Part - 3 Breaking from Past Assumptions

The Bioshaft® Design Process – what is it and how it came to be.

Part 3 – Breaking from Past Assumptions

 

In 2005 I started my own company, D’Alessandro & Associates, I had recently quit my job at a Chicago based firm and was looking to expand on my own. For a few months I was still providing my design skills pro bono towards the completion of the fish hotel  for the Friends of the Chicago River. I was full of energy and optimism. My first plan of action was to collaborate with other firms by subcontracting my services. The strategy worked; I was involved in green housing projects, urban renewal and used my artistic talents in designing features that helped in the branding of these projects. Over time however I became disillusioned by the housing trends. Too much land was being eaten up by these projects and despite their green status we were selling bad planning. I had bought into the claims made by the green industry. Now I started to question the rationale of Greenfield developments and the suburban best management practices that claimed to be a solution for the urban challenges. Even porous paving became suspect, I had doubts that water would percolate through a 95% compressed substrate which was required for road construction and that microbes could live in such a harsh environment. The water for me simply percolated down a foot or so through the gravel layers and then moved laterally wherever the ground sloped, carrying with it all the pollutants it had picked up from the surface. I referred back to the porous alleys program and created alternatives to the simplistic solution. I envisioned the alleys as potential pollinator corridors and instead of the water trickling through the various porous paving products that eventually would clog up and need cleaning with pressurized water, a further waste – I designed habitats on the private properties of adjacent homeowners that would be tied to their own roof runoff collection and be part of a greater habitat function along with vegetable gardens, rain gardens and rain barrels. But this still did not solve the downtown urban challenges. The green movement was promoting solutions for the residential areas; the high rises of the city scape could not be accommodated by the bio-swale and rain garden approach. The use of open space to accommodate the city runoff for me was a red herring. It would require converting the current habitats in the forest preserves into flood plain management. It may work in some zones but there were no sufficiently large preserves in the Chicago loop. The green roof promoters were making exaggerated claims of the abilities of rooftop gardens to handle significant rain events; later studies showed that after a one inch rainfall most of the water would be runoff.  Many desired green effort examples came from cities such as Portland, Oregon and Seattle, Washington. A far cry from the summer drought conditions and severe winter weather Chicago was prone to. The real challenges were being ignored and most solutions were still based on an anthropocentric view of the world.

Throughout 2006 I revisited the Chicago Loop including the river and arrived at the term ‘vertical watersheds’ to describe my concepts.  In a densely populated center where most of the substrate is taken up by parking garages, subway transit, service tunnels, the sprawling service infrastructure with miles of wire conduits, water mains, gas lines, potential chemical plumes, etc. Where most plantings could be termed roof-top gardens such as Millennium Park, where can one find the soil strata characteristics to recreate the proper biogeochemical processes that nature has used since the beginning to perform the water cycle? Too many illustrations of this cyclic event carelessly included city components without a real understanding.  The solution for me was a vertical one, above street level where most of the pollution occurred, but not that of the living wall concepts which were gaining in popularity at this time. These were beautiful living tapestries; they had their place but were not the answer for the creation of a true watershed function. I began to sketch out concepts for the Chicago River that now included vertical riparian systems with waterfall features to aerate the slow moving waters. Biological connections would run from green roofs down a vertical watershed column and include underwater reef- like structures in cases that connected to the river. The buildings themselves would be turned into living architecture through the use of these eco shafts. I presented these concepts for the first time at the 2007 Wild Things Conference held at the University of Illinois at Chicago and received a great reception, the room was packed and I was inundated with questions and praise after my talk. I was extremely pleased and began to seek out opportunities to present to various city departments and personnel. The only door that opened slightly was that of the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District, one meeting that had no follow up. All my requests to meet with anyone interested at city hall were met with silence. I decided to take the concepts west to the Fox River corridor and for a time made good progress until I was outflanked by an unethical politician who claimed my work as his and tried to build it using other sources. Fortunately I had only shared preliminary sketches and he could not make heads or tails of them given his level of knowledge. For the second time in two years I walked straight into a politically corrupt individual. This was a great setback after the euphoric feeling of a few months previous. My opinion of Illinois politicians hit an all-time low, where could I find honest people to collaborate with? At this time, the summer of 2007, I landed a two month subcontract with Mia Lehrer Associates to work on the Orange County Great Park Project in Irvine, California that gratefully took me away from the unpleasant situation.