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Sunday, March 20, 2011
The Soldier Field that wants to be a park shall be topped off with ribbons of “bioclimatic and aesthetic skin.” Layered on top of the futuristic spaceship snuggled in its neoclassical nest, this “false topography” shall provide an occupiable space without disturbing the program below.
A member of the para-speculative wing of the Forever Free and Clear Lakefront Movement, Lara Muñoz Martinez shall embed this camouflaging system with a Trojan code. When the Daley Politburo and Pritzker Comintern are out to lunch, her fellow members shall hack in and re-activate the ribbons, which shall then smother the parking lots to the south, as well as parts of Lake Shore Drive and adjacent railyards, resulting in a vegetated membrane connecting Lake Michigan and the barricaded neighborhoods to the west. Propagating further south, the ribbons shall also devour another icon, McCormick Place, disfiguring its facsimile of a flat Midwestern prairie into the second peak of what shall become an artificial mountain range. As before, or perhaps even more so, the views of picnickers, strollers, marathoners, tobogganeers and cross-country skiers shall be spectacular.
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
Mrs. Blumenthal, 55, of Florida, has been driving around the city for hours now. Since landing at O'Hare, she's taken in the fleeting sights of the northern and western neighborhoods. This afternoon, she'll barrel along the inexorable super-linearity of Western Avenue all the way down to the city limit before making a U-turn and returning to her hotel for the night. Tomorrow and for the rest of the week, she'll make the same perambulations.
Meanwhile, at a cavernous control room in one of the buildings at the Illinois Medical Super-Complex, doctors and technicians have been monitoring her driving through a mesh network of surveillance cameras scoping for the early tell-tale signs of a neurodegenerative disease. Every micro murmuration, every nano-flux, every subtle correction in her navigation is being recorded. Every speed, every acceleration, every direction — indeed her every reaction to this city turned diagnostic tool will be plotted. Then her medical tour of Chicago will be data mined.
At the end of the week, she'll be given her diagnoses report, although her consultation with the doctors will be a little hurried, as the FBI will be taking over the network for their annual probe for pederastic and terrorist behaviors.
Friday, February 4, 2011
Which is one of the many ideas you can submit to the Chicago Architectural Club's annual Burnham Prize Competition.
This year's competition, McCormick Place REDUX, is “intended to examine the controversial origins and questionable future of the McCormick Place East Building, the 1971 modernist convention hall designed by Gene Summers of C.F. Murphy Associates and sited along the lakefront in Burnham Park.”
Built on parkland meant to be “forever open, clear, and free”, considered an eyesore by open space advocates, and suffering from benign neglect at the hands of its owners, the Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority, Gene Summer’s design for McCormick Place East is nevertheless a powerfully elegant exploration of some of modernism’s deepest concerns. The current building’s predecessor generated withering criticism from civic groups so when it burned in 1967 its critics mobilized. The raw economic power of the convention business served to hasten rebuilding atop the ruins. But while Shaw’s previous building lacked any architectural merit, Gene Summers brought to the new project his years of experience at Mies van der Rohe’s side. The resulting building is a tour de force that succinctly caps the modernist dream of vast heroic column-free interior spaces.
[...]
The “McCormick Place REDUX” competition seeks to launch a debate about the future of this significant piece of architecture, this lakefront site that was effectively removed from the public realm, and the powerful pull of a collective and public claim on the lakefront. This iconic building is caught in the crossfire of a strong, principled, and stirring debate. So the question posed by the competition is quite simple: what would you do with this massive facility? What alternate role might the building play in Chicago should it be decommissioned as a convention hall? And if the building were to go away, how might the site be utilized? What might you do with a million square feet of space on Chicago’s lakefront (along with 4,200 seat Arie Crown theatre)?
Will you, as Chicago Tribune's architecture critic Blair Kamin suggested, propose to tear the entire building down and restitch the lakefront's splintered parkland?
Despite one of its member's aversion to ideas competitions, it would be awesome to see an entry from the FAT gang.
You have until 4 April 2011 to send in your proposals.
(Im)possible Chicago #6
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
A forest was allowed to grow and blanket the city after its roads and parking lots were depaved, its houses and skyscrapers carted away.
While the process of ecological succession took awhile, the desired climax community was reached in record time with the use of expert wilderness management strategies.
Encircling this 145,400-acre urban park is the successor city, thickly encrusted on a thin but continuous band of annexed suburban territory and sand nourished coastline. Separating the two is the new Michigan Avenue, still flower-potted and Art Nouveau-lighted but serviced with the longest subway line in the world. This grand boulevard has been tasked with the monumental job of stopping the city's sheer, vertiginous cliff-like streetwall (a mile-high in some places) from creeping into the woods.
