Union Rail Station / Chicago (usa)

> 2008 / CHICAGO – ILLINOIS / USA
CONCOURS
Architecte

© The Architectural Club of Chicago

I LOVE CHICAGO

A multi-purpose Complex, Hotel and Congress Center,  Farmer’s Market for Video Artists are to be planned around the New High Speed Train Station.
I visited the City in 1999, during a Trip around New York, Buffalo and Boston, hosted by relatives.

My favourite souvenir is John HANDCOCK’s Tower Bar, drinking Porto at the Sun-dusk, watching the endless darkness of the MICHIGAN Lake facing the lighting grid popping up from the Most American City.

Here, You can find Frank LOYLD WRIGTH and Mies VON DER ROHE Masterpieces.
Oak Park Houses and Lake Sure drive, FBI + Post offices buildings are the best testimony of american modern times scaled into an harmonic urban place.

Organic and modern are now days Strategic thoughts, not a question of style anymore.
The use full strategy to develop is the sustainability of our buildings.
It’s a place where the natural resources are seen as a Vertu.

A City and a Fusée is a text written on a none zone.
A constant need of identification into foreign minds : Mine & Yours.

Union Station
A City & A Fusée

The Railways Station is a nod.
The Union of Regional and International scales, plugged on tracks.
It’s a running Pulsar, inducting Day In, Day Out, Energies for the City Center.

Head phones, Ipods, free human flows are twisting cars under the renewed entity, beneath intermodal connections, concessions, down to the parking silo.

A scissor like topographical system is cutting this exogenous body of functional screens, from the subway to the tracks, across the renewed Grand Hall.
They are the Corridors from Clinton to Canal streets.

A vertical Core is heating up and down the Physical Transit. Into this mixed organization, a network of underground corridors are connecting the Platforms.
Above the train, in the mezzanine waiting rooms, a silent slide shows the river.

Across the two stories roof top plaza, pop-up periscopes are mirroring like photographs, changing skies, moving clouds, stars facing waiting travelers.

Jumping over the tracks, the Hotel is a Tower.
Composed by 5+1 blocks, gambling with the Mid-West Market, those two buildings are in harmony with each other.
A walking observer will notice their dance, temptation of an Alchemical Addition, the Congress Center wrapped into, settled on the top of the old Station.

This proposal is a schemantic design :
blues, soul, noise, sounds like, music.

The underground telluric architecture is playing with masses,
abstract forms, vibrating cristal surfaces, concessions cluster,
a model shaped with nails and sand paper.

It’s actual, sustainable, ever recomposing a GPS instant map.

October 2008