Worshiping at the (minimalist) altar of modernism

It’s Friday morning in Chicago, and we step off a green line ‘L’ train at 35th-Bronzeville-IIT station. This is the oldest urban transit line in the city of Chicago: parts of the entirely elevated line date back to 1892, when the route was constructed for the World’s Columbian Exhibition. Like all suburban ‘L’ stations, we find ourselves standing a storey and a half above street level, on a narrow island platform of untreated wooden planks, barely shaded from the sun and rain by a small canopy. Between us and the large drop to the pavement are the two train tracks, one either side of the platform. Prominent signs remind us that they are electrified.

Chicago’s ‘L’ trains are a destination in themselves: the ideal vehicle for tourists to explore and see the city. Although a few lines dip beneath the ground through the downtown core, most pass through the city centre on the ‘loop’, a circuit of tracks that connect a number of lines to the suburbs by forming a closed loop above the streets of the city centre which has come to name the downtown’s innermost core. Once outside the city centre, the tracks stay above ground level or in the medians of suburban freeways. Far more exciting than an underground network, the ‘L’ is your budget city tour – a seven day pass for train and bus is just $20, and regular ‘L’ service connects Chicago’s two airports to the city.

We’re in southern Chicago on the edge of the historic Bronzeville district to visit the Illinois Institute of Technology. This university campus, which has its principal campus here around 35th street, is home to no less than eighteen buildings designed by the architect Mies van der Rohe, who spent much of his life teaching architecture at IIT. Regardless of whether you find Mies’ architecture cold and emotionless, or clean and uplifting, a new tour programme offered by the Illinois Institute of Technology and the university’s Mies van der Rohe Society is an unmissable part of any visit to Chicago’s architectural high lights. For just $5 a person, you can choose to follow a self-directed iPod tour or be shown around the campus by a student (tours depart twice daily, Monday to Saturday at 10h00 and 13h00). Seeing that one such architecture student was waiting near-by the office that offers the tours, we gladly accepted the latter. The tours start at IIT’s most striking new building: the campus and student centre designed by Dutchman Rem Koolhass. This bizarre and colourful building slides and folds itself beneath the elevated tracks of the green line, and encloses them with a corrugated steel tube that was originally designed to damped the sound and vibrations of the trains passing over the tracks. You can visit the building yourself to see if this grand design works, but it was amusing to compare it to the adjacent student accommodation blocks designed by Helmut Jahn. This calmer and less ostentatious building forms a permeable wall between some of the campus’ open spaces and the passing trains, and it deals with the associated noise much more prosaically: with triple glazed windows mounted in insulated frames.

The landmark architectural feature of the campus is, however, van der Rohe’s Crown Hall building, the huge floating steel and glass block that was built to house the university’s architecture department. The department has now grown and spilt out into neighbouring buildings, but following a multi-million dollar refurbishment in 2006, the Crown Hall remains at the heart of the faculty of architecture school. Our guide confesses that while the building may be worshiped by fans of the Modernist movement in architecture, its refurbishment was well overdue. The black steel frame had begun to rust badly, and with no coherent shading inside the building, it had been likened to a green house in summer and a refrigerator in winter. Double height glass windows enclose the main floor of the building, used as a studio space for undergraduate students. We were there a week before the start of term, and the vast space was silent, with small wooden and cardboard models on white workshop tables reminiscing of last term’s projects.

Some visitors may find the building familiar. That could be because you’ve been in one just like it before. Mies van der Rohe refined many architectural and engineering techniques while he was teaching and building at IIT, and the Crown Hall is considered the peak of van der Rohe’s exploration of the plan libre: spaces that were entirely open and undivided, supposedly allowing for the space to adapt to any use at any time in the future. It’s a romantic idea that this vast open plan studio space could be used in that way, for students to occupy as they wish: design studio one day, lecture hall the next, play room for softball after hours when the security staff aren’t around.

The dream is broken very rapidly though. Two ‘floating’ staircases descend from the open plan studio to the basement level; these are proudly explained and shown off by our guide, because they make no contact with the building at any point other than the two landings – but are designed to hover so close to the adjacent walls that this detail seems wasted. It was here, rather than upstairs, that I understood Mies van der Rohe’s plan libre. For in the hushed basement we found the partitioned offices, ventilated workshops and subdued library. Photographed and reproduced in a thousand books, magazines and journals the world over, Mies van der Rohe fooled the world into thinking that a department of architecture was the ideal client for an open plan pavilion of steel and glass. In fact, the plan libre is a con: van der Rohe just knew to sweep all the messy, noisy and compartmentalised bits of the building into the basement, out of sight of passing visitors and distant architectural admirers.

