Chi-town.

The office building I was working in for a couple of days each of the last three weeks was overlooking Millennium Park. I took a couple photos through the window of the park. It is both unique and beautiful.

Millennium Park is an award-winning center for art, music, architecture and landscape design. The result of a unique partnership between the City of Chicago and the philanthropic community, the 24.5-acre park features the work of world-renowned architects, planners, artists and designers.

The criss-cross structure on the left is Jay Pritzker Pavilion an outdoor concert venue. The Pavilion stands 120-feet high, with a billowing headdress of brushed stainless steel ribbons that frame the stage opening and connect to an overhead trellis of crisscrossing steel pipes. The trellis supports the sound system, which spans the 4,000 fixed seats and the Great Lawn, which accommodates an additional 7,000 people.

The silver drop on the right is Cloud Gate. Cloud Gate is British artist Anish Kapoor's first public outdoor work installed in the United States. The 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. Cloud Gate sits upon the AT&T Plaza, which was made possible by a gift from AT&T.

Connecting Millennium Park to Daley Bicentennial Plaza, east of the park, this 925-foot-long winding bridge, Frank Gehry's first, provides incomparable views of the Chicago skyline, Grant Park and Lake Michigan. Clad in brushed stainless steel panels, the BP Bridge complements the Pritzker Pavilion in function as well as design by creating an acoustic barrier from the traffic noise below. It also has a 5% slope to allow easy access for people who are physically challenged.

A view of the Chicago skyline from the office building I was working in.

Lake Michigan is one of the five Great Lakes of North America, and the only one located entirely within the United States. It is bounded, from west to east, by the U.S. states of Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan. The word "Michigan" was originally used to refer to the lake itself, and is believed to come from the Ojibwa Indian word mishigami, meaning "great water."

The Chicago River is 156 miles long, and flows through downtown Chicago. Though not especially long, the river is notable for the 19th century civil engineering feats that directed its flow south, away from Lake Michigan, into which it previously emptied, and towards the Mississippi River basin. This was done for reasons of sanitation. The river is also noted for the local custom of dying it green on St. Patrick's Day.

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This was the view from my hotel room on St. Patrick's Day, but unfortunately I didn't get to see it dyed green. Click here to check out a video of the dying process.