Book Review: Visionary Chicago Architecture
Visionary Chicago Architecture: Fourteen Inspired Concepts for the Third Millennia edited by Stanley Tigerman and William Martin. (Amazon)
Chicago ever lives in the shadow of many great architects, most notably Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Mies van der Rohe. But none has had such a profound effect on the ways architects look at the city than Daniel Burnham, who shaped much of the city through his planning of the 1893 Columbian Exposition and his 1909 City of Chicago Plan. In the case of this 2005 book and its fourteen projects, his influence comes through via those words he's often quoted as saying: "Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood and probably will themselves not be realized."
While none of these designs came with a promise of being realized (and probably none ever will), each architect treated their respective site with both creativity and practicality. Neither takes precedence (these are all, to a lesser or greater extent, buildable), though it's definitely the ideas that will survive this exercise started in 2003 by Tigerman and Martin, who invited seven young and seven established architects to look at seven different parts of the city. With one of each addressing each area, the projects find a vague yet apparent divide between the two, most apparently in an emphasis or acceptance of landscape and space by the younger group and an object-oriented approach by many of the established architects. For example, Jeanne Gang uses low-scale hothouses, gardens, and landscaped areas to stitch together the disconnected areas adjacent to the Ohio Street feeder ramps; Adrian Smith on the other hand envisions super tall buildings as a prototype gateway to the city.
Perhaps the best and most popular design in the book is John Ronan's proposal for turning the Old Post Office into a mausoleum that finds an oddly appropriate use for the huge building spanning Congress, frees up land that would be used for cemeteries in the future, but also brings death to the center of the city, a morbid prospect that's also charged with meaning and could have the greatest impact by changing the way people think about the inevitable. In addition to those mentioned, the remaining architects include Ron Krueck, Brad Lynch, Joe Valerio, Doug Garofalo, David Woodhouse, Helmut Jahn, Dirk Lohan, Ralph Johnson, Carol Ross Barney, Larry Booth, and Tom Beeby.
Chicago ever lives in the shadow of many great architects, most notably Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Mies van der Rohe. But none has had such a profound effect on the ways architects look at the city than Daniel Burnham, who shaped much of the city through his planning of the 1893 Columbian Exposition and his 1909 City of Chicago Plan. In the case of this 2005 book and its fourteen projects, his influence comes through via those words he's often quoted as saying: "Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood and probably will themselves not be realized."
While none of these designs came with a promise of being realized (and probably none ever will), each architect treated their respective site with both creativity and practicality. Neither takes precedence (these are all, to a lesser or greater extent, buildable), though it's definitely the ideas that will survive this exercise started in 2003 by Tigerman and Martin, who invited seven young and seven established architects to look at seven different parts of the city. With one of each addressing each area, the projects find a vague yet apparent divide between the two, most apparently in an emphasis or acceptance of landscape and space by the younger group and an object-oriented approach by many of the established architects. For example, Jeanne Gang uses low-scale hothouses, gardens, and landscaped areas to stitch together the disconnected areas adjacent to the Ohio Street feeder ramps; Adrian Smith on the other hand envisions super tall buildings as a prototype gateway to the city.
Perhaps the best and most popular design in the book is John Ronan's proposal for turning the Old Post Office into a mausoleum that finds an oddly appropriate use for the huge building spanning Congress, frees up land that would be used for cemeteries in the future, but also brings death to the center of the city, a morbid prospect that's also charged with meaning and could have the greatest impact by changing the way people think about the inevitable. In addition to those mentioned, the remaining architects include Ron Krueck, Brad Lynch, Joe Valerio, Doug Garofalo, David Woodhouse, Helmut Jahn, Dirk Lohan, Ralph Johnson, Carol Ross Barney, Larry Booth, and Tom Beeby.
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