Ilija Bentscheff

ALTERED CHICAGO, Prof. Neil M. Denari @ UIC, Spring 2008


One way in which the line between fiction and reality can become blurred is to use more reality against itself or to hide the fictional content within the real. Unlike, however, Jean Baudrillard’s concept of hyper-reality, where fictions and simulations surpass what we understand as the accepted appearance of reality, here one refers to another author, J.G. Ballard who said (in reference to fiction writing) that “we need less fiction and more reality”.

Project Synopsis

The week’s workshop will use Chicago as a regionally scaled urban / suburban landscape that will be altered photographically. Using Google Earth and Photoshop, we will endeavor to change the landscape of Chicago by adding more reality, in this case more (photo)graphic reality (only photographic material will be used to add to the satellite image of Chicago) with, of course, serious fictional intent. It must be stated here that this method is not at all related to that of collage for we are not interested in seeing the seams between the existing and the new. Our world for the week will be seamless graphically although it may be shocking urbanistically (scale shift, appropriation, etc.) Like Gursky, we want the image to appear to be a documentary of a place. As we will only have the horizontal dimension to work with (with shadows being an implication of the vertical dimension), our new images will essentially be mediations on how cities, in this case Chicago, use land and organize infrastructure. We will offer to Chicago, through compelling photographic “evidence”, how more loops can be added to the city, how mega-buildings can land into unthinkable locations (the lake?), how mile long buildings can appear at an alarming rate in the suburbs, how i-phones may be recaled and to fit perfectly into stadium parking lots, how forests may take Mayor Daley’s green roof rhetoric to maximum proportions, etc.

Images and scenarios

01_ilija_west_loops.jpg

Urban Scenario:           
West Loops is an investigation to the car city. The ability to drive like on a highway through the city on the block scale introduces an improvement of the performance. No stops needed. The further evacuation of the city ground is a consequence, which allows more political control to the public spots like malls, office buildings and amusement facilities, by being the major structures of the new urban life. The left over will become the outlaw zone of the rebels and might engage new forms of society.

02_ilija_wickerpark_smile.jpg

Urban Scenario:           
Wicker Park Chicago is a emerging district of cultural activity in between two landmarks. The Noble Square building and the Coyote at Damen and Milwaukee. To mark the sites area, it needs a third significant structure. Wicker Park Smile will play that role so loud, it even will be seen from other neighborhoods.

03_ilija_block_spot.jpg

Urban Scenario:           
Block Spot is an investigation stepping beyond massing to immersion. The undefined block illuminates the site like a Eliasson´s Sun and creates a spectacle.

04_ilija_third_coast_beach.jpg

Urban Scenario:           
The Copa Cabana analogy in the loop introduces a feature of un-institutionalized leisure activity coherent to the seriousness of the central business district. The beach is the new urban spectacle of the loop. Urban, because the infrastructure is not impacted and juxtaposes functional.

05_ilija_river_city2.jpg

Urban Scenario:           
The site at Goldberg´s River City is a former industrial site, which became an empty spot of Super Size Urban experiments. Chicago´s normative residential building mass experienced the ability to inhere multiple types of users. The investigation exercises an hybrid condition between the River City concept applied to the stereotypical Chicago house.

06_ilija_waterfront_transition.jpg
Waterfront Transition, Ornament of the mass.

Urban Scenario:                 
The concept of the fading is used as a design strategy to make a  new connection between the city and the lakefront. The new Housing and Business district is arranged in long strips of perforated buildings, which are aligned along a set of curves, which make the geometric transition between the surrounding area and the lakefront. Maintaining indexical the orientation of the site, the curves start parallel to the existing and drift smooth perpendicular to the orientation of the lakefront. The entire district is partitioned into four groups alternating in their program; business and residential. The residential strips start narrowed and low to the west, to assimilate the scale of the environment, while opening up and increase height to the spectacle of the lake. The business strips operate in reverse, to keep the views of the residential buildings on the lakefront and to cite the history of the juxtaposition of low residential- and high commercial buildings in chicago.