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 -by Lynn Becker

[October 7, 2009] - An entertaining and challenging compilation of ideas for Chicago's Future is at the Chicago Tourism Center, but only through Sunday, October 11.

OK, here's the bad thing about Big.Bold.Visionary Chicago Considers the Next Century, the great show sponsored by the Burnham Plan Centennial that you have only five days to see until it ends its run at the Chicago Tourism Center, 72 E. Randolph, on Sunday, October 11th: As part of this year's massively ambitious Burnham Plan Centennial celebration, you'd think we would have come up some suitable grand framework and let Chicago architects have at it. Instead, apart from a not insubstantial portion of new content, what we have here is sort of a "greatest hits" compilation drawing on various competitions, shows, and promotions going all the way back to least 2003.

That aside, the concept of the show has a lot to recommend it. Not only do you get to see all of these ideas intermingled, for the first time, in a single location, but even with previously exhibited projects, there's a good chance you've never seen them before. There are a lot of items, for example - like Ron Krueck's Sensescape museum -from Visionary Chicago Architecture, a collection of 14 speculations that Stanley Tigerman curated for the Chicago Central Area Committee in 2005. That spectacular exhibition should have been shown on Millennium Park's Chase Promenade. Instead, it was exiled to the sun-bleached walls of the raised terrace hidden behind the Harris Theater, where only a handful of people probably even knew it was there. Other Big.Bold installations, like UrbanLab's Growing Water, came from the History Channel's City of the Future competition, which was on display for all of a day back in 2007.

At Big.Bold you get to see it all together. Curator Edward Keegan has organized the exhibition into six sections, to which the individual entries sometimes adhere, and sometimes seem to want to leak out into other categories.

Interestingly enough, for a city known for its skyscrapers, perhaps the weakest component of the show is Towers. Smith+Gill's Clean Tech Tower seems a little brother to projects like their Zero Energy Tower in China, and Ross Wimer's rendering of a P-1 skyscraper for a site next to the Sheraton Hotel seems to envision the future as pretty much the same as the last ten years, a tower, in the kind of oval shape that I thought Solomon Cordwell Buenz had patented, plopped atop a parking podium.

Far more out there are many of the Big Plans entries, including Dirk Denison's Grafted Crystalline Mesh, which sees our current street grid replaced with green space and superseded by a "mesh" that looks like a supersized version of the kind of ribbon cables you find in your computer, distributing both public transportation and energy throughout the city. This striking rendering inspires affection by imagining, within the mesh, the re-emergence of Louis Sullivan's Stock Exchange Building, complete with green roof.

The juxtapositions between sections are often what's most striking. There's a spectacular Smith+Gill model of their project Eco Bridge, which proposes creating new greenspace along two miles of breakwater in Monroe harbor, centering on a soaring Eco tower that would both harvest wind and solar energy and serve as a public observatory. As beautiful as it is, however, it reminds me of how often we look at the future as merely an extension of current conditions. Much as the 19th and 20th century central lakefront was dominated by railyards, today's has been allowed to become an enormous parking lot for boats, crowding out other uses. Eco Bridge essentially accepts this status quo - it's pushed far out into the lake so as to not get in the way of the boat slips.

Far more satisfying is Pier 02 from Keith Campbell of RTKL Chicago, which envisions extending Northerly Island south with a large circular greenspace that would provide both an enclosed harbor for the boats, and a more balanced usage of the central lakefront, including a new elevated parkway at 18th street that would mirror, as per the original Burnham plan, Navy Pier to the north. You know what we don't need at Monroe? Still more boats hogging the shoreline. You know what we do need? A public beach.

Many of the best entries are those that challenge traditional thinking, like Clare Lyster's O'Hare Super Strip which, acknowledging the dominance of air travel today, doesn't try to bring high-speed rail lines all downtown, but connects them with O'Hare, along with Metra, the CTA, and the expressways to create a "second urban center for Chicago," a lot less Rosemont, a lot more a real city.

Perhaps the most radical entry in Big. Bold, however, is, on the surface, the most prosaic. Linda Searl's Biga takes on a premise I've seen before - using vacant lots in distressed neighborhoods to rebuild community - and does it in a fresh way that makes you really feel the potential wonder of it. Almost Sim City style, you see in three stages how a given lot begins, develops, and matures with additional layers of program as it spurs stability and development all around it. Searl explains that biga refers to "the traditional bread starter that activates yeast and initiates the leavening process." The renderings are paired with large aerial maps showing vacant lots throughout the city, and you can see how these developments could become a new kind of urban fractal, replicating to construct new energies throughout a troubled city. It's an antidote and counter-argument to the steroid-sized proposals all around it. You want to build a sustainable future? Let's get small.

Writing about Big.Bold is like eating peanuts. There's so much intriguing stuff, offering up so much food for thought, that I feel guilty not covering more of it. I could write an extended critique of each set of contrasting/competing parallel proposals, but I imagine, dear reader, that you probably have other plans than reading an 80 page article.

The good news is that the greater part of the exhibition is on-line, where you can read and contemplate at your leisure. The bad news is the website, while it includes each entry, is not complete. There are no photographs of the models, for example. And there's really no substitute for seeing the show in person,with the models, with the graphics full size, where you get to be the bride of the ball with nearly 60 suitors competing for your attention. Make time to check it out before it closes on Sunday. You won't regret it.

Big. Bold. Visionary. Chicago Considers the Next Century at the Chicago Tourism Center, 72 East Randolph, only through Sunday, October 11th.

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lynnbecker@lynnbecker.com

© 2009 Lynn Becker All rights reserved.