Within are cabinets de verdure, or “rooms” cut into the woodland; the big cultural events take place here. They are all connected together by a network of allées, which are lined with topiaries of unrelentingly unvariegated design.
Beyond these formal clearings are hunting grounds, orchards, wildlife refuge areas, camping grounds and even an experimental Pleistocene Park. One can still detect the outlines and landforms of the old park system, but they're now mostly bramble patches dotted with the ruins of fountains.
All forms of dwelling are strictly prohibited, not even housing for park rangers on duty. However, the homeless and the hermits occasionally manage to avoid detection. When they are discovered, the homeless are swiftly evicted, heir hovels razed to the ground. On the other hand, the hermits merely get a warning, because their authentic hermitages have become fashionable landscape accessories again.
Monday, January 17, 2011
Here's the brief of the just announced international competition organized by MAS Studio and the Chicago Architectural Club.
Proposed by John S. Wright in 1849, the system was envisioned twenty years later when the State Legislature established the South, West, and Lincoln Park Commissions. Also referred as the “Emerald Necklace” since the 1893 World Columbian Exposition, it is composed by a series of streets and parks, some of them designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and William Le Baron Jenney. After the mid-twentieth century, the lack of proper funding, the split of management of the system as a whole (parks would be managed separately from the streets) and the migration of residents to the suburbs were some of the circumstances that accelerated the deterioration of the system. While portions of it, such as the Logan Square Boulevards District (an official city landmark district since 2005) still maintain the original character, other parts have just become underutilized areas and oversized streets that act as barriers within neighborhoods.
That is where we are now and this competition asks you to envision where we can be in the near future. These are some of the questions that we are asking ourselves and we want you to think about in your proposal: What if the system becomes a new transportation corridor in the city? What type of transportation would that be? What if the open space becomes an active layer and not just a passive one? What if this system provides activities that the city as a whole is lacking? What if the system becomes a tool for social cohesion? What if the system has a strong visual identity? What if it becomes an economic catalyst for the neighborhoods? What if the system is all of this and more?
Participants are asked to look at the urban scale and propose a framework for the entire boulevard system as well as provide answers and visualize the interventions at a smaller scale that can directly impact its potential users. Through images, diagrams and drawings we want to know what are those soft or hard, big or small, temporary or permanent interventions that can reactivate and reset the Boulevard System of Chicago.
Submission deadline is Monday, February 21, 2011.
Hopefully by predicting that we'll be seeing entries proposing the ubiquitous urban farm and alternative energy generating field, we won't actually be seeing too many of those.
Monday, January 10, 2011
Unrivaled by even the demographic upheavals seen during the Great Migrations of earlier eras, almost overnight the tiny Muslim minority of Chicago exploded to constitute 99.9% of the city's population.
To now walk through its neighborhoods, their street signs all in Arabic except for those historic plaques dinged with mini bullet craters, is to walk through an amalgam of the streets of Dubai, Mecca, Baghdad and Kuala Lampur. Slick, hyper-consumerist modernity side by side with hyper-religiosity; bustling and heady amidst the charred remains of sectarian armageddons.
But you can't walk around Hyde Park, as the entire neighborhood is now the private walled compound of Louis Farrakhan, his Domus Aurea of sorts. The University of Chicago there has been converted into the largest madrasah in the world.
Converted as well are the churches, synagogues, temples and every other places of worships; into mosques as expected. None of them could ever rival the Hagia Sofia, so the Gene Summer-designed, Mies van der Rohe-inflected McCormick Place was consecrated into the Jama Masjid of Chicago.
At night, vacationing Saudi Arabian princes and bored local youths cruise the inner boroughs American Graffiti-style and then drag race all along Lake Shore Drive, whose beaches are filled during the day by women frolicking in their own segregated venue of abandon, in burkinis. The most reckless and self-destructive men and boys, the so-called drifters, they make deep runs into the militia-infested Christian outer boroughs.
Despite the occasional car crashes and border skirmishes, and also the mass public funeral of a much revered ayatollah, the city is a quiet place. Most Muslims you talk to would love to live here, and in fact, due to its liberal immigration policy, autonomous from that of the federal, it's the most popular destination for refugees, asylum seekers and others violently displaced from Muslim countries. Thus, exiled political figures fighting for reforms in their home countries often mingle with oil executives, their companies' world headquarters relocated to here in a Halliburton-style attempt to curry favor with Arab sheiks, Iranian clerics and Iraqi MPs.
So many immigrate that the city's population doubles every decade. And every decade, one Dubai is built.
