Part 1 - The View from Michigan Avenue Bridge

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

Part 1 – The View from Michigan Avenue Bridge

As more people have become interested in my Bioshaft® design process and the work is finally progressing, although at a slow pace, many have asked me to explain what a bioshaft design process is. I have presented this work at various venues, the latest presentation given at the German American Chamber of Commerce in Chicago. I also received awards for specific components of an overall strategy, the latest an international award from the Integrative Habitat Design Competition 2012 held in London, UK. However, in these venues, there has never been time allotted for a full disclosure on the evolution of this design process, I presented bits and pieces tailored to the central theme driving each conference. I will use the next series of blog posts to delineate the evolution of my thoughts and design and hopefully answer your questions. The watershed moment came one winter day in 2004 while standing on the Michigan Avenue Bridge looking west at the Chicago River.

I often make it a goal to traverse this bridge when in downtown Chicago because for me this corner of the city is emblematic of this great metropolis. This is the corner where Fort Dearborn stood, close to the original river mouth and where the Tribune Tower and Wrigley Building stand proudly in their gothic-style architectural drapery. These must be the most photographed structures of Chicago and certainly the city’s most recognized landmarks. That afternoon in fact I was scouting for particular architectural features I am particularly drawn to. It - came as a mist rising from the waters, a vision to replace what was before my eyes. This day the buildings flanking the river had taken on an ominous look. They no longer looked like structures for people to inhabit but rather rows upon rows of tombstones. I suddenly realized how much life was actually missing in this vista. Even the waters looked jellylike; everything static, grey and so, so, somber. This vision haunted me for most of that year, even the spring blooms could not remove it from my inner eye.

The Michigan Bridge experience came at the heels of my redesigning the front landscape for the Chicago Center for Green Technology (2003). As I worked on it my curiosity in the building that received a Platinum LEED award pushed me to ask many questions on the LEED criteria. At the time the landscape surrounding buildings were not part of the qualifying criteria. In fact one could receive LEED awards even if the structure was surrounded by an asphalt parking lot. I also questioned the rationale of giving such an award to a single structure, whereas a city is a multitude of connections.  LEED for me had too many loopholes and its one-track concern for energy saving was missing out on what was really needed. We needed a living architecture, one that placed value on habitat creation as well as energy savings, and LEED was not the way there. Over the years LEED criteria have improved dramatically and we are closer to this goal but not quite there. In my 2004 research I came across the work of Emilio Ambasz and the Organic building at Osaka by Gaetano Pesce.  Ambasz quickly became my living hero and reference point.

The work on the redesign for the landscape at CCGT and the building itself offered an opportunity to present at the Society for Ecological Restoration 2004 Conference, I submitted an abstract that was well received. I contacted Emilio Ambasz’s Green Over Grey office in New York, Gaetano Pesce and Farr and Associates, explained my position on a living architecture, on extending the one building concept into a neighborhood or at least a complex of buildings and asked permission to use images of their work, all gave their consent. The conference took place in Victoria, BC. I spoke on the CCGT’s rescue from being an illegal dumping ground to becoming a LEED platinum building and the need to include surrounding grounds as part of a LEED criteria. On the efforts that the city of Chicago was undertaking in ameliorating its ecological footprint from rooftop gardens to green bungalows to porous paving of alleys to rain gardens and Millennium Park. I pointed out that we needed to distinguish habitat creation from beautification approaches which at the time the city was grouping all into one. My appeal was to look at the city as a living organism and not focus only on single building criteria or garden-scape efforts, that green corridor habitat function should be prioritized. I called for eco-bridges to overcome the island effect of green roofs, and the need to biologically connect them to the ground level. It is good that we can build new structures with eco-friendly features but what about the city that must remain and be preserved? My final slide was that view from the Michigan Avenue Bridge annotated with preliminary opportunities for habitat creation that would biologically connect the built structures to the river and bring life into the city.