By Dennis Rodkin
The rec room at the Blackhawk Hills complex was built ten years ago, when Ross had just left a high-end interior architecture firm to start his own company, but he’s still exploring ways to bring the outdoors in, to make nature part of our living spaces. In his buildings nature isn’t just something to look at through picture windows; it’s an essential force to live with and respond to. He’s not the only architect who thinks that way, but he’s responsible for some of the Chicago area’s most intriguing attempts to make the natural environment a central part of a building.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Next summer the city of Chicago will build another of Ross’s nature-centered designs as part of Green Homes for Chicago, a project showcasing environment-friendly ways to build affordable housing: five houses by different architects will be built on lots in the Englewood and Hermosa neighborhoods. Ross’s design relies on a dramatic central stairwell leading up to a rooftop atrium with huge windows on the south, which together act like a big light and heat shaft. When the low-hanging winter sun hits those windows, its light will pour down the stairwell into all the living spaces, and its heat will be captured by a special intake duct in the furnace system, boosting the furnace’s efficiency. In the summer, when the sun is higher in the sky, it will instead hit a patch of lawn that insulates the roof–just as Mayor Daley’s new City Hall rooftop garden does. The summer heat will rise through the house and out the windows, creating drafts and reducing the demand for air-conditioning.
Live in a building that’s full of sunlight and flowing warm air, his reasoning goes, and you’ll come to appreciate those natural forces and countless others. Live in a closed box with a big furnace and air-conditioning, with windows that can’t take advantage of the sun’s free heat, and nature remains something out there, remote from your life.
The contest that the city’s departments of the environment and housing ran last summer to find designs for the project attracted 770 entrants, most from Chicago. Of them, Reynolds says, “Doug Ross was the one who understood most that it’s the whole package. It’s not just sustainable materials, and it’s not just inexpensive to live in–it’s a nice place to live.”
In 1985, after graduate school, Ross went to India to work for a year in the office of one of his professors, Balkrishna Doshi, a leading Indian architect. “That year was quite influential for me, because in India you have extreme heat and you can’t rely on consistent energy,” he says. “The finest architects are relating to the environment out of necessity. They have to relate to the wind and the sun, and they have to use local materials, because that’s what is available. So they know how to make a building cool without air-conditioning.”
That’s not always the easiest principle to uphold, but Ross and his team find little ways wherever they can. At Palwaukee Airport in Wheeling they’re building a hangar and office building–not ideal structures for an arty rethinking of space. “The hangar is a hangar,” Ross says. Yet they’re making the buildings energy efficient and “trying to relate the indoor and outdoor spaces. We were the first at Palwaukee to provide a patio so passengers and pilots could sit outside and enjoy a beautiful day while they wait.”
