Ninety-five years ago, architect Daniel Burnham sketched a plan for Chicago’s lakefront that proved so captivating that city voters backed a $20 million bond issue to build a chunk of it, including Northerly Island (which later became a lakefront airport that a certain king — er, mayor — shut down in the middle of the night).
Now, in the skylit lobby of the very building where Burnham worked out his 1909 Plan of Chicago, a bracing exhibit showcases new visions for the city’s lakefront. All of them take us beyond Burnham’s formal visions of ladies promenading in full-length dresses and shading themselves with parasols. The plans answer a question that presumably never occurred to Burnham way back at the start of the 20th Century — What should a park look like in the 21st Century?
Imagine Chicago’s shoreline outfitted with concrete steppingstones that would allow you to walk amid the lapping waters of Lake Michigan and feed the fish beneath you. Quite a difference from those brute new sea walls that line the lakefront like a concrete bathtub.
Or think of the lakefront as a collection of bargelike structures–some floating, others resting on the ground, all of them joined to form an uninterrupted park. Different barges would have different uses, from forests to athletic fields. As the needs of the park changed, the barges could change with them. That’s a rejection of the idea (probably started by some vain landscape architect) that no one should mess with a park once it’s finished.
There are more provocative peeks into the future in this show, which asked architects to create new visions of outdoor public space by fleshing out Mayor Richard M. Daley’s idea to extend Lincoln Park northward 2 1/2 miles to the Evanston border.
North of Hollywood Avenue, where the park and Lake Shore Drive now end, there could be “Offshore Drive,” a parkway along an island stretching to Evanston. At the Chicago-Evanston border, there might be a ferry terminal from which you could zip to Navy Pier or to St. Joseph, Mich. There are proposals for atolls dotted with parks and beaches. And how about lakefront windmills that would provide enough electricity for an entire neighborhood?
These visions are the result of a conceptual design competition organized by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, a Chicago-based foundation that makes research grants in architecture. The foundation, to its credit, has taken a step beyond that insular role and has attempted to shake up the way we look at Chicago’s greatest public space.
The thesis is simple but profound: We don’t live the way people did 100 years ago. Our parks should be designed accordingly.
There were six winners and 24 other recognized designs in the competition, which drew more than 100 entries from around the country and was judged by six experts, including the foundation’s executive director, Richard Solomon (full disclosure: Solomon is a friend of mine, but we know each other well enough to say “you’re nuts” when we disagree).
The 30 select designs are now on display in the lobby of 224 S. Michigan Ave., a 100-year-old office building clad in white terra cotta that was designed by Burnham’s firm and housed his offices. The Chicago Architecture Foundation, best known for its architecture tours, uses the building’s atrium as an exhibition space. The two foundations are jointly presenting this show, called “21st-Century Lakefront Park Competition.”
Some people may see the proposals as finished blueprints, but they are better understood as visions. Think of them as searchlights that illuminate a path beyond such shop-worn prototypes as Burnham’s starchy Beaux-Arts classicism or Frederick Law Olmsted’s idea of the park as a picturesque imitation of nature.
They join with the adventurous garden now under construction in Millennium Park, which was conceived as a rooftop garden for the parking garage beneath it, to articulate a new grammar of park design — one is that flexible rather than fixed, joined to infrastructure rather than holding it at arm’s length.
Admittedly, some of the plans, like the atolls, are a little wacky. Yet that’s OK. Exploring the future is an adventure. Better to let creative minds run free than to constrain them with slavish attention to detail. Shows like these are supposed to produce big ideas — and this one delivers, with alluring concrete proposals and conceptual heft.
`Woven Composite’
Take the plan called “Woven Composite,” by Chicago architect Carol Ross Barney and five other designers.
In the 19th Century industrial city, waterfront parks were, in effect, walled off from their environs. They were a separate place where you sought a separate peace. The city was a machine, dirty and ugly; the park was a garden, clean and beautiful.
But in the post-industrial era, the city is less of a threatening beast. So instead of walling off the city, Barney and crew weave it into the park. They extend the checkerboard pattern of Chicago’s street grid onto the lakefront. The land itself bends and warps, offering a gorgeously undulating landscape to the Chicago flatlands. It also creates hills under which half of the Lake Shore Drive extension could be tunneled.
This plan celebrates motion, but maybe it’s got too much dynamism–and not enough serenity. Its sketch of someone reading a book with cars zipping by and a skier flying off a hill into the air doesn’t seem particularly restful. Even in the post-industrial era, we need parks for a respite from the congested city.
There’s a similar blurring of boundaries in the plan with the steppingstones, which is called “Eco Tones” and was put together by three New York architects — Natalie Jeremijenko, Laura Kurgan and Kate Orff. In this case, however, it’s the wall between park and lake, rather than city and park, that’s being torn down.
