Afters its close, an assessment of the First Chicago Architecture Biennial

click images for larger view

First things first.  Sunday, January 3rd is closing day at the Cultural Center for the First Chicago Architecture Biennial.  If you haven't seen it, make the trip.  The Biennial has not been universally loved, but I'm betting that unless you're Zaha Hadid, you'll find things that intrigue and perhaps even amaze you.

For an opening salvo for what is hoped to be a continuing event, the Biennial can be judged a major success.  According to official sources, by the time it closes, it should have drawn nearly a quarter of million people to the Cultural Center (no, I don't know how they count them either, and as critic Edward Keegan has noted that's only 38% over what the CCL drew in the same period the year before.)

John Ronan at the Chicago Architecture Biennial

Beyond the body counts, the Biennial drew major press attention globally, and spurred a great deal of discussion, laudatory and otherwise.  The event included a wealth of related events, including signature addresses from the likes of John Ronan, and other lectures, panels and presentations which seems to have included the participation of just about every Chicago architect of note, as well a wide roster of distinguished visitors.

Summer Vault - Independent Architecture
and Paul Preissner Architects

The Biennial went beyond the confines of the Cultural Center to create four temporary kiosks for  locations at IIT, the Museum Campus, and Millennium Park.  One, located on the Museum campus, was the result of an international competition; the other three were created in partnership with the city's architecture schools at IIT, UIC, and the School of the Art Institute.  They were all outshone, however, by the opening of the Stony Island Arts Bank, created out of a South Side classically-styled, long-abandoned building by Theaster Gates, who, much like Ai Weiwei, is becoming an international superstar for his merging of architecture and design with social activism.

Photograph courtesy: Rebuild Foundation

The Arts Bank is an example of how the Biennial was enriched by a wide range of events other institutions mounted in co-ordination with its run.  Most prominent of these was the Art Institute's major retrospective, Making Place: The Architecture of David Adjaye, which also closes this Sunday, and a smaller show, As Seen: Exhibitions That Made Architecture and Design History, which runs through May, and may be particularly relevant to the Biennial as it examines "the influence of architecture and design exhibitions years after their closing." 

Grid | River | Landmark, first prize,
Perkins+Will DLC Design Competition
Yanwen Xiao and Silas Haslam

When you consider the influence of this First Chicago Architecture Biennial, a lot of the real meat came not from the "official" events, but from the partnerships that went beyond the usual suspects.  Perkins+Will scheduled its in-house DLC Design Competition, Projects Imagine Sustainable Design Along the Chicago River, to coincide with the Biennial, with the awards ceremony held at the Cultural Center.

Tim Samuelson and Tom Burtonwood
photo courtesy Thorsten Bösch.

Pecha Kucha had an evening in Preston Bradley Hall with, excepting myself, a particularly rich roster of presenters, culminating with a demonstration by Tom Burtonwood and Tim Samuelson of making affordable replicas of Louis Sullivan's ornament in a bound set created by 3-D printing.  The Chicago Architectural Club mounted both a competition and a series of events centered on Chicago architecture's eminence grise Stanley Tigerman, who was both perhaps the Biennial's most vocal booster and an indefatigable participant in many of its events and panels.

The Big Shift

Indeed, one of the most interesting part of Biennial inside the Cultural Center, was a co-exhibition Bold: Alternative Scenarios for Chicago, curated by architect Iker Gil, whose most ambitious proposal came from Port Urbanism: The Big Shift, which envisions transforming Millennium and Grant Parks into a variation of Central Park by enclosing it from the lake with a wall of skyscrapers built on new landfill.  Tigerman labeled Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin "an asshole" for not supporting what Tigerman sees both as the kind of audacious vision we need, and inevitable.  I have to admit that, while I do admire the breadth of vision - and especially the excellent and informative video Port Urbanism made documenting the development of the downtown lakefront - I am as confident as Tigerman, but that the proposal, to the contrary, will never be built and is, in essence, a really bad idea, shafting the larger public by trading the great sweep of Grant Park to the Lake Michigan for a fringe of parkland fronting still another enclave for the super-rich. (But think of the tax revenue it will raise!)

Given Tigerman's commitment to making architecture something more than just "designing houses for the rich", his enthusiasm for The Big Shift is a bit of a puzzler. If we are going to create more landfill downtown, it should be more in line with Daniel Burnham's vision - shifting the huge boat parking lots that now dominate the lakefront to a new island or islands to free up the actual lakefront for beaches and greenspace, with maybe a tower or two in the mix.

