Gensler’s “Gateway Tower” is a 2000-foot (610 meter) conceptual proposal for the Chicago Spire site. The project is the winning entry for a company-wide internal competition to generate a new megatall structure for the 2.2 acre plot at 400 N. Lake Shore Drive. The mixed-use proposal throws out the residential luxury model that drove Santiago Calatrava’s design, with a concept inspired by tourism and public engagement. Gateway Tower’s volume is still largely devoted to residential functions, but now condos and apartments are coupled with a hotel and public attractions that connect to the riverwalk, lakefront, and city. The building would include four unique experiences including riverfront public access at DuSable Park, a Funicular ride of pods ascending the building’s structural “leg” over Lake Shore Drive, a Skylobby with hotel and retail amenities, and a Skydeck with a restaurant and sky-garden at the building’s pinnacle.
Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R) has unveiled its design for the David M. Rubenstein Forum at the southeast corner of Woodlawn Avenue and 60th Street on the University of Chicago's campus. The 90,000 square foot (8,500 square meter) facility has been devised as a place of intellectual, institutional, and educational exchange, fulfilling a variety of campus needs for meeting spaces. A collection of block-like volumes, the building’s two-story base is anchored by a narrow 165-foot (50 meter) tower, with the exterior materials and structure reflecting the programmatic divisions within.
Studio Gang has designed a new home for the Academy for Global Citizenship (AGC), a Chicago Public Charter School in the Garfield Ridge neighborhood. Established eight years ago with the operating philosophy that a more sustainable world begins at school, the proposed campus is an urban farm and educational institution wrapped into one.
Brick by Brick features a spectacular collection of more than a dozen LEGO-built structures of engineering marvels, constructed by LEGO Certified Professional and Chicago native, Adam Reed Tucker. These model structures include:
In his book We Have Never Been Modern, philosopher Bruno Latour concludes that an inability to make humanity and nature inherently separate is one of Modernism’s most misguided tropes. Thus, contemporary designers that hope to riff on or have continuity with modernism must understand that architecture, even at its most aestheticized, is not hermetically sealed off from the outside world - and that therefore modernism is not a plateau of design, but another base camp on the road to further refinement.
In Chicago, the city where Modernism reached both its metaphoric and physical peak, Atelier 2B, a team of Yewon Ji, Nicolas Lee, Ryan Otterson, recently shared the top-five prize of the Chicago Architecture Foundation's ChiDesign Competition (part of the Chicago Architecture Biennial) for their project Soft in the Middle: The Collaborative Core. Indebted to the legacy of Mies and the International Style, Atelier 2B proposed a Modernist-tower-redux that (externally at least) is composed of three stacked rectangular volumes bisected with terraces, set back from the street by a large public plaza. The project brief called for “a new center for architecture, design and education,” in a competition judged by critics including Stanley Tigerman, David Adjaye, Ned Cramer, Monica Ponce de Leon, and Billie Tsien.
The Chicago Architecture Foundation (CAF) has announced the three winners of its ChiDesign ideas competition to design the Chicago Centre for Architecture, Design and Education (CADE). The competition was in conjunction with the first ever Chicago Architecture Biennial, following the spirit of Robert McCormick’s international competition for the Chicago Tribune Tower in 1922 which opened discourse on the importance of design to the public. Similar to McCormick’s competition, but tackling a more modern, mixed-use typology, the Chicago CADE is envisioned as a facility to house the Chicago Architecture Foundation; the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat; a design and allied arts high school; and learning spaces for an extra-curricular youth program. Read about one of the winners, "Layered Intelligence" after the break, and see another winner, "Unveiled" here.
Come to the Table is an installation made of reconfigurable elements that serve as a platform for dialogue. The construct is a framework to engage local architects, artists and thinkers in questioning What is the State of the Art of Architecture Today? Confirmed Panelists include Penelope Dean (Associate Professor, UIC), Vedran Mimica (Associate Dean, IIT)
and Ben Nicholson (Professor, SAIC).