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
The coyote seen roaming around Downtown Chicago the other night may not be one of the pack fitted with GPS devices and let loose around the city “to help deal with rats and mice,” but learning that there is actually such a pack sent us into violent but gleeful epileptic convulsions.
According to researchers involved in The Cook County, Illinois, Coyote Project, there are over 250 coyotes fitted with radio collars now roaming the streets, parks and backyards of the metropolitan area. This is “the largest urban study of coyotes in the world.”
We have tracked the coyotes day and night and located the collared coyotes more than 40,000 times. This allows us to peek into the hidden lives of urban coyotes. We use results from this unique project to answer common questions regarding coyotes in urban areas. Many aspects of coyote ecology have direct management implications. Although our study was focused on Cook County, Illinois, we believe the things we have learned about coyotes and people living together are indicative of many metropolitan areas in the Midwest and eastern United States.
Set up an API to give mobile software developers a way to access those radio pings, and there might be apps to track the coyotes' urban ramblings. Google Coyote®. And yes, we're betting that it will have an audience. It's no different than nature webcams and participatory GIS platforms, like Google Earth, both of which have sizeable user base. It's also not uncommon for a lot of people to have their only extended contact with the wilderness mediated virtually. Make the interface slick, and the data pornographers and Tufte zombie acolytes will come in droves.
Develop it into an iPhone app, and you have the makings of an urban safari fad, as popular as birdwatching or urban GPS-tagged fruit harvesting. And to make it more interesting, that is, to approximate the conditions of a Serengeti safari, dial down the app's locative precision. Instead of giving you exact coordinates, it only tells you that the coyote is roaming somewhere in Hyde Park.
Touring the city in search of indigenous cyborg fauna.
GPS Pigeons
Into the Wild
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
Beneath the city is the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator, interlocking or in tangents with the next dozen on the list of the highest-energy accelerators.
Everyday they collide particles to produce a steady supply of Higgs bosons, which are stabilized, concentrated and routed as a beam to one of the many gantries located throughout the city. Able to rotate 360º, each three-story gantry can shoot the subatomic particle beam in the correct angle at the cancer patient lying inside its treatment chamber. Precisely calibrated, the Higgs bosons decay the moment they hit the tumor, and in the process of decaying or escaping into other dimensions, they degrade the mutant cells.
This super-machine, then, is one giant medical device, the most expensive in the history of medicine. It's also the most costliest to use. A second under its therapeutic beam can bankrupt a small nation. In the aftermath of the repeal of health care reform acts, treatment regimes have leapfrogged into mindboggling territory.
Practically everyone in the metropolitan area is employed to support these machines, either as administrators, research scientists, the army of engineers who maintain and repair the thousands of complex parts strewn throughout the city, the security staff who police the miles of tunnels and profile saboteurs, or the cooks who feed them all.
The infrastructure to generate their massive energy requirements might as well be another city, complete with its own support staff.
An urban legend most likely but it is often said that so powerful and so many are the magnets used in the machines that Chicago is slightly out of phased with the space-time continuum of the rest of the country.
What isn't an urban legend though are the rocks levitating in some neighborhoods.
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
All records of the city's subterranean infrastructures are no longer in the public domain, their maps classified by the federal government as state secrets.
Public works employees have to undergo extensive background checks and sign non-disclosure agreements. Those who break their non-disclosure agreement, Guantanamo awaits. Similarly, urban adventurers are charged with espionage if found hiking down in the sewers and subway tunnels. If they try to evade capture, security forces have orders to shoot to kill.
Digging is banned, so among other things, this means that gardening is done with containers, hydroponics, roofs, walls or zeppelins. Exposed ground is carpeted with feral turf or, more likely, prairie grasslands that once grew thick in the region. Parks are mere prosceniums on which plants-on-wheels and fountains-on-wheels are rearranged in countless configurations by parkgoers and passing storms, until of course they've all been wheeled away and there are no more planters to play with. This botanical piracy is but one outward manifestation of strange pathologies brewing in a city now geologically censored.
Lest they were to sprout DIY tunnels that might accidentally brush up against or puncture the network, a lunatic Rachel Whiteread was let loose on all the city's basements. Open any door that once led to those lower floors, and you'll be greeted with bare concrete.
Meanwhile, all post-blackout structures, from houses to street lights to skyscrapers, must use non-geologically invasive support systems. You can't plant anything. As a result, the city's famed skyline is beginning to look like Tatlin towers wrapped inside a jungle gym designed by Superstudio with buttresses sloping down towards the periphery. Hanging jewel-like within are the Millennium and Grant Parks re-landscaped as a cubic shrub and a parterred cylinder.
