Elva Rubio on Burnham’s relevance
Rubio is executive vice president and creative director at the renowned firm of Bruce Mau Design and is a co-founder of Mau’s Chicago-based studio, Rubio Studios. She is past president of the Chicago Architectural Club, chairs the Burnham Prize competition and is associate professor at the UIC School of Architecture.
Burnham left us with an incredible legacy — realized physical evidence of his plan and, more importantly, a vision and identity for the city. The image of Burnham evokes for me a grand master directing a formal concept and conscience of a city and overhauling the scrappy, Western-front town into a world-class example of modernity and urbanity.
I do not think, however, that our generation has Burnham’s tools in our kit. By the year 2050, 75 percent of the world’s population will be living in dense urban environments. Cities are not safe, clean or democratic places. They are physical examples of inequalities in our system. Our responsibility to future generations requires a critical investigation of the essential issues that all cities face. Incremental moves rather than a grand overview might be a key to the next urbanity.
For me, the Wacker Manual, published in 1920 for Chicago public schoolchildren, was the most inspirational outcome of Burnham’s Plan. The Manual, an effort to help sell Burnham’s vision to the public, explained the benefits of the plan and introduced a profound idea: that citizens have a responsibility for the stewardship of a great city. Small individual contributions and decisions ultimately have the greatest impact on a city’s success.
The Wacker Manual 2.0 would recognize that such contributions have an effect at the macro scale of the city. The logistics and strategy may differ from Burnham’s. However, the outcome would eventually add to the beauty, well-being and identity of our city, hopefully with global implications and contributions. What if child safety and well-being were as important as storm water as an urban feature? What if healthy, fresh food supplies were a citywide right achieved through new urban infrastructures? Design thinking is once again a key component for success.
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Philip Enquist on the Lakefront Master Plan
Enquist heads the urban design and planning studios of the Chicago office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP, the firm that drafted the Lakefront Master Plan, which aims to transform the 573 acres of the shuttered U.S. Steel plant into a new South Side community of 30,000 people. It is the last big piece of developable land along the lake.
The project will be built over something like 20 years and will address the demand in the Southeast Side area for affordable housing, retail — which there’s virtually none of now — and provide office space and jobs and attract educational institutions.
Its influence will spread to surrounding communities by becoming a retail destination and also offering a tremendous lakefront park. The project fills a gap in the chain of lakefront parkland.
In the middle of the project there’s a stretch of water called the North Slip. That was where ships came in from the lake with materials for steelmaking. The developer is responsible for providing public access along the slip. There will be waterfront houses, cafes and more. The Chicago Park District is responsible for public access to the lake and the Calumet River.
In the Burnham Plan, there was a proposal for a very large industrial harbor. We propose a 1,000-boat marina. The project recognizes the importance of this spot where the Calumet meets Lake Michigan. Since the property juts out into the lake, the views are stunning.
Public transportation will be supported by three Metra stations and bus lines near and through the project. South Shore Drive will be rebuilt to be less a truck route and more a pedestrian-friendly boulevard.
A giant breakwater that protects the mouth of the Calumet could provide wind energy, if we could locate windmills on it. That part of Lake Michigan is especially deep and cold and might be a way to provide cooling at reduced energy rates.
The plan reflects the Chicago spirit: a very large project, probably the largest infill project in Chicago, that adds great value to the surrounding area.
Although it’s a massive and important project, there’s not a big ‘Wow!’ factor. It’s a quiet, simple idea for building neighborhoods.
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Doug Farr on sustainability and Chicago
Farr is founder and president of Farr Associates, a Chicago-based sustainable architecture and planning firm that is the first in the world to design three buildings certified as “platinum,” the highest distinction under the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System. He is author of “Sustainable Urbanism: Urban Design with Nature.”
Sustainability points us toward a future lived locally in one’s neighborhood — getting around on foot, bike and transit. A greater share of our money will be spent on locally owned businesses and our quality of life will be shaped by fine-grained neighborhood issues: test scores in the walk-to elementary school, selection and service offered by walk-to retailers and the eye-level beauty of urban (architectural and landscape) design. Only now are we beginning to understand how important livable cities like Chicago are to providing sustainable lifestyle choices where Americans will voluntarily choose to live.
The sustainability and climate change debate has focused almost exclusively on efficient technology alone — light bulbs, cars and buildings — to solve our environmental problems. Efficiency is essential, but it only makes cheaper the things we need to do less of, such as powering ever-larger homes and driving ever-longer distances. Chicago’s urbanism — its mixed-use, transit-served neighborhoods — is the foundation of long-term sustainability, making smaller homes and shorter trips an attractive alternative.
In order to be truly sustainable, Chicago’s urbanism needs to be integrated with high-performance buildings and high-value infrastructure. While a few regional examples of this sustainable urbanism are currently being built, it is a powerful international trend with numerous built examples.
The Beddington Zero Energy Development (BEDZED) is one such mixed-use project, built outside London with the ambitious development goal of living within an ecological footprint of One Planet (a set of 10 principles calling for zero carbon, zero waste, sustainability and localism). True, BEDZED fell short of this goal, achieving roughly a 1.2 planet equivalence (by comparison, One Planet’s estimate is that if everyone in the world lived like Americans, we would need five planets to support us). But its developers found that 62 percent of its carbon reductions — insulation, solar panels and so on — were accomplished through technology while 38 percent were achieved through changes in conduct.
The finding that our future in sustainability demands technological and cultural change contains a revolutionary opportunity for Chicago’s immediate future: a bottom-up sustainable renewal of the technology and culture of every building, block and neighborhood over the next generation. Burnham gave Chicago its good bones, setting the stage for this opportunity through top-down planning. While we might differ over approach, it is hard to imagine that the grandness of this complete plan for renewal would fail to stir his heart.
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EDITED BY CHARLES LEROUX
