Everyday Sightseeing: Logan's Run house, Rogers Park

(This is part of a new series I'm doing, mostly to get back into the habit of blogging again, in which I shoot pictures and do a little write-up about interesting things that I see here in Chicago on a regular basis, during my usual ho-hum daily errands.)

Before the rise of postmodernism as the industry standard, and happening at the same time as the daring organic architects of the 1970s who got all the attention, there were also a series of designers who were stubbornly holding on to the Euclidean standards of 1960s Mid-Century Modernism, only were now trying to do funky things with their angles or material in an effort to stay hip in those countercultural times. Objects of scorn when I was growing up in the '80s and '90s, I find myself now with a much more charming admiration for such structures, or at least what few survived the mass destruction of them that occurred after their short-lived height of, say, the Ford and Carter years. Here's a complex of them, for example, right literally at the point where Chicago's massive lakefront bike trail has its official northern terminus, right at Ardmore where you turn west and re-enter the city proper; this is a common route I take whenever doing far-north stuff on my bike, and every time I pass them I think how these were designed in the same years that Logan's Run was filmed, and how that explains everything you need to know about them. There's a part of me (a small part, sure, but there) that thinks sometimes how groovy it'd be to live in one of these chrome-and-brick retro-sci-fi Way-Too-Late-Modernist funhouses, and especially one like this whose back door opens literally onto the beachfront, right here where Lincoln Park ends and the lakefront land reverts back to private ownership.