A Very Modern Chicago Trip
Writers area. The Langham Hotel Club.
Chicago is my second home. My husband David and I shared an apartment in Streeterville for four years, within walking distance of my office. Because it’s an easy three-hour car trip from Indianapolis, I visit the city at least half a dozen times yearly. It’s where I do most of my shopping for clients, and it serves as a great getaway destination, either by ourselves or with friends.
David and I recently went to Chicago with four of my dear friends who have also been loyal clients for years. We all travel together frequently — they’re so independent and successful, I love them. We rendezvoused at the prestigious Langham Hotel on a Friday afternoon before going to see a show that evening.
As always, I was smitten with Chicago’s spectacular modern architecture. I couldn’t resist the urge to write about our visit.
Taking in a Play
The historic theater is located in the Theatre District at 18 West Monroe Street in the Loop area of downtown Chicago.
The six of us planned the weekend around seeing SIX, the Musical, the Tony Award-winning Broadway musical was written by Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss. It was playing at the CIBC Theater at 18 West Monroe. It’s just down the street from the Modern Wing entrance to The Art Institute of Chicago, which we visited the next day, a rainy Chicago Saturday.
Modern at the time, the CIBC Theatre opened on New Year’s Day in 1906 as the Majestic Theatre. Designed by the architects Edmund R. Krause and George L. and Cornelius Rapp, it was the tallest building in Chicago when it was built and the first venue in Chicago to cost over $1 million dollars. To stay relevant, the venue has successfully rebranded itself many times and was home to a three-and-a-half-year run of Broadway’s biggest hit, Hamilton.
SIX is a modern pop concert featuring six leading women backed by a quartet of very talented female musicians. As each one retells her life as one of the six wives of Henry VIII, they compete to see who suffered the most while married to Henry and who should, therefore, become the group's lead singer.
According to Theatre in Chicago:
In SIX, the queens of Henry VIII take the mic to reclaim their identities out of the shadow of their infamous spouse — remixing five hundred years of historical heartbreak into an exuberant celebration of twenty-first-century girl power. The all-woman cast, backed by an all-woman band known as the “Ladies in Waiting,” traverses the spectrum of modern-day pop with a soundtrack storming up the UK charts.
Our Stay at a Modern Masterpiece
The Langham Hotel entrance, 330 North Wabash Avenue at River North.
Did I mention that we all stayed at the Langham? Originally the IBM Building, it was the Bauhaus master Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s last American building and his tallest at 670 feet. Completed in 1972, a little more than two years after his death at 80, it literally transformed Chicago’s skyline. Clad in anodized aluminum and bronze-tinted glass, its bottom 13 floors were converted into the Langham Hotel in July 2013.
My dear friend and client is ready for an evening out. The lobby is stunning day or night.
The magnificent building conjures up everything I love about Chicago’s iconic modern architecture. Its 268 guest rooms and 48 suites, which offer stunning views of downtown, the Chicago River, and Lake Michigan, were decorated by the London design firm Richmond International. Van der Rohe’s grandson, the architect Dirk Lohan, oversaw the hotel’s design. He paid tribute to his grandfather in the lobby, which features mid-century reproduction furniture.
An “infinity suite” guest bathroom at The Langham, overlooking the river and another thoroughly modern skyscrapper.
Here’s a link to The Langham Hotel
As described in ArchDaily, “Its strength and clarity of form are distinguishable and appreciated along the Chicago skyline, a tribute to the lifelong study of structural expression, organizational scale, material simplicity, proportion, and constructive detail.”
Many people don’t understand such purely modern architecture. There’s so much more than meets the eye. Nowhere is this more apparent than riding in the Langham’s Otis & ThyssenKrupp glass traction elevators, with their jaw-dropping 12-foot ceilings. It’s well worth the trip!
