O’Hare exposed

By Kaylee King

It was 1984 when Robert Burley began his documentary series of O’Hare International Airport.

The operations crew drove him to places where the runways ended and the windsocks disappeared. Burley spent four years watching, photographing and experiencing the fields that lay outside the airport that are viewed only aerially by passengers flying in and out from

worldwide destinations.

All alone, he set up his large-format camera and watched the planes depart and arrive overhead. After many long afternoons shooting, he walked to the designated pick-up spots where the crew scooped him up from the fields and he would return home.

“It’s a very interesting place to explore because it’s like a microcosm of the city. On the far edges, there are wooded areas and wildlife,” Burley said. “I saw deer and foxes and rabbits prancing around, but as you make your way in from the edge of the airfield, it essentially transforms into a city.”

Burley’s photographs from those four years will be displayed Jan. 15-Feb. 27 at the John Buck Company Lecture Hall Gallery, 224 S. Michigan Ave., as part of the “Documenting the Definitive Modern Airport” exhibition. Along with Burley’s photographs, selected shots from renowned landscape and architecture photographers Hedrich Blessing will be featured.

The exhibition is part of a collaboration among the Chicago Architecture Foundation, O’Hare and curator Charles Waldheim.

The purpose is to recognize O’Hare’s history in a sense that it, at the time, set the industry standards in terms of a central parking garage, movable jetway bridges and the two-tiar drive which separates arrivals from departures, said Susan Ross, director of communications at

Chicago Architecture Foundation.

“These are things that we all take for granted, and they don’t feel like design marvels,” Ross said. “It’s not like [Santiago] Calatrava’s Spire or anything, but these things originated at O’Hare, and they are used internationally [today].”

The exhibit is also an approach to help visitors understand that Chicago was at the forefront of airports. O’Hare bloomed out of many different names and phases, including Old Orchard Field, the former name of what is today’s airport.

“No one really documented the process [of airport design development], and it’s so great that we have these beautiful photographs,” Ross said.

At the time the photographs were taken, Burley, a native of Canada, was a graduate student at School of the Art Institute in Chicago. He convinced the airport officials to let him out onto the airfields to do his work and was quite surprised when they agreed to let him do it. Burley said he expected the officials to turn him down due to security issues.

“It was fascinating because I’d never had the opportunity to actually be in an airfield before,” Burley said. “I could never do this project again today. I don’t think anybody could because people are now using airplanes as bombs.”

The series of photographs have previously been exhibited in Toronto and at the Chicago History Museum, but Burley said he is still looking forward to the upcoming show.

Under the blanket title, there will also be lectures, a behind-the-scenes tour of O’Hare that begins in the airport’s lobby, a discussion on green building initiatives in airport design and a conversation with Waldheim.

Most of the programs are free and open to the public, except for the behind-the-scenes tour (which is $30 and for Chicago Architecture Foundation members only). In addition, the “On, Above, and Beyond the Tarmac: The Endless Dialogue Between Airplanes and Airport Design” lecture with John Zukowsky, chief curator of the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum in New York costs $15 for non members and $10 for members and students.

For more information about the exhibit and program directory, visit Architecture.org.