Although Chicago has been popularly known as the Windy City since at least 1876, its nickname has not always been invoked in reference to the natural movement of air across the city. In fact, local legend alludes to an early rivalry with Cincinnati and social smear campaigns as having first propagated the moniker. With both cities vying to become the capital of the Midwest, Ohio-based journalists remarked that Chicago’s weather was as notoriously windy as its “conceited, self-endorsing citizens.” This reputation carried over to articles written by New Yorkers ahead of the nationwide competition to host the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. Journalists similarly cited the bloviating personalities of Chicago’s residents and politicians and accused them of being “full of hot air.” Despite the criticism, Chicago eventually won the bid to host the fair and has since gone on to become one of the country’s most prosperous metropolises. Incidentally, citywide development means the nickname has only grown truer over time. Chicago’s many closely clustered towers have created various pockets of atmospheric pressure that, unforeseen by their designers, now frequently incite extreme wind activity across the city streets. This frenzy of artificial wind-making, paired with the frigid breezes known to blow off Lake Michigan, has helped positively assimilate the nickname over time.
Today though, when the breeze blows especially cold and swift, some locals know it as the Hawk. The term is common to the African American vernacular and is referenced in songs like “Dead End Street” by Lou Rawls. As an introduction to the 1967 song, Rawls sings: “I was born in in a city that they call The Windy City. They call it the Windy City because of the Hawk. The Hawk, almighty Hawk. Mr. Wind.” In Chicago, he explains, “the Hawk not only socks it to you, he socks it through you, like a giant razor blade blowing down the street.” Elsewhere, in other lore, the Hawk is the face of the famed native resistance to white settlement in and around Chicago. When an indigenous Sauk leader by the name of Black Hawk (Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kia) led a battle to safeguard Potawatomi native land in1832, nearly seven thousand American soldiers retaliated in what was both the first military conflict and cholera epidemic to sweep the Upper Great Lakes region. A century later, the legend of Black Hawk was resurrected by the very ideologies that had murdered the Sauk leader. Rather than live on as a symbol of native resistance to colonial forces, his name became eponymous with the expansion of the United States’ military interests across the modern world. By 1978, the Sikorsky UH-60 four-blade military helicopter, more famously known as the Black Hawk, was transporting soldiers, and facilitating aerial assaults in dozens of combat zones controlled by the United States Army worldwide. The Black Hawk, now an unprecedented model of airborne violence, would be employed by the United States and its allies to advance their political interests across the Middle East.
Despite its complexity, the Hawk is just one example of how Chicago’s air challenges the absence it is often made out to be and acquires a cultural and material sovereignty. More importantly, it is a testament to how natural phenomena shape, and are ultimately shaped by, planning and design regulations that have geoengineered air in service of political ambitions. That the quality of air has decreased dis-proportionately across Chicago cannot but find its origins in the city’s history of redlining, which decreased the value of land in the most disadvantaged neighborhoods and encouraged the construction of heavily polluting industrial zones. So laden with pollutants is the air in some of these communities that it increases temperature (given the absence of shaded public spaces) and respiratory illnesses. Rawls himself, a former resident of the Ida B. Wells public housing development in Bronzeville, would tell of these conditions through songwriting and literary production. In this studio, we will engage with air as a critical lens of design and observation, and foreground, not only how historical policies and contemporary practices shape Chicago’s ‘natural’ airscape, but also how dwellers today devise ways to challenge them. In doing so, we will test the possibilities, limitations, and agency of architecture—marked by its boundedness—in addressing the boundlessness, character, and complexity of air.
The studio will unfold in two distinct parts, both of which will draw on three considerations of air: (1) Air as Commodity, and its operation as a real estate currency, (2) Air as Commons, and its function (or malfunction) as a collective space, and (3) Air as Climate, and its transformations historically and today. The first part of the studio will work towards the creation of an Air Atlas of Chicago. The stories it recounts, invisible though they may at first seem, will magnify the practices of those forging new realities out of planned or unintended relationships with the air around them. The atlas will read between contemporary data of onsite pollutants, existing or future architectural and urban projects, zoning and building regulations, as well as historical representations of air mined out of literature, archival records, oral histories, and the like. The second part of the studio, which we will launch with a trip to Chicago, will concentrate on the neighborhood of Little Village on the city’s southwest side—one of the communities most affected by industrial contamination. On April 11, 2020, and after decades of extreme pollution, the Crawford coal plant adjacent to the neighborhood collapsed due to a planned implosion that ended up blanketing Little Village in a cloud of brown dust. The property owners responsible for the demolition, Hilco Redevelopment Partners, had purchased the land to build the city’s largest (LEED certified!) distribution warehouse, which has brought hundreds of diesel-fuel trucks to the neighborhood. Within this context, we will build on the collective atlas and the culture of Little Village to envision and design new alliances between air and architecture—ones that center design on those whose bodies (and airs) have for too long been deemed disposable.
