I ended the
afternoon yesterday by the lake, watching thunderous waves produced by a
full-fetch gale out of the north, getting soaked in the process.
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| Waves just north of Diversey Harbor inlet, 4/19/2011 (JWB, 2011) |
Earlier in the day,
for the first time in my four years as a docent for the Chicago Architecture
Foundation I ended a tour by running the last three blocks. A great group of young men and women
from Loyola Academy accompanied me on a tour of the city’s historic skyscrapers
in some of the worst springtime weather I have seen.
As we left the
Roosevelt University in the beautifully restored Auditorium Building on
Michigan Avenue, The Hawk was howling out of the north at 30 miles an hour and
the rain was a fin away from being hail. After 86 minutes of stoically facing
the weather, Maggie, the brave little girl in the Gore-Tex shell, started to
run for her life. And the group
followed. Stout-hearted and
gimpy-kneed, I paced the group, as it stopped only for the traffic light at
VanBuren.
Yesterday Chicago
lived up to its nickname . . . it WAS the Windy City.
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| Waves between Fullerton and Belmont 4/19.2011. Compare to size of cars on Lake Shore Drive (JWB, 2011) |
Interesting
what a little research will do . . . for years now I’ve been telling tourists
the popular myth (as it turns out) that Chicago’s nickname came from a piece
that Charles Dana wrote in The New York Sun during Chicago’s lobbying effort to get the
1893 fair. It makes for a good
story . . . Chicago boosters full of wind, yakety, yakety yakking, about the
merits of their city.
As Barry Popik
points out in his excellent article on the subject, the Dana story
just ain’t so. Popik's research indicates that the term “Windy
City” was used as early as 1856 to describe Green Bay, Wisconsin and as early
as 1858 to describe Chicago.
My favorite
reference in Popik’s comprehensive study is the 1879 entry from The Cincinnati
Enquirer:
There was a young
man from Chicago,
It was strange how
he did make his jaw go,
One nice day he did
to his pa go,
Saying, “Really,
father, does ma know
If for crime and
deceit
Any city can beat
This windy old town
of Chicago?
Wherever the nickname
came from, it applied yesterday.
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| "Windy City Man" on the Harold Washington Library State Street faccade between VanBuren & Congress (JWB, 2008 |
I stood along the
lakefront between Fullerton and Belmont late yesterday afternoon with my back
to the wind and waves and looked toward the tall buildings that make up this
great, windy city, buildings standing grey and impassive against the roaring
assault from the north. It was a
moment, as the spray from yet another wave slamming against the breakwater
drenched me, that made me appreciate the genius involved in
designing the tall structures that have defined this city.
There are so many
ways that the wind can affect a building.
The most obvious is the sheer lateral force of the wind against the
side of a building. For the past
36 hours we’ve listened to it as our 43-story condo building creaks and groans.
But even that
obvious force is complicated. The
wind is not a constant and continuous force, for one thing. Once it slams into a building it goes
nuts. It oscillates, it tries to
sneak around the corners, it goes up, it goes down. As a result, it assaults different sections of the building
at different heights in different ways and at different speeds.
Imagine shaking up
a bottle of champagne and then popping the cork at the corner of your
refrigerator with the bubbly spraying in all directions, including right back
in your face. The wind is a
continuous series of popped champagne bottles, some unshaken, some shaken
vigorously, some with a lowly pulled cork, others with the cork exploding.
 |
| 2520 Lincoln Park (JWB, 2011) |
Now that’s no
problem for the half-completed 2520 Lincoln Park, which as yet has few windows and
through which the wind can blow without much deflection. But button a building up with windows
and you’ve got a massive spire of concrete and steel that the wind can’t blow
through and so must blow against and around.
That produces
problems for structural engineers.
But it also poses problems for pedestrians. Just ask our elderly neighbor who broke her nose last year
when she was blown over in the middle of Commonwealth, a short street that runs
between the 43-story 2800 Lake Shore building and Mies van der Rohe’s 28-story
twin towers to the west.
There’s that,
too. A high density of tall
buildings in a given area means that each building is impacted by the way the
buildings around it handle the wind loads. Nearby buildings deflect, divert and re-direct the wind and
do it differently from hour to hour.
So buildings have
to be stiff enough to resist the variety of forces placed against them. But they also have to flex with the
loads placed upon them.
That’s what Haemon
was trying to get Creon to understand in Antigone: Seest thou beside the wintry torrent’s course, how the
trees that yield to it save every twig, while the stiff-necked perish root and
branch? And even thus he who keeps
the sheet of the sail taut, and never alckens it, upsets his boat and finishes
his voyage with keel uppermost.
Finishing a voyage with the keel uppermost would be really bad publicity for an architectural firm.
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| Looking south at Diversey Harbor Inlet 4/19/2011 (JWB, 2011) |
As our neighbor discovered last year and as we groundlings saw yesterday, when the wind smacks into a building, it has to
go somewhere and when it goes down the resultant wind shear can make it really
difficult for folks on the ground. Yesterday morning on Michigan Avenue Maggie
ran, I’m convinced, because she knew that if she didn’t, she would be blown
backwards until perhaps a doorman at the Hilton saved her.
All of this is an
oversimplification, I admit, the product of a liberal arts education and a
little bit of knowledge. But yesterday afternoon, watching those massive waves
slam against the brand new breakwater at Fullerton, it was enough to make me
appreciate anew the men and women who designed and built this Windy City.
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1 comment:
Imagine shaking up a bottle of champagne and then popping the cork at the corner of your refrigerator with the bubbly spraying in all directions, including right back in your face. The wind is a continuous series of popped champagne bottles, some unshaken, some shaken vigorously, some with a lowly pulled cork, others with the cork exploding. mens wedding bands canada , mens wedding bands australia ,
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