95 up

Any self-respecting travel guide to Chicago will tell you (and I can almost guarantee this without exception) that while the observatory on the ninety-fourth floor of the John Hancock Centre is a great viewing point from which to see the city, you can get the same view on the adjacent ninety-fifth floor for the price of a drink.

As you can imagine, the drinks in the ninety-fifth floor Signature Lounge (11h00 – 00h30, 01h30 at weekends, www.signatureroom.com) are sold at marginally inflated prices, and the service is hardly worthy of the fifteen percent you’ll be adding to tab, but then that’s not the reason you come here.

Ascending from the building’s basement lobby on North Michigan Avenue, the elevator rattles at speed all the way to the top. I’ve experienced smoother elevators in university buildings a quarter the height of the Hancock Centre, but since I’m in the company of an elevator full of relaxed and chatty Mexican waiters, I’m reassured that the ride is always this bumpy. Alighting at the ninety-fifth floor, you can look down immediately to the double height restaurant space, in use tonight for a charity fund raiser. The disconcerting view down one level and out through the windows of the floor below me sends me knees into spasms, but I manage to stagger round (eagering resting one vertiginous hand on the inner wall of the corridor) to the main bar, which occupies the complete western side of the building at this height.

Visiting after dark on this unseasonably warm and therefore rainy January evening, the view is utterly breathtaking. In the same way that the Empire State Building offers a view set back from the main cluster of Manhattan’s skyscrapers, the Hancock Centre was deliberately placed outside the dense downtown core of skyscrapers and office buildings. This sacrifice in location means the view is even more spectacular: the tight downtown pile of steel and glass skyscrapers can be seen in one glance from here, including the dizzying heights of the 443 metre Sears Tower. The Sears Tower is taller than the Hancock Centre by several storeys, and the competing SkyDeck observatory is a similarly popular tourist destination. But on a night like tonight, with scattered rain clouds scudding over Chicago at a speed that confirms the city’s nickname, the top of the Sears Tower is hidden in cloud. We seem to be at just the right height for a clear view out onto the orange lights of the Windy City.

My first visit to Chicago was almost five years ago, when a connecting flight brought me through O’Hare Airport en route to western Canada. My first taste of the United States of America was an airport that I couldn’t leave for fear of missing my onward flight. A long trans-Atlantic flight spent strapped into a middle-block seat of a widebody jetliner was finally concluded with a striking view out across the laps of my fellow passengers. We approached the airport directly parallel to the city’s grid of streets, and for a few brief moments before landing, the windows to my left and right framed a perspective of parallel streets flashing past, all pointing towards invisible vanishing points on distant horizons. From up here, my visit to Chicago is suddenly brought into remarkable clarity. The vast grid of right angled streets is laid out before me and marked out with orange streetlights.

The Signature Lounge is packed tonight. There are tourists from Japan, Australia and Holland. Everyone takes their turn upon arrival to edge towards the floor-to-ceiling windows that line the bar, and to peer out over the narrow triple glazed edge to the streets and diminutive neighbouring buildings below. I like neither heights not cognac, but in order to make the most of this view, I drink slowly and gradually acclimatise to both.

Slick and the six centimetre sandwich

Some of my itineraries have seen me changing trains in some slightly unexpected places. It’s all very well spending a layover of a few hours in a big city, but it’s quite often more enjoyable to discover something of a smaller town when you have time to kill between connections.

Schenectady, New York is one such place. I didn’t know of this small town until I started planning a major train trip around the USA last year. It’s the recommending connection point for passengers travelling between Montréal and Chicago. Unfortunately for anyone in the windy city who fancies a train trip to Montréal, the connection only works going west; the east bound ‘Lake Shore Limited’ misses the north bound ‘Adirondack’ by several hours. Although I suppose you could spend the night here.

This is how I first found Schenectady, in April 2006, en route from Montréal to the west coast of the USA. The full post is here.

Schenectady is a tidy little town, and a good example of the peaceful middle America I’m happy to experience for a few hours between trains. The station is small, with the tracks up on a raised embankment through the town centre, and with a small one-box station below. After leaving my bags safe in the station with the friendly attendant (definitely a good mood day for Amtrak staff) I head out to stretch my legs on a short tour of the town. Schenectady’s biggest feature is that it’s the home of General Electric, and also of Thomas Edison. Although as my USA By Rail handbook explains, that’s not how he started life.

Edison’s first job was selling sweets to railroad passengers, money from which he spent on chemistry sets and building a telegraph system out of scrap metal.

Just behind the station you’ll find the Edison Exploratorium (I think that means museum) but’s only available to visit by appointment, according to a sign in the window. I walk for an hour or two, buy some stamps from a stubborn vending machine that doesn’t like my dollar bills, and then look for a place to sit down for a while. While exploring the smaller tree lined streets on the other side of the station, I find a small saloon called Slick’s Bar and Restaurant. It’s more bar and restaurant, though Slick seems to be doing good business with his sandwiches. I’m assuming it was Slick that I saw, because his hair was indeed particularly slick.

