The Civic Opera Building in Chicago – quite a spectacular building. I worked in a huge gleaming office building on the other side of the river – there was a bridge right there – and I took this photo from the walkway on my side of the river. The front of the Opera building is all columns and statues, very classical and grand – but the back is a sheer stone wall that goes right down into the water (at least that’s how I remember it), like something in Venice. I just loved the look of it. I almost preferred the back of the building, architecturally, to the front.
I love this building too. One of my favorites.
All of your beautiful Chicago pictures today are making me homesick … and very happy. Thank you.
Sheila – I’m totally homesick too!
I have a couple of pictures of the back of this opera building with the bridge going over the river – and from a couple of angles you really can’t tell you are in America. It looks like Prague or Venice or something.
I’ll post some more Chicago pics. Clearly I was a little bit obsessed with the architecture.
Beautiful photo. Love the lighting and the variegated texture of the yellow stone.
The bit of lore that goes along with this building is great. When you look at it from the front, it looks like a giant armchair. It’s sometimes referred to as “Insull’s Throne” after Samuel Insull, who had it built to be home for the Chicago Civic Opera. The throne design was said to be a nod to Insull’s daughter, an opera singer herself, so she could perch upon it and symbolically rule over the opera. She’d had the misfortune, previously, of being rejected by the New York Metropolitan Opera, so the building is positioned so the arse end of the throne is facing New York. Boo ya!