Terra-Cottology, Part 10: The Reebie Storage Warehouse, Lincoln Park Neighborhood, Chicago, Illinois, USA (1922)
Looking northward at the warehouse's southwestern and southeastern elevations.
What at first glance may seem an uninteresting, utilitarian structure is in fact one of the Windy City's most delightful expressions of architectural noncontextuality—a concept I'm always willing to admire, praise, and promote. As will become apparent in the photos that follow, the Reebie Warehouse boldly dares to relate to nothing whatsoever around it, and not even to itself.
To really appreciate the salutary incongruity present here, you need to lower your gaze to the first story of the building's Clark Street facade. It was there that, at the request of the original owners, designer George S. Kingsley provided something rarely seen in storage warehouses, at least since the Ptolemaic Dynasty: a whopping dose of Ancient Egyptian design motifs.
This remarkable Roaring-Twenties riff on pharaonic magnificence, breathtaking in its cognitive dissonance, was executed in polychrome terra-cotta crafted twenty blocks to the west, in Chicago's Northwestern works.
Northwestern's base material was derived from Pennsylvanian-subperiod (Upper Carboniferous) underclays and marine shales unearthed in the bituminous-coal mines of the Illinois Basin, and then shipped up to the big city by rail.
The pictures that follow will concentrate, at considerably closer range, on the wonderful terra-cotta cladding that was produced from this 300-Ma-old material.
For more on this site, see my book Chicago in Stone and Clay, described at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501765063/chicago-i...
And to see the other photos and descriptions of this series, visit my Terra-Cottology album.
Terra-Cottology, Part 10: The Reebie Storage Warehouse, Lincoln Park Neighborhood, Chicago, Illinois, USA (1922)
Looking northward at the warehouse's southwestern and southeastern elevations.
What at first glance may seem an uninteresting, utilitarian structure is in fact one of the Windy City's most delightful expressions of architectural noncontextuality—a concept I'm always willing to admire, praise, and promote. As will become apparent in the photos that follow, the Reebie Warehouse boldly dares to relate to nothing whatsoever around it, and not even to itself.
To really appreciate the salutary incongruity present here, you need to lower your gaze to the first story of the building's Clark Street facade. It was there that, at the request of the original owners, designer George S. Kingsley provided something rarely seen in storage warehouses, at least since the Ptolemaic Dynasty: a whopping dose of Ancient Egyptian design motifs.
This remarkable Roaring-Twenties riff on pharaonic magnificence, breathtaking in its cognitive dissonance, was executed in polychrome terra-cotta crafted twenty blocks to the west, in Chicago's Northwestern works.
Northwestern's base material was derived from Pennsylvanian-subperiod (Upper Carboniferous) underclays and marine shales unearthed in the bituminous-coal mines of the Illinois Basin, and then shipped up to the big city by rail.
The pictures that follow will concentrate, at considerably closer range, on the wonderful terra-cotta cladding that was produced from this 300-Ma-old material.
For more on this site, see my book Chicago in Stone and Clay, described at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501765063/chicago-i...
And to see the other photos and descriptions of this series, visit my Terra-Cottology album.