Lee Bey: The Urban Observer

(photos by Lee Bey) 

I am looking through a collection of portraits and "people shots" I've taken during the past four years or so. A pattern emerges. A fair amount of them are Chicago architects. Nothing formal, just images grabbed here and there.

The architect above is Mark Sexton of Krueck + Sexton Architects. The firm handled the stellar restoration of IIT's Crown Hall and was giving a tour of the building durings its re-openining in August 2005 when I took this photo.

This is Dirk Lohan in his office at Lohan Anderson Architects, May 2006. I was interviewing him for a book I'm writing and we got on a discussion about Mies van der Rohe---Dirk's grandfather, of course---and the IBM Building. Dirk begins to sketch how Mies sited the building over the tricky riverfront site. I also note that he is a fellow lefty and over the years I've found a lot of architects are. More than the average population, I wonder?

This is architect Dina Griffin, principal of Interactive Design. Her firm is the local architect of the Renzo Piano-designed Modern Wing, now under construction at the Art Institute of Chicago.

This is Ralph Johnson of Perkins & Will with Helmut Jahn of Murphy/Jahn Architects in the background. I took this in July of 2004 during a planning session for the book Visionary Architecture, published by the Chicago Central Area Committee. I was director of governmental affairs at SOM then, was asked to write an essay for the book. Three years later, I am now executive director of Central Area Committee.

Richard Tomlinson, a managing partner at Skidmore Owings & Merrill. I took this in December 2004 in Detroit as we were walking across some kind of skybridge at 1001 Woodward. We were in town checking out the last bit of work being done as part of SOM's renovation of Renaissance Center.

Above is Adrian Smith seated in a Barcelona chair in the lobby of this new firm, Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture during a visit I took there earlier this summer.

And here is Santiago Calatrava, designer of the proposed Chicago Spire, photographed by me last year at Perkins & Will.

And this young woman--okay, is not an architect. I was just making sure some of you were still paying attention. 

Seriously, I have to keep looking through the collection. Back in 2003 when I was working for the mayor's office, I took Calatrava on a tour of the lakefront in hopes of getting him to design pedestrian bridges here. I photographed him a few sites, including the North Avenue Bridge and on parts of the South Lakefront. But I took them on film and never got the pix developed!  I know the undeveloped film is around here somewhere...