I drank a bottle of Samuel Adams, and watched the CBS Evening News that was on a television screen behind the bar. Tonight’s top stories: the average price of gasoline across the States is now $2.86 a gallon (a bargain in the UK); the prices of building materials such as copper and plastic has increased dramatically in the last few months (apparently because of China’s economic boom… all I can say is that you should go into any Wal-Mart and you’ll see straightaway why there’s a boom in China); and also… an exclusive helmet mounted camera view of an Iraqi soldier’s duty in Iraq. I kid you not…

I am delighted to find Slick’s Restaurant again (click here for address and directions). It’s less than five minutes from Amtrak’s centrally located depot, and the small bar is a perfect place to spend some time between trains. Slick isn’t in attendance today, but a friendly waitress takes our order for two sandwiches (which have apparently made the restaurant famous). I take my time examing the unusually wide selection of bottled beers that are on sale, and settle for a not-too-distantly brewed Vermont Porter, which quickly recovers my faith in real American brewing.

This is my travelling companion’s first visit to the USA. She is slightly perterbed but not unsurprised when our sandwiches arrive. Between two thin slices of white bread are crammed dozens of freshly sliced and tightly packed wafers of meat. I chose ham and she chose beef: both sandwiches each way about as much as my Lonely Planet guidebook to the USA, and take almost as long to consume. Neither of us make it onto the second diagonal half of our sandwiches, and almost with a sense of satisfaction, our waitress offers to wrap them for us. We each mumble an acknowledgement of defeat, pay the bill, and scuttle off into the night.

Nonetheless, I look forward to my next layover in Schenectady.

Nice and slow: Montréal to New York by train

Thursday morning saw me re-tracing a familiar route that I have taken several times in the last year or so. I was back in Montréal’s Gare Centrale (central train station) for the daily Amtrak train to New York City.

In the USA and Canada, taking the train is not the obvious choice. Distances are so great that flying is almost always faster, and rail lines are so poorly developed and busy with freight traffic that even the Greyhound bus can usually get there quicker. From Montréal to New York, the bus is indeed quicker by at least a couple of hours, but it can’t match the train in terms of price: US$59 adult / US$50.15 concessions for a one way trip.

The train follows a trajectory that is very roughly similar to the bus, heading south to the Québec – New York border and then down through the Adirondack mountains towards Albany and the Hudson River into New York City. The train, however, hugs the shore of Lake Champlain for a significant part of the trip, twisting and turning along a single track that was forged through the rocky shore between the lake and the forrested mountain region of the Adirondacks. When you combine this exceptionally scenic route with the competitive price, it’s no wonder that there is always a long queue in the airy hall of the Gare Centrale to board Amtrak train 68.

After recognising and saying hello to a previously helpful and memorably friendly VIA Rail agent, we are treated to the priority treatment and whisked down a separate staircase to the platform when the train begins to board. As usual for this busy time of year, train 68 is formed of four passenger coaches with an open plan café car in the middle of the train. Comparisons with the Greyhound continue to be favourable once you’re on board: the seats are vast and very comfortable (comparable with short haul airline business class at the very least) and the train is very spacious.

Travelling with Amtrak does require a certain skill though: that of letting go. The journey to New York City is scheduled to take just under ten hours, covering just 381 miles. The border crossing accounts for much of the delay, but so does incredibly sub-standard track. The journey from Montréal to the border takes ninety minutes – almost three times what a similar journey would take by car along the autoroute. And once you reach the border, the timetable becomes even more loose as the process of checking every passenger’s paperwork is labouriously handled by customs agents. Thirty-five minutes is allowed for this, and on our trip it takes twice as long. You can blame the awkward foreigners who require visa waivers for that (my apologies to everyone else on train 68 that day). Passengers who are joining the service (which is subsidised by the state of New York for providing service through the communities of the northern part of the state) further down the line know to check the service status service on amtrak.com or by calling 1-800-USA-RAIL. Since the train crew radio their position to a control centre after leaving most stations the information provided by this service is notably accurate and dependable.

Although today we’re not going all the way to New York City (we have a connection to make before then towards Chicago) I wasn’t too bothered by our delay. As the train pulls away from Plattsburg – the second station stop in the United States – the line pulls alongside the calm expanse of Lake Champlain, with the snowy mountaintops of Vermont visible across the lake in the distance. It’s very comfortable to kick off my shoes, recline the seat, and drift off as our shining silver train does the hard work, and carries us through this beautiful region of upstate New York.