A boy went missing once when he fell down a blank spot on the map, but no search party was ever organized. There were no prayer vigils, no pack lunches and no strapping firemen. There were no television vans camped for days on end in front of the boy's home to provide 24-hour news coverage of a local melodrama for international consumption. There was no prolonged national hysteria over his fate, and definitely no photogenic heros confected by the whims of the masses. The missing kid was simply censored from the day's news.
If only his parents knew the existence of those anarchist cartographers. They could have helped. Armed with GPS-equipped mobile laser scanners, these spiritual descendants of Harry Lime and Trevor Paglen nightly infiltrate in secret these dark geographies to map them anew, to reclaim their lost cultural heritage. Their ultimate goal, however, is to solve the mystery of why these rhyzomatic contours were redacted in the first place, hopefully before the last cell member is caught or gets lost permanently in the interdimensional knotted terrain the city had constructed to deter and imprison aberrant surveyors.
But the grief stricken parents didn't and eventually were plainly informed that they never had that child. The boy, like the maps, was redacted.
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Over a century since retail magnate A. Montgomery Ward sounded the battle cry to defend the city's mandate to keep its lakefront a public common that is “forever open, clear and free of any buildings, or other obstructions whatever,” a similar call to arms was made for the Chicago River, to make it forever free of industries, private developments and sewage.
The ensuing political battles were bruising, and not every building was cleared away, but at least now one can stroll the entire length of the river. In fact, starting at any point, you can walk or bike or jog uninterrupted on both banks of the river along a circuitous route and end right where you had begun, without having to go up flights of stairs or cross streets and fight through traffic.
Along the way, you might encounter kayaking parties setting off from mini-harbors, anglers, community theaters staging avant-garde interpretations of The Odyssey, and triathletes in training. As it is now a baptismal font for future swimming Olympians, your roundabout will be soundtracked by the ecstatic screams of children frolicking in the waters. A rarer sight, of course, is a riverside cremation at one of the ghats. During the winter, ice swimming clubs and mobile skating rinks proliferate.
Every four years, the entire river is artificially frozen for a monthlong frost fair.
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
After a series of negotiations between the United Nations, the U.S. Government, the State of Illinois, the City of Chicago and various ward aldermen and their constituents, sovereignties over several neighborhoods on the South and West sides were transfered to Pacific island nations whose territories had been made inhabitable by rising sea level. Generously compensated, residents of those neighborhoods relocated to the North side.
The new residents, who were also generously compensated by carbon-intensive nations, in perpetuity or until global warming subsides, then set about colonizing their new homeland: an archipelago of extraterritorial enclaves carved out of the city. Some razed everything to the ground, then unearthed and discarded everything that was underground; they tilled the earth anew. Others adapted to and modified what was there, resulting in a patois of Midwestern and Pacific cultural traditions.
Still another nation-in-exile housed their entire neighborhood-state in greenhouses, a City of Glass simulating a tropical memory, luminous at night, gleaming during the day.
Friday, June 18, 2010
Last Friday, Chicago celebrated the Blackhawks' Stanley Cup victory in half a century with a ticker-tape parade in downtown ending with a rally at the foot of the Michigan Avenue bridge, kitty-corner from the recently completed Trump Tower. According to estimates by the city, 2 million people joined in the celebration, all jam packed in ridiculously small street footage.
A few things:
1) We're curious to find out the reasoning behind the decision to hold the rally in what is essentially a street intersection. The nearby Millennium Park is maybe too precious and dainty to survive the revelry, if it even could contain such a large crowd, but there's Grant Park. It's an incredibly rugged urban park, proving summer after summer that it can handle a stampede of wild festival goers. It's spacious, and there, more people might actually have seen or at least heard what was happening on the stage besides a sea of heads. Then again, why would you need a clear sightline when, even if your view was blocked by a skyscraper, you could probably get instantaneous updates and live feeds from your social network via a mobile device. It's the urban spectacle of the early 20th century amended by the network culture of the early 21st century, perhaps in the process mitigating the monopoly of Victorian and American 19th park typologies for such occasions.
But we'll probably just end up learning that the choice of venue was informed by budgetary issues or simply that the parade ended there.
2) We're also curious to find out what tactics the city would have employed if they had an urban panic on their hands.
3) We were reminded of Studio Gang's proposal for a sports stadium built right smack-dab in middle of the cramped innards of a city.
“Designed for the U.S. Pavilion at the 2004 Venice Biennale,” we are told, “the stadium design explores the potential of an urban stadium to accommodate throngs of people and disappear when not in use. The proposed structure would employ a kinetic seating bowl, lifted 30 floors above street level, comprised of a series of transforming seating and support elements, many constructed to fold into the adjacent high-rise buildings in a dense urban center.”
