Time Travel And ‘Energy Umbrellas’: Chicago Gets A Makeover For The 22nd Century

This year, Chicago celebrates the centennial anniversary of the publication of Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennett’s Plan of Chicago. The Plan, now considered an ur-text of urban planning, was conceived with the greater metropolitan region in mind, and identified six cornerstones of development: highways, rails, parks, systematized streets, civic centers, and the lakefront. Over the several decades that followed, Burnham’s vision transformed not just Chicago’s visual landscape, but its social and psychological portrait as well.

To honor the anniversary, the city asked local architects, planners and landscape architects to issue proposals for large- and small-scale developments for the new century.  The results are startling—alternately haunting and comic, they offer both sweeping answers to systemic ills and imaginative exercises in, for example, an “umbrella of magnetic energy” that “powers public transportation.” (Below, see an overview of 9 striking proposals.)

But before reviewing the new ideas, let’s take a moment to look back at the original Plan and its creator: Burnham was an architect of colossal stature, the Robert Moses of Chicago (though certainly more well-liked). He presided over the construction of the 1892 World’s Fair, served as president of the American Institute of Architects, and designed, among countless others, New York’s Flatiron Building and DC’s Union Station. “Make no little plans,” he said, according to a posthumous quotation, “They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably will not themselves be realized.”

Some of Burnham’s ideas were implemented, and some had been proposed before, although not necessarily with the same depth and clarity of foresight. (Check out this interactive map to see a few comparisons between old Chicago and new.) Burnham wanted to emulate Hausman’s Paris, with its wide boulevards and florid parks. Of Chicago’s 29 miles of lakefront property, he wrote, “Not a foot of its shores should be appropriated to the exclusion of the people.”  To this day, 25 of those 29 miles are public parkland, and avenues were expanded and constructed as Burnham envisioned. The Virtual Burnham Initiative at Lake Forest College has a set of videos with 3-D renderings of what Burnham’s plans would have looked like, fully realized:

It was a radical vision, suited to a city whose population would increase by more than fifty percent over the course of the twentieth century. And the proposals for Chicago’s growth in the twenty-first show equal fervor, but the challenges before them—environmental, social, and economic—are of a decidedly different sort than those Burnham faced. This brings us to “Big. Bold. Visionary. Chicago Considers the Next Century,” and its gloriously ambitious view of Chicago at the start of the 22nd century.

If the “Big Plans” proposals are any indication, we’re racing towards a weird and magical world. From Dirk Denison Architects, we get “Grafted Crystalline Mesh.”   Now, grafted crystalline mesh doesn’t exist yet. But when it does, paved roads will be obsolete, freed for urban farming and open spaces, and it’ll provide public transportation and energy distribution from wind farming, solar heat collection, and metabolic heat harnessing—whatever that is.

Brininstool+Lynch goes one step further with their energy umbrella and a new grid that will form “the historic, geo-political base for the future growth of Chicago.” The first image below depicts (I think?) the aforementioned “umbrella of magnetic energy.” Once in place, “The Chicago Grid” will allow Chicagoans to be partially invisible, travel through time, and walk on water. Score!

For Valerio Dewalt Train, whose slogan is “Build or Die,” the 22nd century “will be the bio-chemical century.” Therefore, the city must be blanketed by a “transparent, biologically engineered, thermocromatic skin,” penetrated only by “taller building” and known as “Chicago 1000011101.” Heat escaping from the enclosure powers turbines; “centrifugal windmills” augment energy production. Not clear what happens to people here.

Zoka Zola’s “Plan for 21st Century Chicago” offers an ingenious restructuring of Chicago’s zoning laws.  Simple steps like omitting side yards and removing porch stairs would allow the layout of a standard 25′x125′ lot to accommodate trees in big backyards and greenhouses on garage roofs.

The Loop, Chicago’s downtown elevated train system, is an icon, albeit a rough-and-tumble one. Garafolo Architects proposes new station stops (below) with public activity spaces and “continuous rooftop ecology,” making it one of several ideas in the BBV exhibit with emphasis on urban farming. Another, Hana Ishikawa’s “Urban Agriculture,” sets as its goal the production of “80% of fresh produce raised within city boundaries in 100 years.”

David Woodhouse Architects, like VDT above, think Chicago needs a technological blankie; theirs, however, covers only the Education District and is made up of a web of cables holding “panels of programmable LED nodes and the photovoltaic cells that power them.”

And then there is Studio Gang’s “Transcending Type.” A baseball stadium amidst high-rise buildings, “Transcending Type” deploys a retractable “kinetic seating bowl” 30 stories above field level. Presumably, the location precludes the need for parking lots; what it’s like to watch a game from that altitude, however, is another issue.

Several projects bank on Chicago hosting the Olympics, including Adrian Smith-Gordon Gill Architecture’s “Eco Bridge,” a breakwater in Monroe harbor with recreational spaces and views of the skyline from a central Eco-Tower.  That tower, of course, would “harvest wind and solar power,” but more importantly, check out how it mimics the breakwater in the first image of Burnham’s plan above.

And finally, among the several “Towers” proposals, there is “Eco-Casino” by Studio Gang—the same folks responsible for “Transcending Type.” Its true innovation, if brought to fruition, is the marriage of sustainability and gambling, where the environment (to date) always loses. The roulette skyline bar, powered by wind turbines, sits beneath a bay of solar-powered slot machines by the rooftop pool, and patrons can bet on the weather.

The plans are on display at the Chicago Tourism Center Gallery through October 11.