The High Life

Far more provocative to me were The High Life, a collaboration between Grant Gibson and SOM envisioning a new tower that allows for maximum differentiation among individual residents, and, most especially . . . 

3D Design Studio entry for The Available City

. . . David Brown's continuing development of The Available City, looking at revitalizing neighborhoods with infill built on some of the 15,000 vacant lots owned by the City of Chicago.  For the Biennial, Brown expanded Available City to include nine specific proposals and models from architects small and large, established and new, from Jahn and Krueck and Sexton, to Ania Jaworska and 3D Design Studio.  I hope to be writing more about these two installations soon.

The key to all of these is they did what the Biennial is supposed to do.  They inspired intelligent debate.  The greatest value of the Biennial was not in itself, but in the response, which came from two opposite directions.

Stuart Cohen and Robert Bruegmann at the Studebaker

Classical architecture proponents mounted their own events, a symposium sponsored by the Driehaus Foundation at the University Club, and a wonderful program put together by the Benjamin Marshall Society, Radical Conservatism: Classical Vocabulary, New Form, at the newly re-opened Studebaker Theater that ranged from architect Paul Florian talking about the individualized classicism of Nicholas Hawksmoor, to John Zukowsky giving a preview of his upcoming book on Marshall.

From the futurist side, Zaha Hadid, recently in Chicago for a long-awaited appearance, dismissed the Biennial as "a cute show."  More detailed dissent came from Hadid Architects Senior Designer Patrik Schumacher who through several Chicago appearances became a sort of counter-Biennial in his own person.

Patrik Schumacher

Schumacher, a tireless polemicist in the cause of parametricism, first appeared at a debate in an ornate ballroom at the Congress Hotel sponsored by ArchAgenda that also included Peter Eisenman, Reinier de Graaf of OMA, Theodore Spyropoulos, and an alternately bullying and just bizarre Jeffrey Kipnis.

Schumacher went on first, electrifying the room with an impassioned critique.  "I have just been to the exhibition yesterday," he said, "and there was virtually next to nothing which I recognize as relevant contemporary architecture." He talked of "an imperative of coherence which implies a rejection of pluralism.  We can only accept pluralism as a temporary sort of condition during periods of crisis-induced paradigm shifts and the last one was the 1980's . . . We have to reject the fabulistic acceptance of a pluralism [as] an insurmountable condition of post-modernity."

"I think we should work from a benign intolerance as I would like to call it . . . The principle of indiscriminate tolerance . . . ultimately denies the possibility of a comparative variation of positions, paradigms and styles.   So that ultimately denies the discipline of rationality, denies the possibility of progress."

Schumacher expanded on his thoughts in subsequent lectures at both UIC and IIT.  His ideas are fascinating and truly provocative in the best sense of the word, even when you see major disconnects between his analysis and conclusions.  This kind of Salon des Refusés insinuated itself into the Biennial in a way that broadened and enriched its scope and cohesiveness.  Which leads me to . . .

Some final Thoughts on the First Chicago Architecture Biennial

1.  The open-endedness of the first Biennial was exactly the right approach, creating an event that was a true exploration, breaking the usual dominance of the usual-suspect best-known firms in a favor of a more eclectic mix of the work and thought of lesser-known architects.
2.  The Cultural Center and the Biennial is a match made in heaven.  The scale and finish of the building proclaims both "public" and "capacious".  The many white-wall galleries provided the accustomed neutral settings for installations, while the ornate interiors of the Yates Gallery and GAR hall provided a surprisingly contrasting and supportive backdrop for the often minimalist modern exhibits.

. . . and Second Thoughts for the Next

1.  If this year's theme was a survey-driven The State of Architecture, perhaps the next logically should be The Future of Architecture, organized around a clear dialectic - pure form versus sustainability, large versus small-architecture as an expression of prevailing power versus an instrument of subversion, etc. - that offers up a coherent foundation for discourse. Or perhaps simply make the next Biennial a symposium of the relationship between power and architecture.
2. Encourage more architect presentations that go beyond "and-then-I-designed" dog and pony shows to talk about the ideas first and then how the work ties into them.
3.  Scout satellite locations that can merge the Biennial within the city's globally-recognized architecture.  The Federal Center Plaza, UIC-West Side, IIT-Bronzeville, etc.
4.  Look for sponsors for regular bus shuttles to remote sites.

