The McCaffery Interests and U.S. Steel Corp.’s master plan for Chicago Lakeside, designed by Skidmore Owings & Merrill LLP (SOM), has been named one of 10 finalists for the first Sustainia Award. The project was named to the Sustainia100 in July at the United Nation’s Rio+21 conference as one of 100 projects and ideas from 56 countries that represent the best ideas for sustainability in the world. The inaugural Sustainia Award will “honor the best sustainable solution,” according to organizers.
The winners of the Sustainia Award and the associated Community Award will be announced on Oct. 11 by former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger during a ceremony at the Royal Theater in Copenhagen. Selection of the Sustainia Award winner will be made by a jury consisting of Gov. Schwarzenegger, former Prime Minister of Norway Gro Harlem Brundtland, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Chair Dr. Rajendra K. Pachauri and EU Commissioner of Climate Action Connie Hedegaard. The Community Award winner will be chosen by the general public via voting through Sustainia’s large social media community.
Chicago Lakeside sits on a site of almost 600 acres along Chicago’s Lake Michigan shore. Formerly home to a steel mill, the land is devoid of infrastructure—creating an opportunity to develop the prime lakefront real estate as a 21st century neighborhood.
Plans include a rich mix of proposed uses, including over 15,000 residential units and more than 15-million-square-feet of retail, restaurants, commercial, institutional and research and development facilities. Open space will include two miles of new park land along the shores of Lake Michigan, extending the lakefront park system originally envisioned by Daniel Burnham in his legendary 1909 Plan of Chicago.
The “Lakeside Idea” is about bridging a brownfield industrial past to a green lifestyle future, from steel mill to innovation mill. Lakeside has assembled an international leadership team in the design of future-focused infrastructures – in water and energy conservation, transportation and personal mobility, renewable energy and digital connectivity.
The first work since the demolition of the U.S. Steel South Works more than 20 years ago began earlier this spring when construction began on the extension of Lake Shore Drive through the site between 79th and 87th Streets. The road is scheduled to be complete by December with landscaping work finished in spring 2013, helping to speed commutes for local residents and setting the stage for the initial construction of buildings within Chicago Lakeside soon afterwards. +
Related Stories
| Oct 13, 2010
County building aims for the sun, shade
The 187,032-sf East County Hall of Justice in Dublin, Calif., will be oriented to take advantage of daylighting, with exterior sunshades preventing unwanted heat gain and glare. The building is targeting LEED Silver. Strong horizontal massing helps both buildings better match their low-rise and residential neighbors.
| Oct 12, 2010
Holton Career and Resource Center, Durham, N.C.
27th Annual Reconstruction Awards—Special Recognition. Early in the current decade, violence within the community of Northeast Central Durham, N.C., escalated to the point where school safety officers at Holton Junior High School feared for their own safety. The school eventually closed and the property sat vacant for five years.
| Oct 12, 2010
Guardian Building, Detroit, Mich.
27th Annual Reconstruction Awards—Special Recognition. The relocation and consolidation of hundreds of employees from seven departments of Wayne County, Mich., into the historic Guardian Building in downtown Detroit is a refreshing tale of smart government planning and clever financial management that will benefit taxpayers in the economically distressed region for years to come.
| Oct 12, 2010
Richmond CenterStage, Richmond, Va.
27th Annual Reconstruction Awards—Bronze Award. The Richmond CenterStage opened in 1928 in the Virginia capital as a grand movie palace named Loew’s Theatre. It was reinvented in 1983 as a performing arts center known as Carpenter Theatre and hobbled along until 2004, when the crumbling venue was mercifully shuttered.
| Oct 12, 2010
University of Toledo, Memorial Field House
27th Annual Reconstruction Awards—Silver Award. Memorial Field House, once the lovely Collegiate Gothic (ca. 1933) centerpiece (along with neighboring University Hall) of the University of Toledo campus, took its share of abuse after a new athletic arena made it redundant, in 1976. The ultimate insult occurred when the ROTC used it as a paintball venue.
| Oct 12, 2010
Owen Hall, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Mich.
27th Annual Reconstruction Awards—Silver Award. Officials at Michigan State University’s East Lansing Campus were concerned that Owen Hall, a mid-20th-century residence facility, was no longer attracting much interest from its target audience, graduate and international students.
| Oct 12, 2010
Gartner Auditorium, Cleveland Museum of Art
27th Annual Reconstruction Awards—Silver Award. Gartner Auditorium was originally designed by Marcel Breuer and completed, in 1971, as part of his Education Wing at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Despite that lofty provenance, the Gartner was never a perfect music venue.
| Oct 12, 2010
Cell and Genome Sciences Building, Farmington, Conn.
27th Annual Reconstruction Awards—Silver Award. Administrators at the University of Connecticut Health Center in Farmington didn’t think much of the 1970s building they planned to turn into the school’s Cell and Genome Sciences Building. It’s not that the former toxicology research facility was in such terrible shape, but the 117,800-sf structure had almost no windows and its interior was dark and chopped up.
| Oct 12, 2010
The Watch Factory, Waltham, Mass.
27th Annual Reconstruction Awards — Gold Award. When the Boston Watch Company opened its factory in 1854 on the banks of the Charles River in Waltham, Mass., the area was far enough away from the dust, dirt, and grime of Boston to safely assemble delicate watch parts.
| Oct 12, 2010
Cuyahoga County Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument, Cleveland, Ohio
27th Annual Reconstruction Awards—Gold Award. The Cuyahoga County Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument was dedicated on the Fourth of July, 1894, to honor the memory of the more than 9,000 Cuyahoga County veterans of the Civil War.
