Seth McDowell Architect, pllc

To celebrate and extend the Chicago’s history of architectural leadership, experts and enthusiasts from around the globe converged in the city for North America’s first architecture Biennial in the Fall of 2015. During this time Chicago Architecture Foundation (CAF) hosted a significant architectural competition tackling a new building typology, one with design as its central focus.

The CAF requested a facility that includes the new headquarters, visitor center and exhibition spaces for the Foundation; a new headquarters for the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH); a design and allied arts high school; and flexible learning spaces for out-of-school-time youth programs. The Center for Architecture, Design and Education (CADE) will be a new kind of learning campus that simultaneously serves as a welcoming center for Chicago visitors; provides a learning environment that equips young people to be stewards for the built environment in the 21st Century (and beyond); and is a hub for community engagement.

Our proposal “Layered Intelligence” offers a spatial/pedagogical strategy for CADE that results in an adaptive, responsive incubator for the future of architecture, design and education. This involves layering tectonic components to allow for the incremental control of space and information. This is seen in section as the building becomes the resultant of layering over 500 unique profiles—each calibrated to specific program requirements and environmental stimuli. This layered intelligence approach allows for global complexity to be decoded and managed in local situations. The building prioritizes the customization of an individual unit, which accumulates in a variety of configurations to generate a diverse set of experiences.  

Chicago’s rich architectural history is driven by material and technological innovation. This proposal works to continue this tradition of experimentation in building technologies and materials. The building reads as a layering of two material oppositions: a hard, manufactured material and a soft, organic material.  Precast concrete panels provide structural ribs and a resin-hair composite forms a binding layer between the panels. The resin-hair material transmits light throughout the building while adding visual screening that results from the clustering of hair particles.

Layered Intelligence will reaffirm the crucial role architecture and design play in the future of Chicago and will serve as a model for future learning environments that not only improve student achievement but also act as catalysts for vibrant community engagement around local design challenges and opportunities.

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"It taps into, historically speaking, a history that Chicago isn’t crazy rich in: the use of structure, in an eccentric way, to define space and differentiate program on [both] the exterior and interior. I love the fact that it is really unafraid to be very idiosyncratic and very particular to purpose. Maybe Bertrand Goldberg hit it best, [and] this is a varied vocabulary of Goldberg. We like the generic and repurposable. This strikes me as resisting that tendency in a cool way." 

comment from Juror 2. 

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"The whole thing is very strange and I appreciate that because I feel like (the designer) didn’t pick this up from a magazine. It comes from a place inside his/her head. And then there is a kind of obstinacy about this building. I was in the cab and we went past the Monadnock building, and that is one stubborn building. I appreciated that sense of stubbornness."

Comment from Juror 5.