Considering the timeframe of its development, one wonders how much cross-pollination was going on between this project and the then nearly finished Millennium Park, that Frankenstein of programming and constituencies “lifted” above a multi-story garage, as well as New York City's failed bid to host the 2012 Olympics for which, at least in the early proposals, the Olympic Stadium would have been built on the West Side of Manhattan.
Perhaps Studio Gang's hyper-programming was more directly informed, after Burnham, by early 20th century epic proposals to build airports, not just way stations for blimps but humongous concrete surfaces filled with winged vuvuzelas, in the bowels of dense metropolises.
In any case, since everyone is predicting multiple championships for the Blackhawks in the near future, perhaps a retrofit in the manner of Studio Gang's stadium might be in order for that particular street intersection for future rallies. To use phraseology en vogue, let's do some urban and infrastructural hacking.
On the day of the event, skyscrapers pop out viewing boxes and lower gangplanks bolted with seats. Windows become electrified and aggregate into a giant television screen. Even the Michigan Avenue bridge is raised to reveal more seating areas. Someone will then shout, Trump Tower, transform! And it will!
Not only will 2 million people be then able to fit in but also the entire population of the Chicagoland area. (It might not, however, adequately contain the apocalyptic hysteria during the victory rally to be held for the Cubs after they finally win the World Series.)
When the crowd dissipates, so too will this hyper-intersection.
4) Just in, via @SubMedina via @loudpaper: RUX's vanishing mosque. “What if a mosque was not a building? What if it vanished into the fabric of a city?”
Stadium City
Friday, June 4, 2010
A team led by Alex Lehnerer from the University of Illinois at Chicago won first prize in Mine the Gap, the ideas competition which asked entrants for ideas on how to adaptively reuse the hole excavated for the foundation of Santiago Calatrava's Chicago Spire.
The winning entry, titled The Second Sun, envisions the hole as a home base for a yellow hot air balloon. As a whimsical twin to the ferris wheel (or the AeroBalloon) across the way in Navy Pier, it would be a fantastic addition to the Chicago skyline, whose sharp lines and pallid complexion would be awesomely contrasted by its voluptuous curves and cheery brightness. Watching it slowly bobbing up and down amid a static forest of glass and concrete would certainly be a marvelous sight, perhaps not unlike Alexander Calder's red Flamingo in its Miesian aviary.
Attached to this bubble monument to the bubble era is a disc-shaped swimming pool. While frolicking about in the water, you can enjoy the panoramic lakefront views from the ghost condominiums of a ghost skyscraper, the promise of those enchanting marketing brochures at last fulfilled. (We can't fully make out what's printed on the bottom of the pool — nor can we read the text, so we'll just fantasize that it's an actual floor plan.)
Surrounding the hole is an artificial beach where you can soak in the sunlight from the real sun or the reflected rays from a latex sun. The beach actually extends beyond the project site, going under bridge and into the adjacent and still undeveloped DuSable Park, where a circular soccer pitch is added.
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
After scientists had perfected the technique of splicing human DNA into the DNA of a tree, the Bureau of Forestry, the department which is responsible for the more than half a million trees on public right-of-ways, entered into a business partnership with the multi-billion dollar funeral industry to turn the city's urban forest into a living necropolis.
In previous revenue-generating schemes, the perennially cash-strapped city had privatized its airports, toll roads, parking meters &mdash much of its public infrastructure, in fact &mdash which proved disastrous. Not so with this arboreal venture.
The number of trees increased exponentially, even the types of species used. Every tree is lush and vigorous, since not only are they well maintained by caretakers with an eternally flowing revenue stream but also by the bereaved, who in their grief come daily to tend lovingly to the trees and the surrounding planting beds. Tear-drenched anguish has been appropriated into the city beautification program.
The sidewalks, too, look immaculate. Not a single stray candy wrapper can be found, and no one dares urinate on the botanically re-encoded dead. The pavement, after all, is now hallowed ground.
On the Day of the Dead, the streets in the city's many Hispanic neighborhoods become the site of deliriously exuberant block parties. Arbor Day is moved to coincide with Memorial Day.
Later, Google pays exorbitantly for the rights to geospatilize and network the data on all the trees onto its suite of web mapping service applications. Consequently, gravesite visits needn't be performed exclusively in real space; the pilgrimage can now be undertaken virtually. From anywhere and at anytime, you can check up on how the tree is faring, see it grow and mature and bear transgenic fruits, watch as your loved one unconsciously experience an after life.
Friday, May 21, 2010
Consider participating in the Third Coast Atlas project.
