Second Nature City: Creative Destruction & Vertical Landfills

(This is an ongoing project)

Chicago has forgotten more great architecture and vibrant neighborhoods than most cities in America will ever know.

Vertical Landfill near Navy Pier

Creative Destruction

In Capitalism, Socialism & Democracy Joseph Schumpeter popularized the concept of "Creative Destruction," whereby capitalism necessarily destroys old economic systems and relationships in order to create new opportunities for perpetual innovation.

The process of capitalist self-destruction and renewal can be readily perceived the landscape history of cities like Chicago, which matured not as a nexus of culture, government or royalty but as a machine of market capitalism. The city, as Max Weber once wrote, "is like a man who's skin has been peeled off and who's entrails one sees at work."
For 175 years the Chicago has continuously constructed, destroyed and re-built its built environment. In the 1840's the city dredged and reversed its river. After the Great Fire of 1871 it began filling in 20 miles of marshland for an expansive lakefront park system. After World War II old landmarks and early skyscrapers were destroyed for larger, more modern facilities. In 1950's and 60's dozens of neighborhoods were cleared to for high-speed expressways, universities and modern housing projects. Since the 1970's de-industrialization has further facilitated the demolition of the city's past. Factories, steel mills and railroad yards have given way to new condo developments and high-rise apartment towers. In the 21st Century the modernist public housing projects, once the emblem of the future, have given to new-urbanist redevelopments that echo the neighborhoods of the past.

Since Burnham and Bennett's 1909 Plan for the City, this process of destruction and renewal has, by design, transformed the center of the Chicago from a chaotic melting pot of industry and poor immigrants into a pristine urbane environment (implicitly for the business and cultural elite). This process mirror's the so-called Haussmanization of of Paris in the late 19th Century (the construction of the bourgeois boulevards) and parallels contemporary patterns of North American gentrification in Manhattan, Boston & San Francisco.

Vertical Landfills

This project envisions an alternate history where large, vertical landfills formed by steel and concrete cages have been constructed 3 miles off the shore of Lake Michigan. These vertical landfills initially functioned as receptacles for earth excavated from the construction of canals linking the Chicago River to the Mississippi. As the city grew and began destroying and rebuilding itself, debris from old houses, factories and architectural landmarks found their way to one of the half-dozen steel monoliths. The Home Insurance Building, The Masonic Temple, the Federal Building, Louis Sullivan's masterpieces, the remants of the White City, Frank Lloyd Wright's Midway Gardens, old train stations, entire neighborhoods from the South and West Sides and, more recently, the city's notorious housing projects of have all been collected in these reliquaries of the City's past.

A century of compaction, weathering and plant growth have given many of the vertical landfills an almost natural appearance. The vertical landfills stand now as artificial mountains against the endless horizon of Lake Michigan. The sifting of their rubble and the groaning of their steel skeletons are occasionably audible on shore, like the ghostly songs of whales that have never inhabited the freshwater of the Great Lakes.

They are monuments; tombs of architecture, industry and all 20th Century modernity.

... to be continued