CHA Competition in Chicago, Illlinois by Brian Healy Architects, 2001.
The following text and images are by Brian Healy Architects of Boston, Massachusetts, for their first-place submission to the Chicago Housing Authority's competition (with the City of Chicago and the NEA) for a new mixed-income housing model.
We are rooted in our homes just as a plant is rooted in the soil. The desire to establish roots, however, is tempered by a widespread restlessness that is deeply embedded in the American grain and leads to personal migrations that continually transform our landscape. This site for mixed-income housing is a prime example of a protean urban landscape.
Our work focuses on the connection of people and their dwellings to these landscapes-in-transition. We engage what is already there in an attempt to be a part of that place and a part of what that place is becoming.
This competition requires a re-imagination of both the city and the urban home. Accordingly, we approach the design as a synthesis between complimentary relationships. We choose diversity over strict repetition. We accept the interdependence of communal and personal space and we satisfy the desire for a tranquil interior landscape to balance an increasingly complex urban life. We conceive of the housing and city block as an open system rather than a closed composition. Our proposal anticipates transformations and permutations.
It is our hope that the resultant proposal offers a fresh, vital and rooted strategy for the holistic redevelopment of this part of Chicago.
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