Infrastructurist has a round-up of some of the projects selected by Chicago to commemorate the centennial anniversary of Burnham and Bennett’s Plan of Chicago. The projects, roughly themed as “big”, “bold”, and “visionary”, are organized into six categories: big plans, catalysts, public spaces, the lake front, towers, and transportation. Notable winners include Urbanlab’s plan to turn the entire city into a gigantic Living Machine (previously featured on Pruned), generic corporatised micro-cities with little apparent virtue (but a great deal of practicality, I suppose), an “extension of Northerly Island” which “abstracts nature” to “allow visitors to experience the essences of forests, oceans, mountains, deserts, and the Arctic”, various plans rendered unfortunately obsolete by today’s announcement, modular barges for extending Lincoln Park into the lake (more on that one, which I rather like, here), and a plan that hopes all our problems will magically go away (ok, that’s a bit harsh, as the idea that the street grid lives into a post-car future as a park system is at least moderately interesting, but only a bit), among other things. The exhibition website is unfortunately superficial, leaving the visitor with little to judge the projects on other than a handful of small renderings, though presumably the actual exhibition is more detailed.
