’s Michigan Avenue entrance, where this stained glass wonder greets each visitor as one begins the journey through the Chicago Art Institute’s museum.

Prism, sunlight and electricity at the science and industry museum

Another fabled Chicago institution, its Museum of Science and Industry, features a spectrum of lessons in lights on display for facts, learning and general enrichment.

“What you perceive as an object’s color is actually a section of the light’s wavelength being reflected by the object,” its light and color exhibit instructs. “Remove that wavelength from the light, and you’ll no longer “see” the object’s color.” At the Museum of Science and Industry, you can enter a “color room” and view the results for yourself. The museum invites visitors to adjust the red, blue and green in the color room’s light for firsthand observation.

The next stop on the tour of Chicago lights is the Color From Light exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry

 

Color from Light exhibit at the Museum of Science+Industry Chicago

The museum encourages you to conduct your own experiment to “[b]uild a simple electric circuit from aluminum foil and a string of holiday lights” to learn to distinguish between what conducts electricity and what does not. Besides the foil, materials include a single LED light or one light from a string of holiday lights, a glue stick, clear tape, paper, scissors and a three-volt button battery—as well as items to test for conductivity such as buttons, paper clips or toothpicks.

Learn to understand sunlight, which streams through the Museum of Science and Industry’s roof, as you replicate scientist Isaac Newton’s prism experiments to split white light into colors. Redirect the sun’s rays through a Fresnel lens to heat liquid and convert the liquid into energy to race model cars.

Or, as the museum guide suggests, recreate physicist Newton’s prism experiment on a larger scale. Rotate a mirror to redirect natural light from the building’s rooftop heliostat mirror into one of four giant optical prisms. As Isaac Newton showed, “the prism splits white light into its component wavelengths. A huge rainbow, reflected on 30-foot-tall white screens, is the result.”

The Newton's Prism exhibit at the Museum of Science+Industry Chicago

 

Visit the Museum of Science+Industry Chicago to see Newton’s Prism on a large scale

Light at the State of Illinois Building

Google just inked a deal to take over one of Chicago’s most storied works of architecture—what’s commonly known as the State of Illinois Building. Officially, the James Thompson Center, named for the Illinois governor who insisted the controversial mammoth structure be built in the Loop. This summer, the Silicon Valley search engine dominator announced that it’s planning to expand offices into the clunky spaceship-shaped glass behemoth.

Designed by the late architect Helmut Jahn, constructed in 1985 as a government building—with a 17-story atrium—and capped by a large skylight and tiered glass curtain-wall which spans the corner entry, dominating its Randolph and Clark Street facades, the Thompson Center’s gained a cult following.

The State of Illinois building features a 17-story atrium capped by a large skylight to maximize natural light within the large space

 

The 17-story glass atrium of the James Thompson Center

The building, which serves as a hub for the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA), and its curved glass facade breed inefficient heating and cooling leaving workers heated in the summer and cold in the winter. Illinois sought to sell the property in 2015 after a granite panel plunged from its pedestrian arcade in 2009, citing exorbitant operating costs, maintenance problems and budget constraints.

Google took the bait, though only after getting the Illinois government to concede redevelopment. Google will occupy the space after the building’s been redesigned and renovated to Google’s specifications. Original architect Helmut Jahn’s firm, still based in Chicago after its founder died last year, is the architect. The State of Illinois Building encompasses an entire city block—bound by Lake, Clark, LaSalle and Randolph streets—which is one of 35 city blocks within Chicago’s famous Loop.

The state government’s James Thompson Center glass structure—fronted by Jean Dubuffet’s sculpture, Monument with Standing Beast (1984)—is also haunted by a dark, violent past. On February 13, 2018, Chicago policeman Paul Bauer, a commander who was chasing a criminal suspect down one of the building’s stairwells, was shot and killed while in pursuit.

Other points of interest and light

Not far from the gigantic glass structure is the Design Museum of Chicago, which was founded 10 years ago. The space hosts free exhibitions and public programming themed to design, architecture, street art and urban planning. A recent display centered upon house music—which morphs with electronic dance music (EDM)—featuring cassette tapes of several original Chicago house DJs. Visit the museum at 72 East Randolph Street seven days a week from 10 am to 6 pm. Or check out the website.

 

Chicago: Home to House at the Catacombs exhibit at the Design Museum of Chicago

Consider contemplating work by an artist in Chicago named Felicia Ferrone, for whom form does not follow function in design—she thinks they’re one and the same. The designer, currently offering private, for-profit design, also directs the University of Illinois at Chicago‘s graduate studies and is an associate clinical professor of industrial design in the university’s design school. Ferrone’s designs include a candle wall sconce with a different take on modern lighting—one which tricks one’s perceptual faculty to assume that these are electric candles, simulating candles.

The candles, however, are real. Ferrone crafted a mirror-polished stainless steel backplate to reflect the candlelight.

 

Candle Wall Sconce by Felicia Ferrone

City lights

National Public Radio’s Chicago reporter, David Schaper, recently reported on Chicago’s unique equinox, which he dubbed Chicagohenge. It “emerges from the city’s skyscrapers,” he recently wrote, forewarning that westbound traffic on Chicago streets may come to a stop while drivers take pictures over dashboards and their passengers lean out of windows as pedestrians set up tripods in the middle of busy roads — “to capture the incredible image of a burnt orange sun setting exquisitely framed by a canyon of skyscrapers.”

Chicagohenge is a natural light event that occurs in Chicago at the spring and fall equinoxes.

 

Chicagohenge is a natural light event that occurs in Chicago at the spring and fall equinoxes.

The natural light phenomenon marks one of two days each year when the sun rises and sets in alignment with Chicago’s grid-based, east-west streets, as the sun’s light’s almost in symmetry with the directional points of a compass. Chicago’s event occurs in time with both fall and spring equinoxes. “According to an explanation on the website of Chicago’s Adler Planetarium,” he writes, “the twice-yearly event occurs mainly due to the fact that “Chicago’s streets line up almost perfectly with the cardinal east and west directions on a compass.”

The explanation goes that on all but these two days of each year, because “Earth’s axis is tilted, sunlight is not always distributed equally” between the northern and southern hemispheres. One hemisphere yields more daylight than the other. During these particular two times, however, as the equator receives most of the sunlight, the earth’s hemispheres get equal amounts of night and day—hence the term equinox. It marks what the author describes as bi-annual equinoxes when the sun rises and sets in line with Chicago’s eastern and western streets.

Chicagohenge’s next emergence: March 20, 2023.

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