Federal Center Plaza, Chicago, Illinois

Related people

John P. Schooley Jr. (was created by)
Alexander Calder (was created by)
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (architect)

Date

1959-1974

Description

230 South Dearborn Street, Chicago, Illinois, The Loop 60604 United States The Federal Plaza in Chicago is Three buildings, the single story post office in the foreground-right, the John C. Kluczynski Building behind statue, and the Everett McKinley Dirksen Building far ground left, all designed by Mies Van der Rohe. The plaza itself, and the "Flamingo" statue by Alexander Calder. The combination of the plaza with the three buildings, each being clad in steel and glass, played a large part in defining a new style, modernism. Ergo the Federal Center became the defining model and its rampant reproduction in nearly every city around the globe attests to its success as style. The Flamingo is a single story sculpture designed for Mies Van der Rohe's Federal Center plaza, completed in 1974. "The Post Office, a unitary space with a central core, is similarly typical of Mies's reductivist concept of the single-story pavilion. Externally thin yet powerful structural columns of steel brace enormous panes of tinted glass." http://www.galinsky.com/buildings/federalcenter/index.htm

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