Sarah Herda, Michelle Boone

Blair Kamin has already named Biennial co-organizer Sarah Herda and Chicago Cultural Commissioner Michelle Boone as Chicagoans of the Year in Architecture, and, along with co-organizer Joseph Grima, they have, indeed, accomplished a small miracle in creating an exciting calling card that reasserts Chicago's claims to architectural relevance to a broad, global audience.  They dared not only to think big, but to posit a continuity of engagement that expands and deepens in repeated iterations.

Let's do it again

Read More:

Carnival of Possibilities:  A Photographic Tour of the First Morning of the Chicago Architecture Biennial.

Little Houses on the Lakefront:  The four kiosks of the Chicago Architectural Biennial

Bombs Away! Stanley Tigerman unveils Titanic 2015

Bombs Away! Stanley Tigerman unveils Titanic 2015

Elva Rubio, Carlo Parente, Karla Sierralta, Carl Ray Miller, Stanley Tigerman, Martin Kläschen,Eva Maddox

In the late 1970's, with Mies van der Rohe dead for nearly a decade and so-called "Miesian" architecture at its greatest point of power, architect Stanley Tigerman declared war with a single photo montage . . .

click images for larger view

"Two of us," Tigerman recalled last Thursday at the Chicago Architecture Foundation,  "James Ingo Freed and I, were sitting one night in my office, drinking. And I made this collage.  And he gave me the backbone to do it. I really was a bit of a coward. I didn't want to do it , but it was definitely confrontational. I was an incredible admirer of Mies van der Rohe, but I always had problems with the sycophants, the acolytes after Mies's death, who ran the school into the ground. Because they didn't add to the syntax of language in the way that they should have done."

Since then, Tigerman's image has itself become iconic, a key symbol of the rise of post-modernism and the emergence of a new generation of architects with very different ways of thinking. Nearly 40 years later, with Chicago's first Architecture Biennial launched with full force, architect and designer Elva Rubio thought it might be time for an update.

Elva Rubio, Stanley Tigerman

"Elva persuaded me to do another one now," said Tigerman.  Last week's event, held around a table imprinted with the original Titanic image, included the unveiling of Tigerman's 2015 update, the architect in conversation with both Rubio and a panel of clients, and a display of office artifacts.

"If you look at the wall," explained Rubio, "basically this is Stanley's office here, that you allowed us to kind of pull out and bring to the public which is absolutely amazing, kind of a patchwork of their lives, he and Margaret, and all the different accomplishments.  You can see the range is astonishing. It's writing, it's product design, ideation, architecture, urbanism, so it's quite a prize . And it's a very small piece of what is there."

The moment came.  Titanic 2015 was unveiled . . .

Tigerman had talked repeatedly about the struggle inherent in one generation taking over from the previous.  He recalled his last evening as Co-Director of Archeworks, the alternative design school he had founded in 1994 with Eva Maddox, at an event that had been named "Passing the Baton". He strode to the podium with a briefcase, from which first pulled a conductor's baton.  That is not what he meant, he said.  Then he pulled out the kind of baton marathon runner's pass one to the next.  That is not what he meant.  Finally, he pulled out a large hunting knife.  That is what he meant, he said, just before he striding out of the building never to return.

Of course, the violence that Tigerman referred to repeatedly is less a matter of tearing flesh than an Age of Innocence kind of genteel evisceration.  Indeed, even the imagery of Titanic 2015 - a bomb falling from the sky about to obliterate both Mies's Crown Hall and Frank Gehry's Bilbao museum should be seen as a kind of a McGuffin spurring discussion about succession.

"I thought about an icon," said Tigerman, "and the problem with an icon is it becomes iconic. It's emulated, and thereby watered down . . . The problem with an icon is that people are so overwhelmed by it that they then use it as a referent to then do something . As opposed to having a tabula rasa, a clean sweep. Nothing on your drawing board. You start again anew each time."

"There are originals, and there are copies. So I have a problem with an icon. I mean, I love Frank Gehry and I certainly love Mies van der Rohe. Obviously, Bilbao has become iconic. And it's not about signature work.  Not about Frank replicating or redoing something in a similar certain way. It's about something becoming an icon. Something becomes so staggeringly important that it inhibits one from finding one's own series of icons. So that's what this is about. It's got nothing to do with bombing Crown Hall or Bilbao at all."

