Chicago Architecture: Ten Visions
Back in 2000, when the show’s participants were chosen, the proposed title was “Millennium Chicago,” but like the park, its opening was delayed until this year. Tigerman’s idea was that all the entries would express alternative visions of the dream and/or nightmare that might be Chicago’s future, separated in each gallery by a diagonal truss. Ronald Krueck’s starkly minimalist The Rectangle: Vision of the Essential is an enigmatic all-white room bisected by a giant white rectangle that hovers over the heads of visitors like a blade, while Eva Maddox’s Chicago Public Education: Future Learning Environment seems less a piece about architecture than a meditation on Howard Gardner’s concept of seven types of human intelligence. You almost have to decompress from one gallery to the next to keep from rushing through them–most seem too complex to be captured at a glance, and those that don’t can seem too simple to merit attention.
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Valerio obviously intended this as a serious commentary. But on the day I visited the gallery it had been invaded by a band of eight- to ten-year-olds who transformed his cautionary tale into a funhouse, jumping in and out of the virtual boxes and positioning themselves where, on-screen, they could cut off their hands and heads. It reminded me of the kind of excitement exhibits at the Museum of Science and Industry used to have when I was young, before technological wonders could be found at any Best Buy. Watching those kids make the gallery their own, I suddenly felt freed from the constraints of adulthood, of consuming culture as if it were brussels sprouts. And that was just the right state of mind in which to take in the rest of the exhibit.
Architect Jeanne Gang’s Baseball in the City: Change and Density does a better job of embodying the contrast. “Wrigley is more like the dream,” she says, “and U.S. Cellular is more like the nightmare.” Wrigley Field meets Vendrell’s criteria for the city of relationships: the surrounding neighborhood buzzes like a beehive whether it’s game day or not. The area around U.S. Cellular, on the other hand, becomes an urban necropolis the moment the stadium empties.
Metter isn’t the only “Ten Visions” architect thinking about stitching back together the urban fabric that’s been sliced by modern transportation. Last year architect Ralph Johnson of Perkins & Will created a stunning vision for the Chicago Architecture Foundation’s “Invisible Cities” exhibit: a proposal for concealing the toxic gulch of the Kennedy Expressway under a series of land bridges bearing museums, restaurants, shops, and parkland. Digital Burnham: The “Information Layer,” his “Ten Visions” entry, fills in and updates Daniel Burnham’s 1909 Plan of Chicago by building, at the Halsted and Congress location where Burnham had envisioned it, a new City Hall set beneath a green roof. It’s flanked by a pair of ten-story sculptures that reimagine Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc as massive digital billboards. Johnson also envisions the Congress Parkway covered over with a continuous strip of parkland and extended east of Lake Shore Drive as a causeway, topped with parks and office towers and leading to a new airport built on the lake. He makes the case that green technology could mitigate the airport’s environmental impact. It wouldn’t destroy vanishing wetlands or prairies, and unlike O’Hare or Peotone, it wouldn’t generate more faceless urban sprawl. The Loop would be its concourse.
Elva Rubio’s Views tackles the question of how architecture actually gets built. “We chose humor, first of all, and storytelling about how the city is made, how decisions are made,” she says. There are Dada-esque faux newsreels on the creation of the renovated Soldier Field, Millennium Park, and the new Maxwell Street. And there’s a series of colorful viewing boxes spinning a tale about the Miro sculpture (rechristened by Rubio as the “Goddess of Love and Beauty”) escaping its spot on the plaza across from the Daley Center to wander through the city, cleaning the river, growing food in planters, and spreading grace.
Although the Art Institute has created a preview of the show (at www.artic.edu/aic/exhibitions/10visions/home.html) that includes a bio of each architect and brief descriptions of the installations, the only illustrations are basic concept renderings. The actual content of the individual exhibits remains almost completely undocumented. This means “Ten Visions” will repeat the fate of many recent and important shows on Chicago architecture that never achieved a presence on the Internet, today’s most critical tool for keeping information available to the widest range of people. (The Chicago Architecture Foundation’s Web archive of its recent “Chicago Green” exhibit at www.architecture.org/BG/cgO.html is a rare exception.) Unlike a traveling blockbuster, where at the end the paintings or sculptures return to their home museums, shows like “Ten Visions” simply disappear into thin air. How do you build an ongoing public dialogue on that?
