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Visionary Chicago
Architecture: Fourteen Inspired Concepts for the Third Millennia,
edited by Stanley Tigerman and William Martin.
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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