He started sketching the Chicago River and just kept going. His 55-foot sketch of the city is now a book

Christopher Borrelli, Chicago Tribune
·2 min read

“I can’t stop,” Ryan Chester said, seated in a window of the Wrigley Building, the south side of the Chicago Riverwalk stretching out before him, scattered with tourists and workers on lunch breaks. “I really can’t,” he said again. He’d already put in so much.

He’d already drawn 5.5 miles of the Chicago River and the buildings looming beyond its banks, sketching by hand — drawing one foot of downtown Chicago a week. He began 2019, and finished 2021, using the same continuous scroll of bond paper. By the time he was done, Chester — an architect with the firm JGMA — had a 55-foot sketch of Chicago, as viewed from the north and south banks of the Chicago River, from the harbor locks at DuSable Lake Shore Drive to Bertrand Goldberg’s River City on the south branch.

It’s so intricate, and obsessive, University of Chicago Press just published a coffee-table version: “Chicago Reflected: A Skyline Drawing From the Chicago River,” an 11-foot accordionlike reproduction, with a thoughtful essay by Chicago native Thomas Dyja (“The Third Coast”) for context. Dyja places Chester’s remarkably detailed gray-and-white sketching into a lineage of artists who unveiled the scope of the city, from Jules Guerin’s dream of a future Chicago for Daniel Burnham to Franklin McMahon’s sketches of Chicago courtrooms and street scenes for magazines and Chicago newspapers. But Chester’s Chicago, Dyja writes, with its recreational boats against thin glass spires, is a panorama of “a pleasure coast for tourists and whoever’s still working downtown.”

A ghostly one.

Chester slipped in a bit of architecture of the past, alongside buildings still being built when he drew. It’s a “total fantasy” of perspective and skyline, Chester said. Past, present and future, at once. It began because “some of the young architects in my office started a sketch club and just went into the city on lunch break to draw.” When winter came, he didn’t stop. He took it as a mild rebuke to how reliant architects have become on computer design.

“Drawing was the reason I became an architect,” he said.

But the advantage of doing it by hand — you notice more, he said — “doesn’t register much now.” He missed the hand-drawn line, the stray marks of an imperfect image. So he’s not stopping: his Instagram (@ryanchesterarchitect) is full of sketches of a new project: Demolished Chicago buildings, standing tall once more, but in 2023, like heavy ghosts.