In 2012, Chicago residents were asked to participate in the process of planning the city’s cultural future. The city has long been home to world-class cultural venues, such as the Art Institute of Chicago, as well as localized neighborhood cultural events and festivals. With the intention of expanding the tremendous cultural capital Chicago has, in [...]
The summer of 2012 saw a drastic uptick in the number of shootings and murders across the city of Chicago, Illinois. While many metropolitan areas, including New York City, have been experiencing historic lows in their homicide and violent crime rates, Chicago saw 532 murders last year, a number higher than troop killings in Afghanistan. [...]
In recent years we have begun to feel the effects of climate change the world over. In America, hurricanes like Superstorm Sandy and Katrina brought urban areas to their knees, killing people, destroying communities, and causing untold billions in damage. In this context, urban analyst and historian James S. Russell’s book The Agile City calls [...]
With last fall’s announcement that the low-cost supermarket Village Foods would be closing in favor of a new upscale Whole Foods location, a long-running debate about gentrification on Chicago’s South Side was re-ignited. The Hyde Park storefront is adjacent to the University of Chicago, and is part of a larger development project slated to bring [...]
James Corner’s Field Operations, renowned designer of New York’s High Line Park, won the design competition for Chicago’s Navy Pier one year ago. The attraction is approaching its centennial in 2016, and the trustees of Navy Pier, Inc. hope the renovations will be completed in time to celebrate. Navy Pier is a major tourist attraction [...]
As architect Bertrand Goldberg’s civic legacy was highlighted in his engagement with Federal regulators during the Marina City Project, another prominent building of his remains mired in a preservation struggle. The Prentice Women’s Hospital (pictured above) is considered an icon of modern design, and the National Trust for Historic Preservation just lost the fight to save it from [...]
Bertrand Goldberg’s iconic Marina City project has been a fixture of Chicago’s skyline for decades. The unique, futuristic, corncob-shaped towers, constructed using innovative concrete pouring techniques, represented a bold expression of design in the late 1950’s. As remarkable as Marina City is from a design perspective, a retrospective on Goldberg’s work at the Art Institute [...]
With the trend of de-industrialization common to many American cities, the 93,500 square-foot Peer Foods meatpacking plant was in danger of being abandoned when it was sold in 2010 to a unique social enterprise. Enter the The Plant, an ambitious effort to convert this huge facility into a vertical farm and business incubator. By recruiting [...]
Ever wonder why the supermarket only carries four types of apples? With the proliferation of commercial-scale agriculture, hundreds of unique fruit and vegetable varietals were lost, spurned in favor of heartier and easier to ship breeds. The Chicago Rarities Orchard Project, or CROP, is a new initiative that seeks to reclaim this lost biodiversity (along [...]
In July of 2012, Target opened a brand new location in downtown Chicago, in architect Louis Sullivan’s famed Carson Pirie Scott building. Critics were left to wonder if the landmark building’s character could be preserved with such a corporate tenant, yet the remarkable cast-iron façade remains intact, and the exterior corporate branding is less obtrusive [...]
The city of Chicago’s flat topography makes it a bicyclist’s paradise, where despite the harsh winters, the lack of hills invites people to pedal. With the recent surge of citizens choosing sustainable two-wheeled transit, the city has struggled to keep the increasing numbers of cyclists safe, with a 38% increase in bicycle accidents from 2001-2011. [...]
Geoff Manaugh’s BLDGBLOG book attempts to frame the world as consisting of architecture, resultant of design choices, as legible texts similar to a work of literary fiction, and perhaps most importantly, open to the possibility of rebuilding. With his personal interests at the fore (including a penchant for novelistic allegory and acoustic quality of space), [...]
In September, two coal-burning power plants on the Southwest side of Chicago closed down operations, leaving the nearby communities with the pressing question of how best to re-use the combined 132 acres. The Fisk and Crawford coal plants have been decommissioned by their owner Midwest Generation in response to increasing pressure from community groups and [...]
A typical three-story walkup building in Chicago Urban planners the world over recognize that affordable housing is crucial for neighborhood stability, as well as workforce diversity and the economic sustainability of a given region. But in the summer of 2012, the tight rental market in major cities like Chicago meant that landlords could get record [...]
An innovative air-filtration system is the central feature of the proposed CO2ngress Gateway Towers, a skyscraper project envisioned by two students at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Situated over the busy Congress Parkway interchange, which serves some 77,000 vehicles a day, the two towers would capture CO2 from the air and feed it to algae [...]
