Via Pruned and elsewhere, the Chicago Architectural Club has just launched a spring competition, “Mine the Gap”, which holds a great deal of promise:

…at a moment when the global recession has either slowed or frozen completely the driving forces that had propelled architecture and urbanism over the past decades. The bursting of the realestate bubble has left many architects without work, and a number of building sites within the city sit incomplete or abandoned. Yet there is opportunity in this collapse. Despite the apparent desperation of the moment, we detect a newfound freedom for architects to speculate, to propose, to instigate and to agitate for a different city. This competition aims to exploit that new freedom and to define the role of the architect in an economy of crisis and a city full of scars.

The competition site is the abandoned footprint for Calatrava’s proposed Chicago Spire, and, as a metaphor for the state of contemporary architecture and urbanism, is nearly perfect, the seventy-foot deep shaft presenting unmistakable psychogeographic and geologically-scaled evidence of the ruin produced by our financial system’s institutional arrogance.  Entries are due May 3rd.