ChicagoRound: angles and circles

This parking garage sits on a grassy lot at the south end of the Loop. I've always been fascinated by its pedestrian geometry of angles and parallels—they were clearly designed around the building's function as a ramp with little regard for its outer aesthetic. Its workaday blandness is jarring and ugly in juxtaposition to the soaring architecture around it ... and yet I still find it to be strangely beautiful. It's kind of like a pug at a greyhound convention:


The RedEye is a tabloid offshoot of the Chicago Tribune. Launched in 2002 (in ill-timed competition with the strikingly similar but short-lived Red Streak, a tabloid offshoot of the Chicago Sun-Times), it's written by lazy, one-source writers for lazy, one-celled readers who apparently find detailed content to be burdensome and off-putting. The RedEye's sole creative achievement is its iconic red i-shaped dispensers that stand on every other street corner in the city. The orb-like red dot on the top of each dispenser originally featured a bold white FREE on each side, but creative vandals all across Chicago have spent the last few years picking at the Fs and the Rs so that it's hard to find a dispenser today that doesn't proudly proclaim "I PEE":