"It's the problem of using those referents as inspiration. Inspiration is there in the emptiness of your drawing board or your computer . . . You try to do something each time out of the barn that's new. Not to be different. But just to try your hand at it. Inevitably, there will be things on your mind. Architects always have agendas. Architects are not simply, as Frank Lloyd Wright referred to himself as Louis Sullivan's pencil. They're not the client's pencil. The client comes to you because they're hoping that you have an idea about something. And when you hold up an icon, and that becomes the referent, then the client in a way becomes diminished."

"[Mies] was not going to be held hostage to the vicissitudes of clients. He had a 20-man office. He had 20 people. He had 20 people when he died. And he didn't expand it to 21, or drop it to 19. That was his team. And he wasn't going to have somebody come in and say, oh, we're going to overturn everything to accommodate them."

Stanley Tigerman, Eva Maddox

"Mies was a role model for me. Why do you think I've lived in a Mies building for 45 years? Because he was a really terrific architect. And it was a challenge to me to wake up every morning in a really good building . They're going to drag me out horizontally. That's where I'm going to end my days. Because he was my role model. He was my Abraham."

"Architecture is optimistic. The forces are always there to diminish you.  Building commissioners, zoning administrator, often clients. to diminish the work of the architect . . . You have to have a very strong stomach, and a very strong backbone.  You have to be stunningly and optimistically inclined to cause something to be built."

"It takes a wonderful client to make a really good building to transpire. So it is about optimism. You have to convey that optimism to your clients and everybody in the world, who will make light of what you do. Trust me."

Chicago Architecture Biennial

Tigerman had special praise for the Chicago Architecture Biennial, "which I'm thrilled by. 120 architects from all over the world, all six continents, that [Graham Foundation's] Sarah Herda and Joe Grima, the former editor of Domus, put together with the help of a consulting group that included [Chicago Architecture Foundation's] Lynn Osmond and a number of people. But they did it. And so what you see at the Cultural Center is this thrilling youngest generation , which is thrilling because they somehow have coalesced and they're not quite as back-biting as one finds in New York.

Elva Rubio, Lynn Osmond, Stanley Tigerman, unidentified, Eva Maddox

"Not all of it is wonderful. A huge proportion is quite remarkable. . . . Not everything is happy ending stuff. They get full marks, as far as I'm concerned."

The exhibitions Currencies of Architecture and Celebrating an Icon continue at the Chicago Architecture Foundation, 224 South Michigan.  Concurrent with Celebrating an Icon is a series of panel discussions which continue next Thursday, October 29th, with a Chicago Educators evening including Penelope Dean of UIC, Vedran Mimica of IIT and Ben Nicholson of SAIC; a November 12th event with Carol Ross Barney; SOM's Brian Lee on November 19, and a closing party and auction on December 4th.  More information here.

An exhibition, Stanley Tigerman 821 Stanley Tigerman Sketches 821, is on display at Volume Gallery through December 5th.

 Read More:

The Architect as Zelig: Tigerman's Ceci n'est pas une reverie, at the Graham

Schlepping with Stanley
 

As he receives a Lifetime Achievement Award from AIA Chicago, a Stanley Tigerman Miscellany

As he receives a Lifetime Achievement Award from AIA Chicago, A Stanley Tigerman Miscellany

click images for larger view

A Confession: I've been working on a piece on Stanley Tigerman's Illinois Holocaust Museum ever since it opened ever since it opened over three years ago.  I've been grappling with it ever since, so, for the moment, all I can give you this very informal photo essay on just some of the buildings from his very long career.

This evening, Friday, October 25, Stanley Tigerman will be honored by AIA Chicago with it's Lifetime Achievement Award.  You can read an interview with Tigerman by AIA Chicago's Peter Exley here, or watch last night's interview with WTTW's Geoffrey Baer below.
When I wrote my first article for the The Chicago Reader over ten years ago, it was about the dismal current state of architecture in the city.  My editor Kiki Yablon suggested I get in touch with Tigerman for some input, and although he didn't know me from Adam, he still was incredibly patient and gracious, as he's been in every one of our encounters ever since.  I asked him for some up-and-coming architects we should be watching.  One he mentioned, Darryl Crosby, is a very talented architect we haven't heard enough from.  The second was David Woodhouse,  The third was Jeanne Gang, then largely an unknown.

