QUICK REMINDER: SBCS annual dues are due! Password to Members Only section changes on February 2, 2017. If you are not current on dues you will not receive the updated password.
The 2017 Souvenir Building Collectors Society convention team is working hard to finalize dates and venue. As we await the announcement, let’s start pulling together a list of Chicago area souvenir buildings. If there are Chicago area miniature buildings in your collection that you want to be sure are listed, you can use the form at the bottom of this post to give us a “heads up.” Check out the printable pdf that was produced for the 2016 Los Angeles Convention.
In 1893 Chicago, IL hosted the World’s Columbian Fair. There are few surviving buildings from this Columbian Exposition. One is the pictured, Palace of Fine Arts, which is now Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry. Click here to visit the Building Collector’s post with a picture of an early souvenir building of the museum. The same miniature is found in Monumental Miniatures, Souvenir Buildings From the Collection Of Ace Architects, Fig. 62, pg. 30. Do you have a miniature building of the Palace of Fine Arts or any of it’s reincarnations – Field Columbian Museum or Museum of Science and Industry?
One other surviving building from the 1893 World’s Columbian Fair is still in Chicago. It is the World’s Congress Building, which was built by the City of Chicago in conjunction with the Art Institute of Chicago. Following the exhibition it became the Art Institute of Chicago.
A few buildings from the exposition were dispersed to other locations, and there may be miniature examples out there, somewhere, in someone’s collection. They are: Norway Pavilion, a creation of a wooden stave church, that has had a peripatetic life and is apparently now being reassembled Orkdal, Norway; Maine State Building, now in Poland Springs, ME; and Dutch House, Brookline, Massachusetts.
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