Reconnecting the Urban Web: Chicago's Failed Olympic Hope

‘Towers in the park,’ a destructive urbanistic typology that gained notoriety with idealistic projects by Le Corbusier, are prevalent in American cities. This architectural and urban concept consists of mono-functional high-rise towers, typically residential, placed on a superblock of unprogrammed over-scaled greenspace. The original intention was to create order within the city and provide plenty of landscaping and urban space for the city’s occupants. Noble in goals, these mega-towers have been chastised for their lack of character, inappropriate scale, and the inability to create vibrant public space that promote interaction and community by creating an over concentration of segregated nodes without adequate or engaging connections for the public.

As one of these cities that used this typology for its low-income housing projects, Chicago faces many physically segregative issues in its south-side neighborhoods. One such site, Prairie Shores in the Douglas neighborhood, is physically separated from an affluent neighborhood to the west, downtown to the north, and Lake Michigan to the east. Focusing on the physical segregation – as opposed to the racial, economic, and social segregation – this project attempts to reconnect disparate parts of the neighborhood in order to make it a more inclusive part of the city’s urban fabric.

Major urban interventions, such as the one being proposed, are very unlikely due to the immense political, economic, and social barriers that occurs in such a large project. Occasionally an event occurs which allows or even promotes urban interventions at a large scale. This proposal uses one of these events – the Olympics – to investigate the opportunities and issues that come with such a massive infrastructural, social, economic, and urban project. Applying these and other findings to the proposed and rejected Chicago 2016 Olympic Village in Prairie Shores, the proposal seeks to rethink urban and architectural morphologies to better integrate transportation infrastructure, ecology, and public space.