It just goes to show you how, across six decades, Stanley Tigerman has not just hand his finger on the pulse on Chicago architecture.  He's helped define it, not only through his iconoclastic, often witty buildings, but through his acerbic, pinpoint criticism, and his never flagging activism for architectural education and social justice through the built environment.  If Stanley Tigerman didn't exist, no one could ever have figured out how to create someone like him.  We're all the richer for his enduring presence.

Read more:

The Architect as Zelig:  Tigerman's Ceci n'est pas une reverie

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tigerman, Adrian Smith, Dominque Perrault, Toyo Ito, Playboy Architecture, Open House Chicago, Edgar Allan Poe and much more - it's the October Calendar!

Stanley Tigerman receives AIA Chicago's Lifetime Achievement Award

Will we be adding more? You betcha, but right now, there's almost 60 great items on the just-published October Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.

Things start fast and furious this week, with Adrian Smith talking Wednesday. the 2nd, about Supertall Towers and Green Cities at the Logan Center for the Arts. Also on Wednesday, Anthony Denzer is at CAF talking about his new book, The Solar House: Pioneering Sustainable Design and 6:00 p.m. at IIT, Christophe Cornubert of PUSH is in from L.A. to deliver a lecture at the McCormick Tribune Campus Center.

Architects? At IIT, at Crown Hall we've got Dominque Perrault  on Tuesday, the 8th, and Iñaki Alday, founder, Arquitectura y Paisaje, on Wednesday the 13th, Alphonse Sarthout and Hugo Haas of Ciguë Agency at the Alliance Française.

Monday the 14th, and 2013 Pritzker Prize Laureate Toyo Ito at the Art Institute on

Tuesday, the 15th. Ito will also participate, along with Yusaku Immura, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Moon Kyungwon and Jeon Joonho, at an Art Institute Public Forum, A Conservation on Beauty earlier in the day. Then, on Friday the 25th, Stanley Tigerman will receive AIA Chicago's Lifetime Achievement Award at the 58th Annual Designight, at Navy Pier.

Princeton's Beatriz Colomina's talks about Playboy

Architecture: 1953 - 1979 at the School of the Art Institute on Thursday the 10th, the same day that Tony Tasset of Eye fame is at Unity Temple in Oak Park.  On Thursday the 4th, the Graham is screening Drop City, a documentary about artists who created their dwellings from “the scrapheap of a wasteful society.” This Saturday the 5th, Hedrich-Blessing's Dave Burk will be leading an Architecture Digital Photography Workshop at the Chicago Architecture Foundation.

Open House Chicago is back for its third year.  The Chicago Architecture Foundation event  will give participants access to 150 buildings on Saturday the 19th and Sunday the 20th.

Jeffrey Boyer and Sachin Anan of dbHMS will be at the Chicago Center for Green Technology to talk about the Decarbonization Plan and Triple Net Zero Design of Nalanda University. CAF lunchtime on Wednesday the 16th, there'll be a presentation of Design Evanston's Jack Weiss, Stuart Cohen, Kris Hartzell, Heidi Hoppe and Laura Saviano on the new book, Evanston: 150 Years, 150 Places. The next week - same time, same place - Michael A. Hirsch of Pelli Clarke Pelli and John Culbert, Dean, will discuss their new Theatre School at DePaul University.

Meg Kindelin of Johnson Lasky discusses Highland's Park International Style Battledeck House at the Cultural Center for Landmarks Illinois on Thursday the 17th, the same day that Dianne Harris will be at the Graham in the evening discussing her new book, Little Houses: Race, Space, and the Ordinary Postwar Home, at the same time that Patti Philippon will talk about The House (Mark) Twain and (Louis Comfort) Tiffany Built at the Driehaus Museum. Also at the Driehaus on Thursday, the 29th, architect Richard Economakis will discuss The Civic Hall and New Town of Cayalá, Guatemala.

Architect and urban designer Marshall Brown will talk about The Speculative City at the American Planning Association Tuesday, the 22nd. Also on the 22nd, Steven Monz talks about the Architecture of Benjamin Marshall at the Glessner House Museum, where, just in time for Halloween, the museum sponsors its 27th Annual Edgar Allan Poe Readings on Saturday the 26th.

