The Ground is Lava                        Eco-Polis Reclaimation

Date Fall 2020
Location Cabrini Green, Chicago
Instructor Joel Kerner

In response to a studio-wide interest in top-down vs bottom-up dynamics, this project in Chicago’s Cabrini Green neighborhood returns the ground to nature as a wildlife preserve, whilst the human realm continues throughout/above. In an attempt to challenge how design can autonomize/disenfranchise both human and nature, the parameters and definition of conventional ‘urbanity’ expands itself to presuppose an inherent opposition between human mechanisms and ecological tendencies in spatial arrangement, thereby challenging a normalized instinct of commodifying nature or the commons. The thesis of the project is to acknowledge the contradictions between these systems and use the architecture (formal matter, process, networks of relations etc.) to accentuate that tension.

By mapping the programs that engage the street, the clustering of capital, and thereby injustice caused by capital, emerges. The new developments on the northwestern area has a concentration of commerce and commodities, all connected through a network of services that privilages those who can afford to live in the newly built condos. Moving southwest, the programs become more clearly segregated and categorized in a Corbusian sensibility. By isolating these enclosed/self-referrential networks, urban continuity can be broken up into factions whose characteristics are reflected in the materiality, sequencing, and ‘vibe’ of the built environment. To appropriate Guy Debord’s diagram of derive, one can begin to understand how the wealth gap has impacted the urban grid and how it bends over to facilitate the flow of money and dibilitate upward mobility, figuratively and literally.

The overall site is the Cabrini Green neighborhood in Chicago, located on the North of Chicago adjoining the North Branch of Chicago River. At its peak, the public housing project was home to 15,000 people in mid- to high-rise apartment building. With years of neglect, the living conditions became hostile and plagued with crime and violence. In 1995, the Chicago Housing Authority began tearing down the housing towers, with a promise to rehouse original residents. As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have seen the resurgence of wildlife in the urban landscape, reclaiming space that has been colonized by human activity. It also highlights the inequity of ownership, with humans subjugating, controlling, and culling wildlife when they trespass into human territory. In addition, the Forest Preserves of Cook County has made a commitment to restore and expand protected lands by at least 30%, an ambitious target that requires humans to restructure the relationship between urbanity and nature.

The design is the possible iterative process by which humans and nature argue/negotiate through their coexistence, which manifests as strategic compromises or stubborn palimpsest conditions asserting dominance over each other. Form and program are therefore decoupled by virtue of oscillating territorial boundaries through feedback loops between humans and nature, residents and planners, top-down and bottom-up. The site was divided up into 4 areas of study. The first focusing on a nomadic landscape that behaves as a suburban field condition, where questions of spatial ownership and identity investment play out. The second centers around the municipal core, studying transitions between communal private to communal public porosities. The third and fourth look at the threshold condition between the city and the nature reserve, with an emphasis on returning nature to the city whilst bring the city into nature. Throughout the project, there is an interest in destabilizing prescriptive programmatic stability and how autonomy can be developed from formal and spatial opportunities/idiosyncrasies.

Zone A: Nomadic horizon. A suburban field condition where settlers comission units that form s network of social relations. Once a nomadic layer is overpopulated, a new layer that mediates infrastructural and conditioning for humans and nature is applied above.




Zone C: The threshold between the city and Cabrini Green. It returns nature to the city rhythm by introducing gardens and pavilions along the pedestrian narrative whilst introducing the rhythm of the city into the forest preserve through a culture center and office space.

Zone B: Conglomeration of municipal programs extending from the suburban condition. Of particular interest is a different sensibility when spatializing nature. Zone A biases a palimpsest condition with openings that bring light in. Whereas Zone B uses a more evasive formal strategy, allowing the canopies and massing to coexist on the same plane.



Zone D: The elevated datum that rethinks the organization of a ‘street’. Building towers are connected not by parcels that are seperated by street, but instead by programatic relations that seep into one another.