ArchitectureChicago PLUS: The One that Got Away: Jeanne Gang's Ford Calumet Environmental Center

The Chicago Architecture Center's exhibition Flyaway City: Architecture for a Flourishing Ecosystem, designed and co-curated by Studio Gang, explores "making cities safer and more welcoming for birds and diverse wildlife." Gang's interest in birds and bird strikes is long-standing, including her project for the Ford Calument Enviromental Center. [A revised and expanded version excerpted from 2011's Jeanne Gang Before Aqua - an Early Portrait.]

"Ooh! exclaims architect Jeanne Gang, nearly 20 years ago, as she steps out onto the balcony and finds a dead bird, killed when it flew straight into the window of her just-completed building for the Chinese-American Service League. "That's a problem," she says, visibly perturbed. Even back when, Gang was already an expert on bird collisions with buildings, and the fact that her screen failed to completely keep birds away from the glass is clearly a disappointment.

Just a few years later, Gang was able to put her increasing knowledge to use in her entry, beating out 108 others, to design a new $6,600,000 Ford Calumet Environment Center. The site is on the far south side is deep in the city's industrial heartland. Ford's Torrance Avenue plant is there, as are steel mills, scrap yards, landfills, and the city's last operating sawmill. Yet the area also includes ecologically rich wetlands and woodlands. It's directly on the flight path of many migratory birds, and inhabited to visited by several species on the state's endangered list. 762 species of plants are represented.

Gang draws on the idea of the nest for her building. Specifically, of a turkey nest, "a bird that takes both the natural and the manmade to create their nests . . . using the abundant and the nearby discarded material. I remembered losing a whole night of sleep, thinking of how to make this more about reuse. We started looking for those materials in the Calumet area, and it was a fascinating thing, because there were so many places where you could get structural members and recycled steel and there was already some slag. (a byproduct of steel production.)

"We were very conscious of all the openings," says Gang, "so we could prevent these bird strikes with glass. There's only one guy who researched it fully," she says, referring to professor Daniel Klem. "He put birds into cages with different surfaces and glass, and he found you could either put something in front of the glass, like a screen, or you could tilt the glass downward so it reflects the ground." Along the building's south wall, Gang tilts the glass outward, which also reduces solar heat gain. A wire basket-like mesh goes around the building, most probably to be fabricated out of rebar.

Salvaged steel from the area will make up the building's support columns, and Gang will even retain the names of the mills in which they were made, etched into the surface. Each column will actually be a cluster of steel beams, splaying out as they rise to support the roof like the fingers of a waiter carry a large tray. "The reclaimed steel columns are bundled together like twigs and put into the ground as piles," says Gang, "so they're also the foundation as well. That allows up to get all the lateral bracing that we need, but at the same time serve as a kind of visual connection to the history of Calumet as a steel producer."

The building also includes a number of system that will help in its goal of qualifying for a Platinum LEED rating, the highest designation for sustainable buildings. The site's wet lay soil "is also a very good soil type to use for earth systems. We're doing earth tubes and geothermal heat pumps, and because the soil is wet, it's conductive."

The earth tubes, which maintain a constant temperasure around 55 degrees, snake around the parking lot to develop length and volume, which vents into the building to cool in the summer and warm in winter. There's also a biomass boiler, to be fueled with trees being culled from the site, clippings from road crews, and waste wood chips from the lumber mill. Gang hopes the boiler will not only be able to feed heated steam to coils in the floor slab in winter, but help- produce enough energy to both power the building and a send a surplus to the city's power grid.

But, of course, it was not to be. Coasting on Chicago's reputation of being centrally important to architecture rather than adding to it, the project was cancelled in 2011, with the city, in best tradition of Richard M. Daley blaming Frank Gehry for the cost overruns at Millennium Park, citing the project cost exploding from $6.8 million to $27,000,000, which a Sun-Times reporter passed along in a report, adding "It's unclear if that includes staff and programming" (he apparently couldn't be bothered to find out.) Gang, herself, disputed the figures.

"The project construction budget was established after the competition, in 2006, and was, including site work, $17 million. Now in 2011 the cost is $20 million (not 27). The difference is due to time escalation of cost, NOT cost overruns."

Even the highest figure, however, should be seen in the context of the prolificacy rampant in Daley's declining final terms, including half a billion for a never finished transit station under Block 37, and over $32 million to tear up the beautiful landscaping and demolish the historic architecture of the Michael Reese campus for his risible pipe dream of a Chicago Olympics. Decades later, the bunker under Block 37 remains empty; the Reese campus a dirt-pile wasteland.

Eventually, in 2021 a Ford Calumet Environmental Center was finally built, not at Hegewisch, but at Big Marsh a bit to the north, a 280-acre park which opened in 2016. Designed by Valerio Dewalt Train, it's a perfectly acceptable design. It's won awards. It also references the area's industrial past, but the careful relationship to nature and the delicate yet robust poetry has gone missing. But it only cost $7,800,000, so there's that, even though it's only about a third the size of Gang's design.

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