{"id":60915,"date":"2022-04-14T14:03:09","date_gmt":"2022-04-14T14:03:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/villa-albertine.org\/magazine\/chicago-grid-city\/"},"modified":"2024-04-22T16:12:22","modified_gmt":"2024-04-22T16:12:22","slug":"chicago-grid-city","status":"publish","type":"app_magazine_article","link":"https:\/\/villa-albertine.org\/va\/magazine\/chicago-grid-city\/","title":{"rendered":"Chicago: An Impossible Transformation?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Miles and meters<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Courtesy of GRAU<\/p>\n\t\t<\/figcaption>\n\t<\/figure>\n

The urban structure of Chicago is founded on the basic square of Thomas Jefferson\u2019s grid, which was adopted in 1785 to survey the land as the US expanded westward.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n

Each section of the grid is one square mile. The city\u2019s large avenues run alongside these superblocks, starting from point zero, at the downtown intersection of State and Madison streets, in the Loop. The squares were then divided into eight and sixteen to form the basic unit of Chicago\u2019s urban grid\u2014a rectangular 330×660-foot block with a middle alley leading to every parcel on the block.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n

Each block encompasses 100 street numbers, so there are 800 street numbers per mile, and 1,000 street numbers equal 1.25 mile. Every address is prefixed by its direction in relation to point zero\u2014N, S, W, E; once you have grasped that, an address itself tells you its distance and bearing from point zero. 2000 N State Street is 2.5 miles north; 800 W Randolph Street is 1 mile west.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n

Whether you use the metric or imperial system, the grid is a universal unit of measurement that enables strangers to the city to find their way easily.\u00a0<\/p>

Organic<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Courtesy of GRAU<\/p>\n\t\t<\/figcaption>\n\t<\/figure>\n

A Sunday morning in February. It\u2019s 14\u00b0F outside, Covid is still in the air, and the Super Bowl is on tonight. There\u2019s nobody around, and we soon feel the need to go and warm up in a shopping mall. We\u2019re not the only ones, and we do what everyone else does: drink coffee on the couches provided in this indoor public space before hitting the road again.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n

A little to the north, along the Chicago River, are the two round towers of Marina City, designed by Bertrand Goldberg in 1964. With 900 apartments above 19 levels of parking space, it\u2019s one of the city\u2019s most densely populated complexes. Marina City is famous for its corncob-shaped towers and the green Pontiac that plummeted from its circular ramp in the movie The Hunter<\/em> (1980). The ramp starts off innocently enough on the first floor, with cars parked all around it and between the two towers.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n

Marina City is also home to the House of Blues and the Smith & Wollensky Steakhouse, with its green awning that reaches out to pluck customers from the sidewalk of State Street. Each apartment in the towers opens onto a circular balcony with a super-high metal guardrail and a parasol-style roof that create a cozy outdoor room.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n

Ten miles to the west of Marina City is the village of Riverside, designed a century earlier by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux. Riverside was the first planned suburban community in the vicinity of Chicago. It has perfectly curving roads, and each intersection enjoys a triangular view. Although it is contained within two Jefferson squares, there are no straight lines; as you drive through the neighborhood, your hand is always at a slight angle on the steering wheel.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n

Marina City and Riverside are two extreme\u2014but not completely opposing\u2014examples of what can also be found in the grid. Each architect broke free of the grid, playing with it in his own way: Goldberg added urban density while rejecting the traditional American corner; Olmsted recreated fluidity within this typically American unit of measurement. Riverside and Marina City, two organic forms set up at the riverside, both offer a romantic vision of what can be done with the Cartesian grid.<\/p>

Original Monopoly<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Courtesy of GRAU<\/p>\n\t\t<\/figcaption>\n\t<\/figure>\n

From the outside, Stony Island Arts Bank is hardly welcoming, with a fa\u00e7ade featuring four large gray columns, thicker than the trunk of any hundred-year-old tree, and windows with drawn blinds. A little notice informs us that the entrance is the red door at the side of the building.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n

Inside, it\u2019s a different story. The safe in the basement is empty, but the bank now houses new treasures that are currently being inventoried and digitized: book and magazine collection from the Johnson Publishing Company; glass slides from the University of Chicago and the Art Institute; the vinyl collection of Frankie Knuckles, the \u201cgodfather of house music”; and the Edward J. Williams collection of some 4,000 objects and statues representing stereotypical, racist images of the Black population (the very purpose of the collection was to take such offensive objects out of circulation).\u00a0<\/p>\n\n

Stony Island Arts Bank, a former bank built in 1923, is now a place that preserves the memory of Black culture in the United States, a building that contains a whole heritage. It is also a venue for temporary exhibitions and events.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n

The building stands out like a UFO in the urban Chicago landscape, on an avenue as wide as the Champs-Elys\u00e9es in Paris. But Stony Island Arts Bank is a project with solid backing: it is managed by the Rebuild Foundation, the brainchild of Chicago-born artist Theaster Gates, who is working to transform the southern Chicago neighborhoods through cultural development and has mounted several projects in South Shore in recent years, including the Dorchester Projects, a series of houses that the artist bought up and converted into cultural spaces; Kenwood Gardens, where 13 abandoned lots have been turned into a community garden; and the Dorchester Art and Housing Collaborative, which provides social housing for locals and artists.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n