On October 24th and 25th, there's not one, but two, two-day Facades+Performance at IIT, and Building for Sustainability at the Center for Green Technology. On the 25th, Openlands has its 50th Anniversary Luncheon at the Hilton Chicago.   On Monday the 28th at the House of Blues, there'll be a special Pecha Kucha Chicago/Chicago Tribune Photojournalism, featuring the work and stories of a dozen photojournalists.
symposiums:

As you might imagine, these are just some of the highlights.  You can check them all out on the October 2013 Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.

How I Built a Better City by Going Off the Grid: Last Days to see City Works: Provocations for Chicago's Urban Future

click images for larger view

You have only through this Sunday, September 29th, to see a fascinating show, City Works: Provocations for Chicago's Urban Future, at the Expo 72 Gallery on Randolph across from the Chicago Cultural Center. Originally created for the 2012 Venice Biennale, the exhibition features four separate investigations of the state of Chicago's grid and its future potential.

curator Alexander Eisenschmidt

Last Wednesday, each of the four contributors were on hand to talk about their work.  Curator Alexander Eisenschmidt noted that “What was at stake was finding alternatives to how architecture engages the city. As a collection, I'm arguing that these projects form a kind of parallel city, a city that isn't real, but that does exist in our architectural consciousness . . . sometimes more so than the ones actually constructed.”

Stanley Tigerman

Eisenschmidt gave each participant the exact same 12-by-3 foot tabletop real estate to work with.  In the case of architect Stanley Tigerman's Displacement of the Gridiron with the Cloister, that meant “revisiting the essential nature of the city.” After much of Chicago burned down in the great fire of 1871, a grid was imposed on the endlessly flat terrain of the city.  Tigerman explained . . .

That grid is abstract as well as realistic. It's optimistic, because it is an equivalency of a democracy of buildings. If you're building you could be anywhere in the grid.  It's also alienating, because there's no distinction, there's just the grid block after block.

In Europe, the urban model is much more hierarchical, residential quarters spinning out from a cloistered center around a cathedral or town hall.  Tigerman superimposes the cloister onto his model of Chicago's street grid through representations of buildings, many his own, that break the grid in different ways.  The traditional way of seeing the city is through the hierarchy of its grand boulevards, but Tigerman defended the grid:

We see the downside [of the grid] in the alienation, in the sameness block after block. but that's equally democratic, and in that end if I look at it, I would prefer the grid. Everyone looks down at the side streets of - let's say - Lawndale, Woodlawn, etc., but the side streets of all of those areas - particularly in the summer - are absolutely beautiful.  Taken care of by people who are very proud of them. The most interesting for me is the side streets of the grid, and without making a value judgement that's it's better or worse- it's both democratic and alienating - they're quite wonderful for me to look at again, and I'm constantly reinvigorated when I see them.

David Brown

The U of I's David Brown's Available City draws on development potential of the 15,000 vacant lots - mostly on the south and west sides - that have come to be owned by the City of Chicago, largely acquired through its fast-track demolition program for abandoned and dilapidated structures during the 1980's and 90's.  Taken together, they comprise a land area twice the size of the Loop.

The city would begin to promote the use of those lots as the basis of a kind of collective space. Individual lots . . . implemented through local community organizations.  Each one of those would have an activity, programmatic recreational, educational or other types of activities and at the same time present some kind of work opportunity. 

The program would also be about . . .

encouraging private development occurring on a combination of city-owned lots and privately-owned lots, with the idea that anyone who was building could do so to a higher height, in exchange for provisions for collective space.

Martin Felsen

UrbanLab's Free Water District envisions the grid and abandoned industrial infrastructure in a new way.  Said UrbanLab's Martin Felsen . . . 

The first crisis we were interested in is the population loss in Chicago.  Over the past 12 to 15 years, the greater Chicago area was the only one of the top 15 cities to lose population, down to the sunbelt,  and jobs down to the south.  The crisis down there is kind a resource crisis, mostly around water. A lot of corporations use huge amounts of water in their production process.  Those companies are often where, let's say Arizona, you need an enormous amount of water, and it's very, very expensive.

A new initiative,  Chicago Sustainable Industries,  says to those companies :  why don't you move back to Chicago?  We're a very green city,  We'll work with you to change our infrastructures because we're rich in certain resources.

