Dream a little dream

Convert the Old Post Office into a mausoleum. Illuminate the South Loop with a trellis of solar-powered LEDs. Erect a 114-story, automated parking garage in Chinatown. These are some of the ideas in Chicago Visionary Architecture: Fourteen Inspired Concepts for the Third Millennia. The book was orchestrated by architect Stanley Tigerman and by planner William Martin of the Chicago Central Area Committee, an influential booster group for downtown business and development.

Their idea, in essence, was to create a 21st-century version of Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennett's monolithic 1909 Plan of Chicago. Because the top-down, one-size-fits-all approach to urban design went out with Cabrini-Green, Tigerman and Martin smartly took a pluralistic, postmodern approach and assembled a team of 14 leading local architects: Tom Beeby, Larry Booth, Jeanne Gang, Doug Garofalo, Helmut Jahn, Ralph Johnson, Ron Krueck, Dirk Lohan, Brad Lynch, John Ronan, Carol Ross Barney, Adrian Smith, Joe Valerio and David Woodhouse. Tigerman and Martin asked each architect to design an urban gateway to downtown. Aside from the locations of the gateways, which Tigerman and Martin selected and assigned, the architects had carte blanche: no client, no budget, no gravity and the freedom to interpret the term urban gateway as they saw fit.

To generate an atmosphere of healthy competition, Tigerman and Martin split the architects into two equal groups: older and younger. In his recent (and confusingly similar) exhibition at the Art Institute, "Chicago Architecture: Ten Visions," Tigerman divided the participants by gender. In neither case does the division help demonstrate the value of progressive architecture or the needs of the city.

The 14 architects focused on issues such as homelessness, the environment, population density, transportation, street life, security, recreation and civic pride. So will the Chicago Architecture Foundation be able to build a new headquarters on top of the El station at Madison and Wabash, as Doug Garofalo suggests? Will the city's homeless want to move into towers made out of repurposed train cars, as Johnson proposes? Will Chicagoans of the future need a place to land their "private air cars," as Smith envisions? Perhaps.

Visionary architecture, like science fiction, requires a certain suspension of reality. Ultimately it doesn't matter whether the architects' ideas are realistic. Unleashed creativity has a value of its own. In Ronan's proposal to convert the Old Post Office into a mausoleum, for instance, what's worth noting is not just the poetry and novelty of his idea, but the way it illustrates Chicago's need for innovative approaches to the reuse of older buildings.

The most inspired concepts in Chicago Visionary Architecture offer insights into the nature of the city itself as a living, impulsive, imperfect organism.

Chicago Visionary Architecture is out from the Chicago Central Area Committee, ($35).