COMMUNITY ARTS CENTER . TOWER

site: Chicago, Illinois

program description: Tower . Art Galleries . Theater . Artists Workshops . Administration

The current economic pressures created by the world’s voracious appetite for oil and other natural resources makes it increasingly important that we revise our old habits of developing endless horizontal projects; strip malls, towers in odd places of the city’s edge, and other patterns of wasteful planning that discourage our growing need to concentrate and optimize values that shape community and the efficient use of limited resources. With these issues in mind the challenge was to design a new mixed-use hybrid building that questions the typology/function of a conventional downtown development. The lake front site in Chicago offers a singular urban setting in the downtown core and is open to either medium or high rise buildings, or a mixture of both.

The purpose of the project was to envision experimental speculation and creative modes of building in an iconic American city. This project engages issues that investigate the urban fabric, city density, environmental impact, human scale, pedestrian circulation, and social context. The building program was determined by each individual student and was expected to question the current outmoded habits of living, working, urban circulation, and entertainment in a bustling urban core. [More]