“In alignment with current trends, the design forecasts that people will value a balanced work and life ratio while retaining real and meaningful connections with each other and with the places that they live.” Inspired by the Tower of Babel metaphor of a community working together in shared aspiration, Kéré Architecture’s proposal anticipates a mix of housing, workplace, commerce, and recreation in one building. The structure is one in which knowledge workers, who expect work / life integration, might just as easily take in a film as write a creative brief. With cores pulled to the sides and located within the envelope (atypical in a traditional high rise) and the asymmetric columns resolving both vertical structure and infrastructure, the floor plates are open to receive a diverse and evolving program. Noting that “an office can be a cubicle and also an open co-working area, a cafe, a lounge, a lab, a multipurpose room, virtual substance in the cloud, a room in your house, and much more,” Ensamble Studio imagined “A Column of Columns” tied together with horizontal structures that vary their positions, heights and areas to frame the city and connect interior spaces. Of the 16 entries, I found myself sparked by the ones that directly addressed core drivers of the innovation economy: work / life integration, community, connection to the public realm, and non-hierarchy.īig Bang Tower by Ensamble Studio (far right) and Biennial Project by Kéré Architecture (second from right)īig Bang Tower: A Column of Columns for the Chicago Tribune by Ensamble Studio Wandering amid the towers, I felt myself inside a diorama of alternative histories of a building and of a city in which I could, in real time, hear the taxis honking below and feel the glare of the sun moving across the glaze of adjacent buildings. The Cultural Center’s Yates Hall, a large expanse of a room with floor to ceiling windows that pull the city into the space, was given over to the exhibition, fusing the experience with meta. The architects practicing today revealed delightfully varied ideas, represented as scaled models that reimagine the landmark tower. If the 1922 competition made evident a pivot point in architecture toward modernism, and the “Late Entries,” of 1980 turned largely on postmodernist metaphor, fun and sarcasm, how might we understand the “Vertical City” of 2017? Resurrected in 1980 by Stanley Tigerman under the guise of “Late Entries,” the Tribune Tower competition (it was actually an invited submittal for a publication) once again attracted some of architecture’s biggest thinkers - Frank Gehry, Tadao Ando, Bernard Tschumi, and Tod Williams and Billie Tsien. The wildly contrasting ideas influenced generations of architects to come. McCormick to make “the most beautiful and distinctive office building in the world,” the original competition attracted entries from over 260 architects, including Walter Gropius, Adolf Loos, and Eliel Saarinen (who took second). With the charge by the Tribune’s publisher Colonel Robert R. Of the many thought-provoking exibits, I was most taken with “Vertical City,” a contemporary take on the 1922 Chicago Tribune Tower Competition. “Vertical City,” 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial: Make New History The Biennial was held in the Chicago Cultural Center (a grand former library built in 1897 and host to the world’s largest Tiffany stained-glass dome), with associated events throughout the city, and it took place from September, 2017 through January, 2018. Make New History was the theme and participants - 140 architects and artists from around the globe - contributed a range of exhibits, from dioramas to live performances, to explore how history can be invoked to inform new ideas and forms in architecture. Last fall I spent three days in Chicago, taking in the Chicago Architecture Biennial. Instead, at a time when there is too much information and not enough attention - when a general collective amnesia perpetuates a state of eternal presentness - understanding the channels through which history moves and is shaped by architecture is more important than ever.” – Chicago Biennial “Today, history represents neither an oppressive past that modernism tried to discard nor a retrograde mind-set against unbridled progress. Make New History: A Vertical City for the Innovation Economy
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