This summer the Chicago Housing Authority–the people who brought the city the minimalist monotony of Cabrini-Green–seems to have been infiltrated by a band of eager design students. Click on the CHA’s Web page (www.thecha.org), follow the “Design Competition” link, and you’ll be presented with the sans serif fonts and single-word slogans that are the graphic hallmarks of the MTV era.
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The agency’s sweeping “Plan for Transformation” calls for the demolition of 18,000 units of mostly high-rise housing and the construction of 25,000 units of mixed-income housing. So, in conjunction with the National Endowment for the Arts’ New Public Works program, the CHA invited seven archi-tectural firms to contribute plans for a mixed-income devel-opment to be built at Roosevelt and Loomis, in the middle of the near-west-side ABLA Homes. The seven submissions make up the exhibit “Transform: Chicago’s Design Competition for Mixed-Income Housing,” which is currently installed on the ninth floor of the Harold Washington Library Center.
Entry seven seems to have abandoned all traces of “tree” planning–the repetitive hierarchical organization of devel-opments into spaces, subspaces, and sub-subspaces that accounts for the depressing quality of most postwar Ameri-can housing developments. Entry seven’s site model is convincingly organic, as if the natural contours of decades of urban growth had been condensed into one set of jutting lines and unbalanced lots. But a common aesthetic unites the entire square block. Geometric windows in all sorts of odd places throw scattered shafts of natural light into the units; there is open space and an intimate, terrace-lined alley.
“Transform” is on display through September 2 on the ninth floor of the Harold Washington Library Center, 400 S. State. The architects will be identified at a ceremony on Monday, August 27, from 5 to 7 PM in the library’s Winter Garden. One of the entrants will win a $15,000 honorarium–and a possible contract with the CHA’s developer. The event is free and open to the public. Call 312-747-4883 for more information.