Third Coast Atlas is an unprecedented compendium of theoretical essays, maps, scholarly research and design provocations that facilitate a contemporary survey of the urbanization of the Great Lakes Basin, known as the Third Coast. This includes research, analysis and design from scholars and practitioners in the disciplines of architecture, urbanism, landscape, geography and ecology. The book [is] conceived as an atlas that positions the Great Lakes Basin as a synthetic regional territory with a population of 30 million people and investigates its landscapes as strategic events in the economic, infrastructural and ecological concerns and opportunities of the area. The publication recognizes the global significance of the Great Lakes as a crucial freshwater source by thorough documentation of the mechanisms that preserve and control the lake system as an operating hydrological resource. Mindful of rampant post-industrialization and the ongoing transformation of rust belt urbanism, the book also charts the complex relationship between urbanization, landscape and the material economies of the region. The Great Lakes is designated as one of the United State’s eleven Megaregions in the 2050 national plan. By applying a broad section of design scholarship to the research, analysis and speculation of regional territories, this publication is positioned as a reference guide for a future plan of the Great Lakes Megaregion. While specific focus is on the area called the Great Lakes Basin that forms the upper coast of the Great Lakes Megaregion, many of the issues addressed have universal appeal and are shared by many other territories worldwide.
The three editors spearheading this project are Clare Lyster (University of Illinois, Chicago), Charles Waldheim (Harvard) and Mason White (Toronto; Lateral Architecture; InfaNet Lab).
Submissions are due August 30, 2010.
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
A quick acknowledgment of a faint signal from the usually noisy Dezeen: O+A's “conceptual floating swimming platform for the river IJ in Amsterdam.”
We wouldn't mind seeing several of these “urban beaches” plopped down on Chicago's lakefront beaches, perhaps as a sort of super designery groynes to slow the erosion of alien sand. Weighty, crisp and angular, one could mistake them for Tony Smith sculptures appropriated as an infrastructure of leisure — by way of disused, water-filled Midwestern quarries re-purposed into swimming and diving hot spots.
Of course, a better proposition would be to liberally sprinkle them on the banks of the Chicago River, as this would necessitate mitigating water pollution and massive rezoning, which also would require equally monumental alteration of the city's rotten political landscape — all precursors we definitely wouldn't mind seeing coming to pass (with or without an urban beach in the end).
In fact, we're beguiled by the possibility (however remote) of O+A's jagged shorelines spurring or accelerating profound changes in how Chicago relates to its river. Some cities buried theirs under soil and concrete; Chicago, for the most part, turned its back to it, cordoning off public access with a veil of industrial and commercial thicket, made more exclusive by bubble-era condominiums and converted lofts. With some choice editing of its brief, this Urban Beach would thus be rescripted as a vision of a “forever free and clear” Chicago River, a battle cry to daylight our river, an antidote to our collective alluvial amnesia.
That or how about installing just one and using it as a dry dock for canoes and kayaks?
A Proposal for an Aquatics Complex for the Chicago 2016 Summer Olympic Games Bid
Sunday, February 14, 2010
This Olympic Stadium is inspired by the historical transformation of the Stadium of Domitian into Piazza Navona in Rome and also to some extent the post-games strategies of Atlanta's Olympic Stadium, which was reconfigured into Turner Field; Albertville's circus-like Théâtre des Cérémonies, which like a circus big top was wholly dismantled and recycled; and the future London stadium, whose seating capacity will be downgraded, the same legacy plan for Chicago's holdover stadium for its failed bid to host the 2016 Summer Olympics.
It will be an antithesis to Beijing's de-civilizing monolith.
Rather than remaining a stadium in a city already saturated with athletic and outdoor cultural venues, this proposed stadium will be adaptively reused post-games into low-rise affordable/low income housing or for mixed uses. It'll be truncated down, and the excised modular units will be clustered around the stadium proper. This newly formed neighborhood will then be infilled with further development to reach a certain density. Additionally, the stadium proper itself will be carved out into segments (not too many, perhaps just two or three openings) in order to open up the interior to the urban grid and link it to the city's Olmsted-designed Emerald necklace of large parks and green boulevards. This open space may be a park, a plaza or whatever the winning proposal will be in an official design competition to repurpose the grassy turf.
The stadium exterior may have the ebullience of FAT, the lushness of a vertical garden or the networked interactivity of a vast multimedia screen of pure data. But the design will have to bear in mind its edited future and that the interior, too, will be a facade facing a park/plaza/whatever.
This stadium or the Olympics needn't be in Chicago.
