Michael McAtee

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October 27, 2005

Chicago Prize Competition

The 2005 Chicago Prize Competition results were announced last night at the Chicago Art Institute with a keynote address by jury chair Thom Mayne, and as usual, the results were fairly anticlimactic. Out of 182 total entries five were selected as honorable mentions, and three received prizes. With a 12 person jury selecting projects over the course of a single afternoon I question how thoroughly each of the submissions could have been analyzed. The vast majority of the schemes appeared to either deal with extremely pragmatic green issues, (utilizing the tanks as wind power generating devices for water reclamation devices or planter boxes) or with the tank as a sculptural element either in its existing context or relocated (which may produced some more interesting projects). See an image of our competition entry board here. A more detailed presentation of our submission (Stephen Lee and myself) will be forthcoming at a later date.

Of the 182 submissions, only 51 were from the City of Chicago, and it seemed only a fraction of those entries truly attempted to relate the water towers directly to the City of Chicago. There seemed to be a paucity of solutions that were unique to the city, its history and development, its landscape. Several designs focused on harvesting wind, although even a cursory examination of the Windy City reveals that Chicago is not a particularly windy locale (ranking 76th of 255 US cities) and the region in general does not rate particularly high for the production of energy through wind farming (though it could be economically feasible). Though the green architecture and ecological aspect is a vital concern and a decent intervention, it is may also be the most obvious and generic. While our scheme utilized green ecological solutions, they were not the generators for the design, but were merely programming aspects for the occupation of the datum we created.

Of the recognized projects few if any truly dealt with the city as the generator of the responses for the competition. One honorable mention utilized the tower as an occupied artifact which framed views of the city and created an interesting perspective of water tower as creator of the landscape rather than object in the landscape. The third place scheme proposed relocating several water towers onto another site and creating a landscape of obsolete tanks which was a very intriguing notion, and another honorable mention proposed converting the tanks into UN sanctuaries for those enduring human rights abuses. While both of these entries were quite interesting neither dealt particularly well with Chicago as an inimitable place. One honorable mention used the projection of activities taped throughout the day to be projected back onto the watertowers at night. The intent may have been to evoke the a Wodizcko projection, unfortunately, the scale and distance from which these projections would need to be viewed would often make them illegible, and could just as easily be performed on blank brick walls, trash dumpsters, El tracks etc. Several other entries, including the winning entry, were ecological in nature and could easily be relocated to any city or locale.

The most disappointing of the recognized projects was the second place finisher which sought to replace a water tower with an urban bird aviary. The board consisted primarily of "analysis" which Thom Mayne indicated was the primary rationale for its selection. This sparsely populated board consisted of images of the construction of the assembly of a water tower (which I among dozens of other conpetitors undoubtedly turned up on internet searches) as well as an exploded axon detailing the components of construction of a tank. Another small grid of images described a matrix of native bird species and possibly their natural nesting habitat. Very little information was present explicating the actual design of the aviary, nor was there any real analysis provided that interpreted either the usage or condition of the water tower, or of birds and their habitats - which would have quickly revealed that these birds may be indigenous, but are indigenous to the wetlands, prairies and beaches of Lake Michigan, not urban blacktop. That such a project was selected for second place overall due to the fact that it substituted a sparse amount of superfluous for constructive design was disappointing to say the least. A competition, co-sponsored by the City of Chicago and the Chicago Architectural Club should have surely recognized more projects which sought to investigate and add to the identity of the richly unique fabric of Chicago.

Posted by mdmcatee at October 27, 2005 10:09 AM

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