Landmarks and Monuments
Further information: List of Chicago LandmarksNumerous architects have constructed landmark buildings of varying styles in Chicago. Some of these are the so-called "Chicago seven": James Ingo Freed, Tom Beeby, Larry Booth, Stuart Cohen, James Nagle, Stanley Tigerman, and Ben Weese. Daniel Burnham led the design of the "White City" of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition which some historians claim led to a revival of Neo-Classical architecture throughout Chicago and the entire United States. It is true that the "White City" represented anything other than its host city's architecture. While Burnham did develop the 1909 "Plan for Chicago", perhaps the first comprehensive city plan in the U.S, in a Neo-Classical style, many of Chicago's most progressive skyscrapers occurred after the Exposition closed, between 1894 and 1899. Louis Sullivan said that the fair set the course of American architecture back by two decades, but even his finest Chicago work, the Schlesinger and Meyer (later Carson, Pirie, Scott) store, was built in 1899—five years after the "White City" and ten years before Burnham's Plan.
Sullivan's comments should be viewed in the context of his complicated relationship with Burnham. Erik Larson's history of the Columbian Exposition, The Devil in the White City, correctly points out that the building techniques developed during the construction of the many buildings of the fair were entirely modern, even if they were adorned in a way Sullivan found aesthetically distasteful.
Chicago is well known for its wealth of public art, including works by such artistic heavyweights as Chagall, Picasso, Miro and Abakanowicz that are all to be found outdoors.
City sculptures additionally honor the many people and topics reflecting the rich history of Chicago. There are monuments to:
- Tadeusz Kościuszko by Kazimierz Chodzinski
- Nicholas Copernicus by Bertel Thorvaldsen
- Karel Havlíček Borovský by Joseph Strachovsky
- Pope John Paul II, several different monuments (including by Czesław Dźwigaj)
- Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk by Albin Polasek
- Irv Kupcinet by Preston Jackson
- Abraham Lincoln by Augustus Saint Gaudens
- The Heald Square Monument featuring George Washington, Haym Salomon, and Robert Morris by Lorado Taft, (completed by Leonard Crunelle)
- Christopher Columbus by Carl Brioschi
- General John A. Logan by Augustus Saint Gaudens
- Harry Caray by Omri Amrany and Lou Cella
- Jack Brickhouse by Jerry McKenna
- A memorial to the Haymarket affair by Mary Brogger
- A memorial to the Great Northern Migration by Alison Saar
There are also preliminary plans to erect a 1:1-scale replica of Wacław Szymanowski's Art Nouveau statue of Frederic Chopin found in Warsaw's Royal Baths along Chicago's lakefront in addition to a different sculpture commemorating the artist in Chopin Park for the 200th anniversary of Frederic Chopin's birth.
Read more about this topic: Chicago Skyline
Famous quotes containing the words landmarks and, landmarks and/or monuments:
“The lives of happy people are dense with their own doings—crowded, active, thick.... But the sorrowing are nomads, on a plain with few landmarks and no boundaries; sorrow’s horizons are vague and its demands are few.”
—Larry McMurtry (b. 1936)
“The lives of happy people are dense with their own doings—crowded, active, thick.... But the sorrowing are nomads, on a plain with few landmarks and no boundaries; sorrow’s horizons are vague and its demands are few.”
—Larry McMurtry (b. 1936)
“If the Revolution has the right to destroy bridges and art monuments whenever necessary, it will stop still less from laying its hand on any tendency in art which, no matter how great its achievement in form, threatens to disintegrate the revolutionary environment or to arouse the internal forces of the Revolution, that is, the proletariat, the peasantry and the intelligentsia, to a hostile opposition to one another. Our standard is, clearly, political, imperative and intolerant.”
—Leon Trotsky (1879–1940)