Chicago 2018, or: A Proposal for the First Wholly Urban Winter Olympics
A Proposal for an Aquatics Complex for the Chicago 2016 Summer Olympic Games Bid
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Here's another competition, and it's organized by the Chicago Architectural Club. The site is the Chicago Spire hole.
The Chicago Architectural Club is pleased to announce the 2010 Chicago Prize Competition: MINE THE GAP, a single-stage international design ideas competition dedicated to examining one of the most visible scars left after the collapse of the real estate market in Chicago: the massive hole along the Lake Michigan shore that was to have been—and may yet be—the foundation for a singular 150-story condominium tower designed by an internationally-renowned Spanish architect, a tower which was to have become a new icon for the city and region. What to do with the gap? Whether or not the project is resuscitated, what else can we do with this strategic and highly-charged site? Once the motor of real-estate speculation has stalled, what can we use to propel ourselves, and the discipline, forward?
We're still pining for subterranean skydiving, but we'd be happy if it gets turned into a mushroom farm as a satellite venue for the world's largest annual food orgy, the Taste of Chicago.
Entries can be submitted online between March 22, 2010 and May 3, 2010.
Monday, October 5, 2009
So Chicago lost its bid to host the 2016 Summer Olympic Games. Rather than brood about what might have been or haggle over alternatives to the massive dose of money the city would have been given to stimulate its limping finances, it should immediately develop a bid for the 2018 Winter Olympics. Since the deadline is less than two weeks away and the bid committee may still be suffering from their Copenhagen hangovers, we'll help them out.
Almost everything is going for Chicago. Its infrastructure is less than perfect for the huge Summer Olympics crowds, but would be more than able to handle the modest attendance at a Winter Olympics and would definitely be unmatched by the usual winter bid cities and their smaller scale public transportation systems. Its gargantuan hotel industry would easily surpass capacity requirements.
There will also be no need to build a hulking, temporary 80,000-seat stadium, as Soldier Field will be more than able to seat the smaller crowd at the Opening and Closing Ceremonies. And perhaps it can even host another event. At the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway, the venue for the ceremonies was also the same arena for ski jumping events. As the following photograph shows, this combination is possible at Soldier Field.
And as we re-imagined it a few months ago for a new century, this new prosthetic mountain analogue would be hinged, meaning it can be flipped up and down. Those traveling along Lake Shore Drive or boating on Lake Michigan would see the wavy profile of a half Eiffel Tower.
It's the technolicious descendant of the first Ferris wheel, built in 1893 for the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago.
It's easy to re-render venues in the failed summer bid into venues for a winter bid. For instance, next door to Soldier Field is the cluster of convention halls where various sports such as gymnastics would have been held; its sprawling spaces would be converted to house figure skating, speed skating and curling competitions. The United Center — formerly proposed for basketball — would host ice hockey competitions; it already serves as the home of the city's professional hockey and basketball teams anyway.
Some of the large urban parks in the old bid will again be drafted into the new bid. At Millennium Park, medal ceremonies will take place against the backdrop of the greatest skyline in the world. One or two will be re-landscaped for freestyle skiing, snowboarding and sliding competitions. As for the serpentine race track used in bobsleigh, luge and skeleton, one is tempted to hire Frank Gehry to replicate his BP Pedestrian Bridge.
Since all the venues will be wholly situated inside a major global metropolis and not in some sequestered, exclusive mountain spa resorts hundreds of gas-guzzling miles away from the supposed host city, chances are that they will be heavily used after the games; maybe a subculture of urban snowboarders will clique together. Perhaps one of the better legacies of the games would be the popular adaptation of winter sports (some or all of which are seen as the domain of the privileged) by new socioeconomic and racial classes.
In any case, during the summer, these same installations will add interesting landforms to the parks. The slopping concave hollow of the half-pipe could be re-landscaped as the seating lawn for an outdoor theater. The sliding track, meanwhile, becomes a monumental piece of public sculpture-cum-skating park.
Of course, there is one major thing that's going against Chicago. It's not the availability of snow, since this is also a concern in many alpine areas. Climate change is evaporating glaciers everywhere, and natural snow cover grows increasingly tenuous.
Chicago's gritty landscape shouldn't be much of a handicap as well. It may seem that way at first, as it definitely doesn't embody a certain sort of nature — rustic mountains, pastoral evergreen forests, a lonely goatherd, etc. — which is presumably a prerequisite for certain venues. But have the more traditional Winter Olympic sites not been over the years transformed into high-tech event landscapes, carefully managed and augmented with artificial snow and heavy plows that sculpt the slopes to a pre-programmed set of topographical parameters?
The one glaring negative is the city's glacial-flattened topography. Where does one hold the alpine events?
