Belgian architect Lucien Kroll is the lone big-name designer among the three winners of the Tribune architecture competition.
Although he has never visited Chicago, Kroll has lectured in New York, Miami, Los Angeles and Seattle, and his work has been published in architectural journals in France, Britain and the United States.
Kroll brings an international perspective to the competition, having redesigned major housing projects outside Paris and in Nimes, in the south of France.
Some of the projects, he said, are similar to the Cabrini-Green public housing development: 15-story buildings, constructed 25 years ago and populated by low-income tenants.
The Nimes project, which involves the rehabilitation of prefabricated houses in that city, strongly resembles the architect’s proposal for Cabrini-Green, with its altered building tops and low-rise buildings wrapped around existing high-rises.
His design for Cabrini-Green, Kroll acknowledged, “put together everything we had experienced elsewhere.”
Kroll is well known for his opposition to the rigid geometries of modern architecture and for his populist desire to involve residents of European housing projects in his plans to rehabilitate their homes.
“We talk with the people. We don’t stay in the office,” the 66-year-old Kroll said in an interview from his studio in Brussels.
“They privatize a certain area. They make gardens,” Kroll explained. “The solution of the problem is not an architectural problem. Architecture is one of the different tools.”
Kroll’s design for Cabrini strongly resembles medieval villages, which the architect admires for being “happily chaotic.”
“Medieval villages are universal and eternal, without age,” he said. “It is a form of freedom.”
