High Performance Goals:
-Reduced noise pollution transportation system
-Allows more daylight to reach the street level
-Generates electricity from climatic conditions
-Utilizes air rights, land area, and geographic position
-Reduced noise pollution transportation system
-Allows more daylight to reach the street level
-Generates electricity from climatic conditions
-Utilizes air rights, land area, and geographic position
In support of the new American sustainable paradigm, we must make sustainable initiatives visible. Not only visible but beautifully so as to move the soul, stimulating the general public into action. Our infrastructure, once solely the domain of civil engineering, is an enormous opportunity.
We combined mass transit with energy generation, transforming an infrastructural blight into a light, efficient model of public transportation. In a city where the ideological mantra has been "less is more" we should recognize our innovative past with another mantra to do "more with less".
Our elevated steel, heavy rail system carries with it such an opportunity. We replaced the 19th century structural system, expensive to maintain and entirely inappropriate for its use, with a new system that is nearly silent, provides more sun light to the ground below and takes climatic advantage to generate electricity. Once a back door and something to visually ignore, the CTA will become a symbol of our future.
"Robert Benson of 4240 Architecture would replace the elevated tracks with a transit system consisting of green structural supports, equipped with wind turbines, that would extend like croquet wickets throughout the city (below) The trains would be nearly silent, but the system would send a loud message, making its green design visible, the wall text says, "in order to move the souls of the general public through beauty."
That's a capital idea, which fulfills Burnham's admonition to make big plans that have the magic to stir men's blood. Now if we could just come up with the billions in capital necessary to turn it into reality.
"Big. Bold. Visionary. Chicago Architects Consider the Next Century" appears at the Chicago Tourism Center Gallery, 72 E. Randolph St., through Oct. 4. The exhibit is a collaborative effort of Chicago's Department of Cultural Affairs and the Burnham Plan Centennial Committee." - Blair Kamin, Chicago Tribune, September 10, 2009