Building the future
Chicago architects envision what the city will look like 100 years from now
Giant windmills, floating skyscrapers and an "elevator to space" in Lake Michigan. An automated 64-lane superhighway in the center of Chicago. Navy Pier reinvented as a year-round farmer's market. A system of underground tunnels through which people travel throughout the city and state. A network of water-recycling "eco-boulevards." Houses made of bioengineered trees.
These were among the mind-bending ideas for what Chicago might look like 100 years from now, presented as part of "The City of the Future: a Design and Engineering Challenge," a competition of local architectural teams held last month at the Chicago Architecture Foundation. Sponsored by the History Channel (as an offshoot of "Engineering an Empire," a series that examines architectural and engineering marvels of the ancient world) and other groups, the contest featured eight teams that were given a week to envision and create presentations for the city in the year 2106.
The winning team won $10,000 and the right to compete in a national round next month against the victors in similar competitions in New York and Los Angeles. Starting Tuesday, the winning projects will be previewed on the History Channel's Web site (www.history.com/designchallenge), with visitors to the site invited to vote for their favorites. The team receiving the most votes will win an additional $10,000 and be named the National City of the Future. Guiding the process will be a jury led by architect Daniel Liebeskind, designer of the Ground Zero master plan.
Some of the teams work feverishly right up until the loud buzzer sounds, while others wrap things up early enough to have lunch before the afternoon's judging. Among the latter group is Garofalo Architects, with its leader, Chicago architect Doug Garofalo, surrounded by his young staff as he jots down notes on cards to prepare for his presentation to the jurors.
Garofalo's scheme is in some ways the most radical of the contest projects, envisioning the abolition of automobiles not only from Chicago but from the entire state of Illinois. In the team's vision, transportation (as well as shipping, heating and utility systems) would be accomplished by means of an "aeroduct," a network of underground tunnels along a one-mile-square Jeffersonian grid, with a station at every crossing point. The aeroduct would be powered by electricity generated by air drawn upward from below ground inside the walls of double-skinned skyscrapers. Old transportation systems, including the L and highways, would be converted to green space for use as recreational and/or arable land.
"The suburbs are sprawling to the west in not-so-aesthetic fashion, eating up land, being inefficient and creating an energy crisis," Garofalo says. "We don't like sprawl, but we don't think it will stop, so we're creating a kind of counter to it. In a nutshell, what we see ourselves doing is creating a different kind of sprawl and accelerating it -- bringing the sprawl back to the city in a different form, reintroducing the prairie and agriculture to an urban setting."
As seemingly unrealistic as the scheme is, Garofalo says, something like it will be necessary to avert a major ecological and energy crises in the next century. "If the world lived like Chicagoans do, currently we'd need six more planets by 2106 to find the necessary resources to support our way of life. It's hard to imagine how things are running now. It's absurd."
It's suggested to Garofalo that the average person examining his vision of 22nd-century Chicago might consider him and his team to be, well, nuts.
"And they'd be right," he says with a smile.
Each team is given 15 minutes to present its concept to the judges, who listen and, if time allows, ask questions. First up are Brad Lynch (of Brininstool + Lynch), Denison and Garofalo, all of whom envision Chicago as free of automobiles. Lynch imagines the freeways repurposed as agricultural belts, interspersed with markets and parks and covered with a translucent fabric of solar-energy collectors. Denison posits a new technology called Grafted Crystalline Mesh (GCM), which revolutionizes transportation and utility systems. Garofalo pictures a new metropolitan planning authority which manages growth and developing in an area that extends west to the Mississippi River.
"Boy, we're really getting rid of those cars!" Cramer says during a break in which the judges digest the early presentations.
"Interesting ideas about the future, but I'm not sure I'd want to live in any of them," Kemp adds. "Looks like we may have similar concepts across the board; it's just a matter of who makes it more compelling."
But the rest of the presentations begin to diverge onto wildly different paths, many of them increasingly speculative -- and with personal ground transportation intact. Strawn.Sierralta imagines the surface of Lake Michigan dotted by buoyant bases supporting floating skyscrapers that produce 75 percent of the city's energy and, as an added bonus, scrub the air of toxins. UrbanLab's concept focuses on water, the "new oil" of the 22nd century, using a system of "eco-boulevards" to recycle 100 percent of the city's wastewater. In a somewhat similar fashion, CUADc + Friends pictures a system of "prairie canals" that collect runoff to irrigate urban forests of poplars, willows and bamboo.
The last two presentations are the most far-out of all. Protostudio's is positively apocalyptic, imagining Chicago as the great American refuge from the devastation of global warming and other environmental catastrophes that have submerged or otherwise damaged New York, New Orleans and Los Angeles. Chicago's 22nd-century amenities, in this scheme, will include a space elevator (built to facilitate construction of the first solar array), a 64-lane automated superhighway and a system of hydro-farms on the Great Lakes. In perhaps the contest's single most arresting image, the LaSalle Street corridor is envisioned as a maze of futuristic towers connected by "sky gardens" and swooping pedways.
Finally there's architect Joe Valerio's vision of central Chicago covered by an energy-producing "biological thermochromatic double skin" -- heat trapped under the skin rises through solar towers and powers a series of wind turbines -- and flanked by suburban and rural areas where families build their own "bio-chemical" houses using bioengineered trees grown in place.
Some of the concepts are controversial because they seem too unrealistic. "Maybe I'm a little too pragmatic," Kemp says, "but I think some of the schemes reached way out and relied on something that doesn't exist."
Rosa nods, frowning. "Protostudio is the one with the elevator. I just --"
"Oh, I know," Cramer says. "There's something sci-fi about it."
"That would be a compliment," Rosa says tartly.
"But I think there's a wow factor to what they've proposed that's legitimately valuable," Cramer says.
"Right up until that 64-lane highway," Shepherd says.
"Oh my God," Healey says. "It would give the traffic engineers a heart attack."
Cramer isn't quite ready to give up on Protostudio. "But it did demonstrate a variety of levels --"
"But," Rosa says incredulously, "an elevator to the sky?"
"Well, if that's a legitimate technology that they're working on --"
"But didn't Valerio have better technology thinking?"
Now it's Cramer's turn to frown. "Biomorphic trees that aren't even on the drawing board?"
"At least it's a future I look forward to," Rosa says, "and want to be a part of."
Valerio and UrbanLab are complimented for having put the most thought into the specific landscape of Chicago and environs.
"That's right," Kemp says. "The space needle -- I wrote down, 'It seems like it came from some other place.' "
Rosa nods. "What I liked about UrbanLab was that they're operating in architecture and they're specifically urban. And they're looking at the fabric of the city in a way that situated itself in the reality of the ground, which includes people and vehicles."
"It's not sci-fi," Kemp says. "So am I hearing UrbanLab in first place?"
"It was the only scheme of all of them," Cramer says, "where I felt like I looked at the objects they made, and I got it."
"And I wanted to be there," Kemp says.
And so it's done. UrbanLab is the winner, with Valerio and Strawn.Sierralta receiving honorable mentions.
"We did it," Kemp says. "Cool."