Zaha Hadid in Chicago

Now that I'm working more and more with fabric, I really enjoyed getting to see Zaha Hadid’s new pavilion, a summer-long fixture of Millennium Park, while in Chicago. Hadid, the first woman to win architecture’s Pritzker Prize, was born in Baghdad in 1950 and set up her London-based practice in 1980.

From an article in the Wall Street Journal by Kelly Crow:

For Chicago, she says she (Hadid) thought about how tension alters the look of fabric as it is pulled taut or twisted. The result: an elliptical building with strategic gashes to let in light and pod-like openings that people can pass through. Her design includes diagonal lines, a nod to Burnham’s 1909 city plan which famously laid out a fanned grid of streets diagonally from Chicago’s city center out into the suburbs.

The physical complexity of the project quickly overwhelmed local contractors. Aaron Helfman, president of TenFab, an Evanston, Ill., company that designs trade-show booths, says it took nearly five months and several structural engineers. The addition of a 400-pound projection screen, for example, upset the math because the whole structure was so lightweight.

Another upside is that it can be dismantled and reassembled in less than a week’s time.

Civilization : Chicago

Once we returned from the wilderness of Isle Royale, we spent another week at my in-laws cabin in the northwoods (still pretty remote if you ask me), before heading on to Chicago. I relished every minute of all the things to do and see in city. Our first stop was Millennium Park, an award-winning center for art, music, architecture and landscape design.

Among Millennium Park's prominent features are the Frank Gehry-designed Jay Pritzker Pavilion, the most sophisticated outdoor concert venue of its kind in the United States; the interactive Crown Fountain by Jaume Plensa; the contemporary Lurie Garden designed by the team of Kathryn Gustafson, Piet Oudolf and Robert Israel; and Anish Kapoor's hugely popular Cloud Gate sculpture (aka the Bean) on the AT&T Plaza. Cloud Gate, a 110-ton elliptical sculpture is forged of a seamless series of highly polished stainless steel plates, which reflect the city's famous skyline and the clouds above. A 12-foot-high arch provides a "gate" to the concave chamber beneath the sculpture, inviting visitors to touch its mirror-like surface and see their image reflected back from a variety of perspectives. Inspired by liquid mercury, the sculpture is among the largest of its kind in the world, measuring 66-feet long by 33-feet high.

Rounding out the trip

After several days of hiking and camping, I was ready for a hot shower and some civilization. My little piggies had long since gone to market and I didn't know it was possible to stick as much as I did. The ride back on the Isle Royale Queen IV ferry was torture! The 5 foot waves made us all sick (it was a 3 1/2 hour ride!).

Moose/Wolf Research

One of the coolest things we discovered on Isle Royale was a trail that took us on a little scavenger hunt to a cabin where people were doing research on the Moose and Wolf population on the island. As we walked along, there were little yellow clues letting us know we were on the right track. Candy Peterson and Rolf Peterson have been coming to the island for 30 years living among the wild, educating people, and conducting research projects. The moose bones you see in the photos were all collected this year.