This side of the tower has the color on it. Eighty-three feet of glass mural by Julie Mehretu, called Uprising of the Sun, which is the one part of this building that looks like it's moving.
Mehretu is worth a second. She was born in Addis Ababa and came to Michigan as a child, when her family left Ethiopia. Now she makes enormous abstract paintings out of architectural drawings, street plans, and maps — layer over layer, until the city underneath dissolves into weather. Her canvases sell for tens of millions of dollars. This one got translated into glass and bolted to a wall where the wind comes off the lake.
But look past it, at the stone. Specifically at the joints — the thin dark lines where one slab meets the next.
That's granite from Quebec, quarried by a company called Lacroix. Two different granites, named Tapestry and Kitledge, mixed together on purpose so the wall has variation in it instead of reading as one flat gray mass. Each piece is a little over nine feet tall, anyw
here from two feet to four and a half feet wide — and only three inches thick. Three inches. The thing looks like a fortress and it's wearing a stone jacket about as thick as a hardcover book.
The trouble is the building underneath it. This tower does not have four flat, square, sensible sides. It leans, it turns, the corners are off true, and the surfaces don't agree with each other. So the job
