![]() ![]() ![]() There'll be a ribbon-cutting Thursday morning, after which, word has it, members of the public will be able to start tilting even in advance of the official opening Saturday. We call it an 'experience,'" said Jennifer Hesser, 360 Chicago's director of operations and one of the people who guided the Tribune and NBC's "Today Show" through the first media experiences, Wednesday morning. Tilt!, on the other hand, wears its engineering on its sleeve, coming across as a more mechanized thing, as, dare we say it, a slow-motion thrill ride.Īpparently, we do not dare. ![]() In these terrariums for the trusting, there's an illusion of danger. Although the Willis structures, too, are movable boxes anchored within the boundary of the building, the part that juts out, that you walk out onto, seems to challenge you to find the support pieces. Just as the Hancock wears its support pieces like a bandit's guns, on the outside, visitors to Tilt! can see the giant nuts and bolts and the heavy beams doing the work of keeping them safe they can touch a glass panel that shows what the three-layer, tempered, laminated structural glass used in the windows is like.ĭesigners at Willis' Skydeck Ledge seemed to want to invite people to walk out into the air. It is a box of steel, 31,000 pounds of it, powered by a hydraulic motor and three big pistons known as hydraulic actuators. It puts your life in the hands of a machine, and it makes a substantial thing - the majestic, cross-braced Hancock tower - suddenly whimsical.īut if a window wall rotating outward is playful, there is nothing light about the way it is built. It nudges you forward, then pauses, then tilts you forward some more. There's the Ledge, the single name for the four glass boxes that jut four feet out from the western wall of Skydeck at the Willis Tower, still a potent threshold to cross, almost five years after it opened.īut Tilt! does something new, something I found entirely enchanting. There's the Ferris wheel at Navy Pier, combining vintage charm with modern height. ![]()
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