SelectionWhile waiting for better days, it is possible to discover the world without leaving your room. On the shores of Lake Michigan, Illinois, the “Windy City” offers the curious a daring architecture and cutting-edge cultural pleasures.
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Running away through the 1980s
Jubilant teen-movie signed John Hughes, genre specialist, Ferris Bueller’s Mad Day (1986) follows a middle-class Chicago teenager (Matthew Broderick, perfect in the role of the unruly) who skips school to enjoy the city and its delicacies with his two best friends. On the program for this hectic day: ultra-festive parade in the shade of buildings, trips to car parks and the trio’s stroll through the galleries of the Art Institute of Chicago, in tribute to the frantic crossing of the Louvre by Anna Karina, Jean- Claude Brialy and Sami Frey in Keeping to himself, by Jean-Luc Godard (1964). An ode to the youth and Chicago of the 1980s.
Playing architects
Flamboyant neogothic for the Tribune Tower erected in 1925, absolute minimalism for the Seagram Buliding by Mies van der Rohe, prairie style with Frank Lloyd Wright… The streets of Chicago are a concentrate of modern architecture. To dive back into these urban canyons running alongside the mythical buildings, make way for Lego’s “Architecture” series. One of the boxes is dedicated to Chicago, with a set of five iconic constructions including the very tall Willis Tower, Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate, the DuSable Bascule Bridge, completed in 1920, the Wrigley Building, inspired by the Italian Renaissance , and the famous “Big Red”, in red steel. An associated booklet tells the story of these monuments.
Investigate a serial killer
Optimists believe that the goal of industrialization is to improve our daily lives. In The Murder Factory (Ed. Zones-La Découverte, 2018, 128 p., € 12.), Alexandra Midal takes the opposite view of this idealized vision by telling us about the adventures of Henry Howard Holmes, the first serial killer in history. At the end of the XIXe century, Chicago is the most modern city in the world and the industrial revolution is in full swing in the factories and slaughterhouses of the city. Holmes took the opportunity to build in the suburbs of “Windy City” his “Manufacture of murder”, a house equipped with sophisticated innovations to eliminate as many individuals as possible. A unique look at Chicago and its transition to modern life.
Reconnect with the impressionists
The yellow room by Van Gogh, The nymphs by Monet… you thought you would find them at the Musée d’Orsay? Yet it is the Art Institute of Chicago that houses these impressionist canvases and other treasures that make this museum the second largest in the United States after MoMA in New York. To visit it virtually, two options: explore the collections on its site or go through Google’s Arts & Culture platform, which allows you to walk around the rooms of the museum, click on a work and take the time to observe it. delicate in normal times in crowded rooms). By reading the associated texts, we enter the history of art and that of the United States, in particular through American Gothic, Grant Wood’s painting of peasants, a flagship image of 20th century American arte century.
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