(Above) A vision of Chicago’s north Loop by architect Dirk Denison includes a very green Marina City at left. (Click on image to view larger version.)

September 22, 2009 – Marina City is bursting at the seams with vegetation in a vision of 22nd Century Chicago for the Burnham Plan Centennial.

In Chicago architect Dirk Denison’s plan, the streets of Chicago are an interconnected grid of green spaces for urban farming and leisure use.

A “multi-functional grafted crystalline mesh” spans the city, providing public transportation and distributing energy from a variety of sources, including wind, solar, and “metabolic heat harnessing,” or the harnessing of heat from waste decomposition.

With the automobile infrastructure antiquated throughout the city, the parking ramps at Marina City would be converted to hanging gardens. According to Micah Stanley of Dirk Denison Architects, “The new transportation infrastructure, including personal rapid transit, eliminates the need for traditional car-based streets and parking lots, allowing them to become vegetated areas – farms, parks, and wilderness.”

The design is one of eight proposals on exhibit at the Chicago Tourism Center. Architects, planners, and landscape architects were invited to share their visions of what the city might be like 100 years from now.

“Daniel Burnham’s 1909 Plan of Chicago did more than provide a vision for Chicago in the 20th century,” says the Centennial’s web site. “It established a precedent of dreaming big and thinking boldly that every generation of Chicagoans since has firmly embraced.”

 Web site: The Burnham Plan Centennial