Chicago\u2019s social geography was created by property and financial speculation from the private sector, which spent decades playing Monopoly with the city. The Rebuild Foundation and other local players are now playing the old version of Monopoly, The Landlord\u2019s Game, and buying up land to gradually restore the community value of the neighborhood.<\/p>

Behind the scenes<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Courtesy of GRAU<\/p>\n\t\t<\/figcaption>\n\t<\/figure>\n

During our first days in the city, the alleys were not really on our radar. Although there are alleys wherever the grid is present, from the Loop to the most outlying residential neighborhoods, they are less visible than the other streets\u2014which is precisely what makes them interesting.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n

Mayors the world over are obsessed with the idea of a lovely and pleasant city. Chicago found its own solution from the start, by creating alleys. There are no trash cans or garages on the streets\u2014a common problem in Europe\u2014because they have been relegated to the alleys. These alleys are used by refuse collectors picking up garbage and by residents unloading their shopping. Freed from aesthetic norms, the alleys feature the kind of hodge-podge of fences and garage doors characteristic of many of our own city outskirts.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n

The alleys provide a welcome break from the practical but rather sterile layout of Chicago\u2019s residential streets, lined with mile after mile of porched houses that are extremely similar. In recent years, in the more desirable neighborhoods, alleys have naturally become places of speculation for homeowners in need of more space, who convert their garages into a student apartment, a home office, or even a business\u2014to the displeasure of certain councilors, who don\u2019t understand the desire to densify the alleys when the city is full of vacant lots in neighborhoods that need revitalizing. And we understand their confusion.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n

So much more than places for real-estate speculation, alleys are interesting for their spatiality: their limited size, far narrower than the streets, is conducive to conviviality. The junk that tends to accumulate there today would still be there tomorrow, but instead of being taken on trucks to the city\u2019s dumps, it could be processed collectively, on the spot, in the micro-society of the alley.<\/p>

A collective America<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Courtesy of GRAU<\/p>\n\t\t<\/figcaption>\n\t<\/figure>\n

What will Chicago look like in 100 years\u2019 time? It might seem like a strange question, but we shouldn\u2019t forget that this is a city where anything is possible, from the rapid reconstruction and expansion in the wake of the Great Fire of 1871 that almost destroyed it, to the reversal of the Chicago River\u2019s flow in 1900, to the new building techniques that resulted in the first skyscrapers that would soon shape cities the world over.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n

When you walk around the horizontal grid today\u2014especially in the apparently under-occupied neighborhoods to the south and west\u2014the challenges Chicago faces might seem overwhelming. But we should remember that these situations are not natural; they do not stem from the city\u2019s organic transformation; rather, they\u2019re the result of deliberate segregation and financial speculation. We should remember that, to remind ourselves that plenty of other paths are possible.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n

One afternoon, we received an email from Monica Chadha, the associate architect of the Civic Projects architecture practice, who showed us around the southern neighborhoods. Attached was a map showing all the vacant lots in Woodlawn, color-coding the city-owned lots and those that are private property.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n

We were surprised to see that the vast majority of vacant lots were actually public\u2014yet another sign that there is indeed room for maneuvering. People may claim that the city hasn\u2019t a single dollar to spend on transforming them, but let us not forget that Chicago is one of the richest cities in the world, in one of the richest countries in the world.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n

Chicago\u2019s transformation requires considerable investment and commitment, but most of all it requires a clear vision of the type of city we want. What seems certain is that the Chicago of tomorrow will not be an endless extension of the grid, but a transformation of the existing one; the city\u2019s future cohesion will be conditioned by the way the horizontal grid evolves in the coming years. Our vision for the future of Chicago can only come from within, from the people who live there every day\u2026 and plenty of visions have been shared with us during our discussions over the last two weeks.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n

What the grid clearly demonstrates is that nothing is impossible.<\/p>\n\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n\n

These texts are excerpts from the research on Chicago GRAU conducted. In the course of their residency, Susanne Eliasson and Anthony Jammes explored the relations between the inhabitants and the grid of the city. From there comes a series of points of view and ideas on the urban grid and its potential future<\/em>\u2014as many narratives that will feed the ongoing reflection on Chicago’s new urban planning: “We Will Chicago.”<\/em><\/p>\t\n\t\tSign up for the Villa Albertine Magazine newsletter!\t<\/a>\n\t","protected":false},"featured_media":60913,"menu_order":0,"template":"","app_discipline":[229],"app_city_tax":[223],"app_magazine_category":[245],"class_list":["post-60915","app_magazine_article","type-app_magazine_article","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","app_discipline-architecture","app_city_tax-chi","app_magazine_category-regions"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nChicago: An Impossible Transformation? - Villa Albertine<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/villa-albertine.org\/va\/magazine\/chicago-grid-city\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Chicago: An Impossible Transformation? - Villa Albertine\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Miles and metersThe urban structure of Chicago is founded on the basic square of Thomas Jefferson\u2019s grid, which was adopted in 1785 to survey the land as the US expanded westward.\u00a0 Each section of the grid is one square mile. 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