CLOSE AD ×

Bold new visions for the future city take shape at the Chicago Architecture Biennial

Bold new visions for the future city take shape at the Chicago Architecture Biennial

The international architecture cognoscenti have descended on the Chicago Cultural Center with a motherlode of new content from Thailand to Ecuador, ranging from robotically-assembled structures to investigations into social and infrastructural inequality. The consequences of this assemblage will unfold over the next few months, but one room in the Cultural Center is particularly clear in its ambition and vision for the future.

BOLD: Alternative Scenarios for Chicago explores some of the less iconic, more layered pieces of Chicago’s urban fabric. Organizer Iker Gil of MAS Studio prompted 18 local designers to make proposals for urban projects around the city. “I wanted to look forward and imagine new possibilities, but remain still attached to reality,” said Gil. “We wanted to use the rules but tweak them a little bit to keep them grounded.

Emerging designers such asWEATHERSHinterlands Urbanism and Landscape and PORT Urbanism were included alongside established designers such as JAHN and Stanley Tigerman. SOM was paired with smaller firm CAMESgibson.

The exhibition prompted designers to tackle key issues at stake in Chicago such as civic, ecological, and infrastructural problems, as well as typological problems like empty lots and high-rises. The projects in the show not only propose new ideas for addressing these issues, but also new ways of conceptualizing an aesthetic project, mostly around bright colors, strong figures, and narrative-based designs.

Design with Company chose to reimagine the 1987 Library Competition with a series of 20 “late entries,” many of which were based on comments from the public in response to the original competition. They made a stack of referential forms from Chicago and elsewhere, each making its own story, but also combining for one over-arching narrative.

SOM and CAMESgibson reimagined the high-rise, using Gibson’s visions for new ways of living, combined with SOM’s high-rise know-how. The result is a prototype tower that would be deployed at L stops around the city, “upping the ante for transit-oriented development,” according to Gibson.

URBANLAB proposed to make part of Lake Michigan into a series of filtering civic green spaces that would clean the water, while PORT Urbanism took Lakeshore Drive and put it in the lake to provide a more developable area west of the highway, caving to a law that bans building east of Lakeshore Drive. The resulting space lets a series of towers spring up, which reframes Grant park in a completely new urban condition.

David Brown collected nine vacant lots from Chicago’s 15,000, assigning them to local designers who reimagined the rules of the empty lot, making a series of flat surfaces into a new collective public space.

BOLD’s local Chicago agenda stands in stark contrast to the international explosion in the other rooms of the main exhibition. The explorations here posit a palpable group of ideas about how to design cities, with the focus on Chicago. What can investigations in a lively urban place like Chicago teach the rest of the world? BOLD embodies much of the Chicago-specific things about the Biennial, with a strong sense of place and a clear mission that translates globally.

The best part of it is that it makes manifest the nascent design scene that has been bubbling up in Chicago for the last seven years. Through strong support from institutions and universities there, this group of young designers has imagined new ways of engaging the city while also forming a cohesive aesthetic and engaging attitude toward architecture in general. So far, it is the locals that are stealing the show.

 

CLOSE AD ×