They'll be held in an artificial mountain. Obviously.
But not that sort of tectonics, as this venue will have a more organic and geological veneer.
And its scale will need to be exponentially inflated. This is the Make No Little Plans for the 21st century.
If one is worried that no future host city will ever be able to architecturally outdo the Beijing Olympics (as if organizing and building the games once again in a free and democratic country with no ethnic cleansing being carried out along its periphery isn't enough to surpass it?), this Everest of the Prairie will surely top a fantasy list of the greatest Olympic venues.
How can the IOC mafia refuse this big, bold vision?
It's an Olmstedian park writ large, and it's going be sited in the heavy industrial Lake Calumet sector of the South Side. Unless the Lakefront is larger, this will be Chicago's largest public open space, something which this part of the city sorely needs. Moreover, it will provide the opportunity to finally clean up this Superfund site.
Embedded within this double twin of the Loop Skyline and Millennium Park are spaces for use by athletes, officials and spectators. One could also hallow out spaces for the media center and even a satellite Olympic Village. After the games, they'll be converted into community centers, offices and residences, even theaters and indoor rock climbing caverns, all sheathed by the largest green roof in the world. And the views will undoubtedly be spectacular. On the outside surface, meanwhile, parts of the mountain will be turned into a refuge for imported wildlife.
As for the cost, we'll get back to you.
Ski Delft
Thursday, September 3, 2009
Yesterday's photo of a roundabout cage wasn't exactly an Abbasidian aviary. It wasn't, as we fantasized, a leftover space re-landscaped into an urban ecological hotspot. As pointed out by a reader, it's the Quatre Pavés Water Tower (1971) by Pritzker Laureate Christian de Portzamparc.
In any case, it reminded us of an entry to the 2005 Chicago Prize competition, which sought fresh ideas on how to repurpose Chicago's ubiquitous water tanks.
Submitted by John Snavely, Sarah Dunbar and Stephen Perdue, it proposed converting these pointilist urban artifacts that still pockmark the city's skyline into a sort of neo-Olmstedian necklace of mini eco-parks for endangered migratory birds.
Chicago is an important stop along the Mississippi Flyway for many bird species during their yearly migrations. This contiguous, low-lying route unbroken by mountain ranges from the Arctic coast of Alaska south to Patagonia has been instrumental in developing migratory paths for various species. Adapting Chicago's water tanks for a new function is a unique opportunity to create a habitat that will enable an endangered bird to safely breed in the city. The Purple Martin, a large songbird who migrates south each year along the flyway has lost its entire natural habitat east of the Mississippi and nearly all of it west of the River. Martins are social birds who readily roost and breed in man-made houses. Given the loss of original habitats, Chicago can use existing infrastructure to connect to the flyway in such a way that birds better inhabit the city - making people aware of its critical relationship to the larger natural environment.
It's somewhat similar in concept to the second prize winner, but this one caught our greater attention because of its renderings of birds shooting out from the tanks, as though uncorked after many restless years in captivity.
For us at least, this image calls to mind any of the staple PBS nature documentaries showing millions of vampire bats whizzing out of their subterranean dwellings soon after the sun has dipped below the horizon. Across a fast darkening sky, darker clouds throb and shudder.
And it also reminds us of Richard Barnes' grotesquely marvelous photographs of European starlings “murmuring” in the skies over Rome.
Surely one must now be wondering whether these self-organizing bio-troposheres could be choreographed in the skies over Chicago.
Orphaned birds have been successfully taught forgotten ancient migration routes, even new ones, so why not imprint other behaviorally malleable birds to cultivate a sort of amorphous topiary sky garden. It would be like landscaping the ethology of an urban ecosystem.
With the ringing of a bell or some other trigger, the birds would surge out in torrents from their rookeries. With another ring (or perhaps guided by one or two oozological agents reared by Natalie Jeremijenko), they will then start to perform their aerial ballet, vacillating between chaotic noise and sensuous shapes, between turbulent instabilities and structured systems.
A living fog sculpting itself with its own meteorology. Reflecting the yellows and the ochres and the oranges at sunrise and sunset, the whole scene will surely look like a Turner painting.
Hack into Jeremijenko's ooz-birds and you can control the flock. Direct an avant-garde staging of The Birds or Mary Poppins if you want. Or do a little bit of guerrilla sky gardening.
With the rising popularity of urban farm animals, perhaps these chickens and honeybees and miniature cows and even the city's existing menagerie of sewer rats and flying rats (and let's not forget the cats and dogs of gentrified inner neighborhoods) can be conscripted and turned into trained acrobats.
Or are they all together already performing one unending gigantic urban show for us humans?
