Articles About Lake Michigan

The Great Lakes winter ice cover has dropped dramatically over the past 40 years, according to a new report. On average, peak ice has fallen by 71 percent; Lake Michigan’s ice cover has shrunk even more than that. Researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) compared satellite photos dating to 1973.  Jia Wang, […]

It’s going to rain.  According to a study by climatologists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Texas Tech University, temperatures in Chicago will continue rising over the next century, largely due to human emissions of heat-trapping gasses.  The strength of that warming trend and the impact it brings depends on the amount of […]

Noted Chicago architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s famous maxim “Less is more” should apply to ambitious plans for revamping Chicago’s Navy Pier, the city’s top tourist destination.  Writing in the Chicago Tribune, architectural critic Blair Kamin says “The good news about the latest vision for the pier is that it discards the excesses of […]

It’s not your imagination.  Chicago’s weather is getting warmer and climate scientists, botanists and zoologists have collected evidence that show real-time changes in seasonal timing and weather patterns that are altering the region’s ecosystems.   Writing in the Chicago Tribune, reporter William Mullen says “This is what experts say we should expect in the future:  Shorter, […]

Although upwards of 800 towering wind turbines provide power to countries like Denmark, Britain and other European countries, the United States has engaged in a 10-year debate over constructing Cape Wind, its first offshore wind farm planned for the south side of Cape Cod in Nantucket Sound and recently given the go-ahead by Secretary of […]

The opening of the new Modern Wing of the Art Institute of Chicago spurred me to finally trek out to the other great piece of museum architecture in the Midwest, Santiago Calatrava’s Quadracci Pavilion, a sculptural addition to the Milwaukee Art Museum which opened in 2001, and cost approximately $121 million. The museum initially hired […]

Amidst the most dire financial crisis in a generation, Chicago has created a magnificent rejoinder to all the bad news.  The Russian writer Dostoevsky once said that “Beauty will save the world.”  Seeing Renzo Piano’s new Modern Wing at the Art Institute of Chicago makes you believe that it just might.  First of all, how […]