Bartlett Architecture Lab
3 Acres On The Lake: DuSable Park Proposal
This scheme is a piece of community landscape artwork, hovering on the edge of an overgrown meadow. It consists of rentable floating gardens, a skyscraper-plant-nursery and a draw-bridge linking into Grant Park. The overall strategy deals with the topographic characteritics of Chicago city: the water surface of Lake Michigan to the ground of DuSable Park, ascending up to the cacophony high-rise skyscrapers. Delicately poised, the new elements avoid any physical interruption to the meadow: all flora, fauna and romance of the site is preserved.
In the late 15th and early 16th Century, water transportation was the means of dispersing people, ideas and artifacts across oceans. Boats of the floating gardens symbolically celebrate the arrival of the first settler in Chicago: Haitian / French explorer, Jean Baptiste Point DuSable and other subsequent immigrant from various ethnic groups.
In response to the toxic ground condition, nature is hence elevated above the meadow. This rather surreal planting system serves as a reminder of world toxic contamination upon our fragile earth, educating us on the importance of organic farming and healthier living. The floating gardens are primarily rentable boats with planting trays, equipped with frost-protection clear covers and artificial lighting tubes. Curated by the community, the floating gardens display a tapestry of non-indigenous worldwide vegetation. Its multitude of colour changes is alien to the seasonal and severe climatic conditions of Chicago. The scheme also develops an ecological cycle of migrated plants, where a new eco-system begins to foster.
The gardens are gently placed on a series of light weight pier structures pinned into the water's edge, while the meadow remains untouched! By day, all the floating gardens are deployed onto the lake by remote controlled cranes. In doing so, the pier structures lift into their vertical configuration, revealing the overgrown meadow again. This performance mirrors that of the draw bridges around the city. On a diurnal cycle, the structures return to their horizontal positions, collecting the floating gardens and shifting them back in place for the night. Movements of boats are either remote controlled or sailed into the lake by public gardeners. With these conditions the choreography of garden is endless.
The skyscraper-plant-nursery is an inhabitable south facing glass structure, echoing the dominance of glass facades in Chicago. As a centre for cultivating non-indigenous flowers, vegetables and rare seedlings, it supplies plants to the floating gardens and the rest of Chicago. Each individual glass seedling box is accessed via a vertical farming device similar to that of a window-cleaning system on neighbouring skyscrapers. The plant-nursery is capped by a sky garden with hydroponically grown trees. The trees symbolises freedom, democracy and liberation. Exalted views of Lake Michigan and the city allow the community to experience spatial conditions normally accessible only to the exclusive few.
As well as being the entrance to the floating gardens and DuSable Park, it also defines the end of Grant Park. At the bottom of this vertical structure locate the public wash facilities, gardening tool/material storage cupboards, a retractable open-deck market and a small kitchen. On Sundays at the end of each month, fresh produce from the floating gardens are sold on the open-market. For a small fee, the kitchen can prepare picnic baskets using local produce. On a clear midsummer's evening with Chicago city as the backdrop, the community can dine in boats, amongst the floating gardens on Lake Michigan.
c.j. Lim
/ studio 8 + Bartlett Architecture Lab
95 Greencroft Gardens, London NW6 3PG, UK
mail@cjlim-studio8.com
http://www.cjlim-studio8.com
architect
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