Jonathan Cohen's photos with the keyword: ceiling

The London Guarantee Building or London Guaranty & Accident Building is a historic 1923 commercial skyscraper whose primary occupant since 2016 is the LondonHouse Chicago Hotel Formerly, for a time named the Stone Container Building, it is located near the Loop in Chicago, and is one of four 1920s skyscrapers that surround the Michigan Avenue Bridge (the others are the Wrigley Building, Tribune Tower and 333 North Michigan Avenue) and is a contributing property to the Michigan-Wacker Historic District. It stands on part of the former site of Fort Dearborn. From 1872 until 1921 the site was home to the a 7-floor structure that housed the business of William M. Hoyt & Co. The Hoyt company was created during the Civil War. Hoyt became a leading grocery wholesaler, with annual sales of close to $1 million by the mid-1870s and nearly $5 million by the early 1890s, when it was among the region’s leading food distributors. The London Guarantee & Accident Building was designed by Chicago architect Alfred S. Alschuler and completed in 1923 for the London Guarantee & Accident Company, an insurance firm that was then its principal occupant. The top of the building is noted to resemble the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates in Athens, but it was modeled after the Stockholm Stadshus. From the 1960s through the 1980s, the studios of Chicago’s WLS (AM) radio were located on the fifth floor of the building. For several decades, Paul Harvey performed his daily syndicated radio show from studios on the fourth floor. The building was also famous from the 1950s through the early 1970s for The London House, a famous Chicago jazz nightclub and steakhouse that was located on the west side of the building’s first floor; it had its own entrance on Wacker Drive. It was one of the foremost jazz clubs in the country, once home to such luminaries as Oscar Peterson, Ramsey Lewis, Bill Evans, Dave Brubeck, Marian McPartland, Cannonball Adderley, Erroll Garner, Ahmad Jamal, Nancy Wilson, Barbara Carroll, Bobby Short and many others. In the 1980s and 1990s TV show Perfect Strangers, the building's exterior was used as the home of the fictional newspaper Chicago Chronicle. The London Guarantee & Accident Building was designated a Chicago Landmark on April 16, 1996.

The Marshall Field and Company Building, which now houses Macy’s at State Street in Chicago, Illinois, was built in two stages – north end in 1901-02 (including a columned entrance) and south end in 1905-06, and was the flagship location of the Marshall Field and Company and Marshall Field’s chain of department stores. Since 2006, it is the main Chicago mid-western location of the Macy’s department stores. Visitors to the Macy’s store can’t help but look up when walking through the building’s first-floor cosmetics department – it provides a distant view of a shimmering vaulted ceiling that covers 6,000 square feet and comprises 1.6 million pieces of iridescent glass. The 5th floor provides an up-close view and it’s simply jaw-dropping. The dome ceiling was designed by renowned glass artist Louis Comfort Tiffany (it’s the largest Tiffany mosaic in existence) and crafted by a group of 50 artisans who worked atop scaffolds for over 18 months to complete the project.

From the Guardian Newspaper (March 17, 2012): The big metal roof is as deeply ingrained in British architectural tradition as thatched cottages and stone churches. The idea was invented for greenhouses, then applied to the great Victorian railway stations and to the Crystal Palace, that wondrous achievement of scale and ingenuity, whose mythic power is made all the greater by the fact that it no longer exists. Big metal roofs speak of confidence and boldness and of the time of this country's greatest industrial might. With the new western concourse at King's Cross station, designed by John McAslan and Partners, the big metal roof is coming home. Meanwhile, the original glass roof has been cleaned up and had its glass restored, while unnecessary clutter in the space below has been removed, making it more bright and airy than it has looked at any time since it opened, 160 years ago. The effect is dazzling, of seeing this familiar, eternally grubby place transformed. It is as if you had just popped a perception-enhancing pill or been granted an extra faculty of sight. But the main event of the new work is the half-cylinder of the new concourse and its roof, which has a span of 52 metres. Its structure, engineered by Arup, rises up a great steel stalk in the centre and then spreads into a tree-like canopy of intersecting branches, before descending into a ring of supports at the circumference. In so doing, it avoids the need to drop columns into the ticket hall of the underground station underneath the main space. Beneath the canopy, a sinuous pavilion in glass and tile takes care of the retail. "It is the greatest station building, ever," declares architect John McAslan, who is not shy of speaking things as he sees them, and it is certainly impressive. Its main effect is a mighty oomph as you enter, from whatever direction, caused by the abundance of space and the unity of the structure. It is big and single-minded and has a generosity to which we have grown unused.

Grand Central Terminal is the most extraordinary public space in New York City. Opened to the public in 1913, this historic train terminal is a world-famous landmark in Midtown. Its rich history is a story of immense wealth and great engineering. Grand Central is one of the busiest train stations in the world, with approximately 750,000 visitors every day. The Main Concourse has an elaborately decorated astronomical ceiling, onceived in 1912 by Warren with his friend, French portrait artist Paul César Helleu, and executed by James Monroe Hewlett and Charles Basing of Hewlett-Basing Studio, with Helleu consulting. Corps of astronomers and painting assistants worked with Hewlett and Basing. The original ceiling was replaced in the late 1930s to correct falling plaster. The starry ceiling is astronomically inaccurate in a complicated way. While the stars within some constellations appear correctly as they would from earth, other constellations are reversed left-to-right, as is the overall arrangement of the constellations on the ceiling. For example, Orion is correctly rendered, but the adjacent constellations Taurus and Gemini are reversed both internally and in their relation to Orion, with Taurus near Orion’s raised arm where Gemini should be. One possible explanation is that the overall ceiling design might have been based on the medieval custom of depicting the sky as it would appear to God looking in at the celestial sphere from outside, but that would have reversed Orion as well. A more likely explanation is partially mistaken transcription of the sketch supplied by Columbia Astronomy professor Harold Jacoby. Though the astronomical inconsistencies were noticed promptly by a commuter in 1913, they have not been corrected in any of the subsequent renovations of the ceiling.

The Hudson River Museum, located in Trevor Park in Yonkers, New York, is the largest museum in Westchester County. Central to its history is the Glenview Mansion, a house built in 1877, once the home of John Bond Trevor an American financier and Wall Street pioneer. Home of the museum for 45 years from 1929, the house now forms a large part of the Hudson River Museum. It contains six period rooms displaying furniture and decor from that era. In 1972 it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.