The architects propose a series of spots along the shoreline where humans and animals could interact. You would walk along the steppingstones, for example, and drop some kind of fish food into holes in them. The fish would swim by and snap up their meal.
This plan, which the architects call “an open and distributed zoo without cages,” would encourage parkgoers to come into direct, and active, contact with nature rather than passively observing it from afar. That’s a marked departure from Olmsted’s parks, which created beautiful vistas that we observe at some remove, as if looking at a landscape painting.
But you have to wonder if these carefully planned interactions might have unplanned consequences, like disturbing the fish’s ecosystem.
Why should they swim all over Lake Michigan when they know someone’s going to feed them? Imagine bloated fish needing to go on the Atkins fish diet. Perhaps just the steppingstones would work — without the holes for fish food.
A far more comprehensive approach drives the plan crafted by three teachers from the University of Illinois at Chicago (Cecilia Benites, Julie Flohr and Clare Lyster). This is the one with the barge-like structures that allow different uses. They represent a kind of menu approach to public space, which is why the plan carries the whimsical title “Assembled Ecologies: Infrastructure a la Carte.”
The proposal calls for a northern extension of Lincoln Park, using conventional landfill that would curve outward from the present canyon of high-rises along North Sheridan Road. Lake Shore Drive would extend northward on this peninsula, as would the aforementioned ferry terminal.
Floating barges would go within a reservoir between the peninsula and the existing shoreline. Other, barge-like structures would be inserted within the landfill. Five types of these structures would form a grid of green space, one that, the architects claim, could be endlessly rearranged.
Here, at least in theory, the park would be “smart” and ever-mutating in response to changing needs, as if it were controlled by a computer. Nothing could be more different from the fixed visions of Burnham’s and Olmsted’s day.
In practice, however, moving around the barge-like structures isn’t likely to be easy or inexpensive. There’s also the danger that all those barges would make the park a patchwork–more like a crazy-quilt than a continuous greensward.
Still, this is a fascinating plan, impressive both in its sweep and level of detail. In case you’re wondering, the architects say that their curving stretch of land would shield the reservoir from waves, preventing the floating barges from bobbing up and down and making parkgoers seasick.
Another theme that pops up in the winning designs is the idea of making parks useful, which, in the past, they weren’t.
`Elektron Park’
There are windmills in the plan called “Elektron Park” by Catherine Seavitt and Koukaba Mojadidi of New York. They would generate enough electricity to light 247 city blocks in the neighborhood just west of the park.
There’s another bright (but maybe dangerous) idea in the proposal known as “Trans-location: Remediation: Colonization,” by Matthew Gordy and Heath Mizer of Cambridge, Mass.
In their plan, contaminated soil from throughout Chicago would be sealed in floating containers and placed off-shore. The containers would be oriented to capture sand drifting southward along the lakefront, creating islands for recreation and other uses.
Undoubtedly, some residents of the Sheridan Road high-rises will scream: Not in my back yard! And you can’t blame them. Without iron-clad guarantees that there would be no leakage from the containers, this attempt to heal the urban landscape should be DOA.
The sixth winning design — “Infinity Edge,” by Ramiro Diazgranados and Georgina Huljich of Venice, Calif., which calls for a series of atolls — is a head-scratcher.
To be anchored to the lake floor by a central support tower, the atolls would resemble mushrooms, suggesting a cap atop a stem. They would contain everything from private homes to public beaches whose undulating landscape would suggest sand dunes, or a manmade wilderness.
Maybe there’s something to this visually seductive California beauty. But maybe it’s too clever by half. It’s certainly troublesome both philosophically and practically. Should we allow private homes to infiltrate the lakefront’s public realm? And how would we get to the atolls–by putt-putt boats?
An academic exercise?
That points to a danger confronting even the good ideas in the 21st Century park competition. This competition, like all conceptual exercises, may turn out to be nothing more than a study that winds up on a shelf.
Indeed, since the summer of 2002, when Daley floated the idea of extending Lincoln Park northward, he has had little to say about it. The all-powerful mayor also has a fresh lakefront issue on his agenda — what to do with Meigs, which he preemptively closed last year after the beginning of the Iraq war, citing the chance that small, private planes might smack into Loop skyscrapers. He still wants to turn Meigs into a park.
Still, it’s not inconceivable that the show could inform any number of future lakefront projects. The point is not so much the drawings as the ideas behind them. Powerful concepts have staying power.
Burnham himself spoke of the enduring impact of a “noble, logical diagram.” Once recorded, he said, it “will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing asserting itself with growing intensity.” The organizers of the 21st Century park competition deserve credit for spawning a new generation of noble lakefront plans, especially because these innovative proposals look entirely different from the one Burnham conceived at 224 S. Michigan 95 years ago.
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“21st-Century Lakefront Park Competition” appears at the Chicago Architecture Foundation, 224 S. Michigan Ave., through May 2.
