burnham’s centennial – mammoth // building nothing out of something

burnham’s centennial

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.

I think I’m a fan of Garofalo Architect’s “New Loop Ecologies”, which augments the Loop with “new station stops outfitted with public activities” and a “new and continuous rooftop ecology”, though their renderings are a bit optimistic/naive about what’d grow on a roof over the Loop. (Why’s everything got to be corn and lettuce?) I doubt you could grow corn in the deep shadows of downtown Chicago, anyways, and wouldn’t the project be more interesting if it capitalized a bit on the, um, ecology of the loop a bit by suggesting a vegetated infrastructure that’s tied to the shaded, windy conditions of the new roof of the loop (imagine how much less interesting the Mittagong mushroom tunnel would be if it were the Mittagong corn-and-lettuce tunnel)?

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