We took a look at the area around the [former industrial area] at Lake Calumet . . . now it's become really just these brown, empty, sometimes toxic fields.  They're just kind of leftover nothing.  They're turning into prairie. So we thought how can we change that ground, that land, that site, in a way that rethinks the grid, and the infrastructure of the grid, to work with buildings and figure out a way that the water that these companies use could be taken out of the lake, used, and then send that water back into the grid of the city itself and have the grid clean all water before it went back to the lake.

So we create a loop.  Take the water out.  Use it as much as we want.  But hold on to it.  Let the landscape and the grid take care of it and clean it naturally, using very little energy, and then send that water back. The benefit to the corporations is to get a resource that they spend billions of dollars on every year.  The benefit to the city is that they get jobs and a new kind of infrastructure that really thinks about a sustainable way of building a city.  And what the area around this renovated, revitalized district gets is, potentially, a new kind of the park system.

UrbanLab partner Sarah Dunn talked a little more about the idea of a “stormwater park” . . .

.  . . as a cultural attractor. These mounds are sometimes seating for an outdoor theater, sometimes places for sheep to graze.  There are tennis courts, basketball courts.  When the infrastructure is not functioning as a floodplain, it's also a drive-in movie theater.

Lindsey Moyer of Studio/Gang talked about her firm's entry, Reclaiming the Edge . . . 

What's included in the model is really representative of the way that we work in the office.  When we start thinking about a project, we become these research nerds and we're just learning everything about the region, the area immediately around our site, and zoomed out a little bit further. 

In all these projects it was about starting to look at the water that intersects with the sites  and thinking about the condition of the water as it was at the point that we started and how we could revitalize that, and think about how it could be this lasting benefit for the city in future.  I guess in a way all of these projects are architecture in response to crisis.  In each of these sites, the water was in a condition that was not great for recreation or for habitat and we've worked with engineers and ecologists to revitalize these waterfronts and these water habitats.  Each of these sites are an ongoing exploration where the architecture becomes the first step in the process.  It is a spotlight on these sites, and can be become a catalyst in rethinking about how we think about the waterways.

The model lays out Studio/Gang's Chicago waterfront projects as a continuous - if geographically incongruous - urban terrain.  It begins with an idea - the  Reverse Effect project dealing with re-reversing the flow of Chicago river - and moves on to river boathouses and the Lincoln Park  Nature Boardwalk.  Then the proposed Ford Calumet Environmental Center, which is about  . . .

nest-making and gathering and taking all of the materials that have been kind of dumped in the Ford Calumet region and gathering those to create a building that's about how to use these recycled materials.

 . . . and concludes with Studio/Gang's plan for Northerly Island . . .

about integrating with the museum campus to create this outdoor component to that circuit, where you can learn about this inland lagoon, canoe, and even dive to view a sunken ship.

The model actually descends below the water level.  Be sure to check out the tiny models of both the sunken ship and small plane lying on the lake bed.

The models are supplemented by printed material stashed in, and graphics printed over the constructions, as well as circular light pods in the floor projecting illustrations and more information.

Surrounding the exhibition, on the walls of gallery, is Eisenschmidt's Phantom Chicago, in which the drawings of iconic visionary projects from the 20th century, from Adolph Loos entry to the Tribune Tower exhibition to Greg Lynn's Stranded Sears Tower . At one point, Eisenschmidt has actually placed the buildings on their own peninsulas in a realistic, if surreal, re-envisioned juncture of the Chicago River and Lake Michigan.

 (There's also a  Chicago component on the iPhone app, Museum of the the Phantom City, which maps provides information and graphics on such unbuilt projects as the Loos and Gropius Tribune Tower entries.)

This is a great show.  Not only are the ideas behind it intriguing, but the models are rather beautiful in their own way.  They also in include some of the neatest, tiniest model people you'll ever see.  If you look closely UrbanLab's Free Water District, you'll even find horses, sheeps and cows.

City Works: Provocations for Chicago's Urban Future runs only through this coming Sunday, September 29th. Expo 72 Gallery is at 72 East Randolph, open 8:00 a.m. through 7:00 p.m., Monday through Thursday, Friday 8:00 to 6:00, Saturday 9:00 to 6:00, Sunday 10:00 to 6:00.