Urban Waterways

Urban Waterways offers a vision for the deployment of water taxi stands along the Chicago River in the spirit of revitalizing a vital urban waterway. Accommodating the given programs through a series of site-specific strategies, each proposal offers a gesture of continuity to three different conditions; the movement of pedestrians, the movement of vehicles, and the movement of water. Given the initial precedent of reversing the flow of the Chicago River in 1871, the idea of controlling movement via infrastructure provides the conceptual foundation for each of the new taxi stands.

An articulated system of water filtration is the common thread between the three river stations. Built as spaces within dense infrastructural matrices, each station exposes the mechanisms responsible for purifying the once toxic waters of the Chicago River. Analogous to the movement of water taxi riders between the Loop and Joliet along the river, the flow of water is mitigated by the infrastructure of each river station.