Architecture

THE BOATHOUSE’S ZIGZAG PROFILE WAS INSPIRED BY THE SHAPES OARS MAKE WHILE ROWING

A shapely Frontboathouse has become a model regeneration project row for ’s riverfront

PHOTOGRAPHY: STEVEN HALL WRITER: JAY PRIDMORE

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THE BOATHOUSE IS ONE OF FOUR PLANNED AS PART OF A REGENERATION PROGRAMME FOR CHICAGO’S RIVERFRONT

FOR MORE PHOTOGRAPHS OF THE BOATHOUSE, INCLUDING A LOOK INSIDE, DOWNLOAD THE IPAD EDITION AT WALLPAPER.COM/IPAD

hicago-based architect Jeanne project ran deep. She rowed as a guest of established Gang and her of ce Studio Gang are commendably teams, including one composed of cancer survivors. straight shooters; design inf uences are made clear She interviewed coaches. She visited older boathouses Cand distinct in their f nished buildings. The studio’s around America to discover how the sport was Ford Calumet Environmental Center, completed traditionally housed. She found specialists who in 2008, for example, used the way birds make their designed and built rowing tanks, essentially lap nests out of found materials as a model, with salvaged pools with mechanical currents. steel and reclaimed industrial scrap being used The boathouse that came out of her extensive to build the sustainable structure. Meanwhile, the f rm’s research is comprised of two separate buildings, 2010 Chicago skyscraper featured undulating with an impressive opening in-between that creates balconies inspired, says Gang, by the layered limestone a stately gateway from the road to the river. The $8.8m outcroppings that border the Great Lakes. project cost an impressively low $3.17 per sq ft, and The practice’s latest project uses a slightly more it includes a state-of-the-art tank room with f ttings abstract, but nonetheless convincing, leitmotif. The for practice in both sweeping (where the rower operates WMS Boathouse on the banks of the once-squalid one oar) and sculling (where the rower uses two). Chicago River has a prof le inspired by motion-picture Gang proudly points out that the repetition of truss pioneer Eadweard Muybridge’s early f lms of men forms was cost-saving, as was the limited palette of rowing. For the architects, the geometry of oars in materials, which includes zinc, slate and wood. The motion sug ested the building’s roof ine of alternating building also aids the local ecology with a permeable M- and inverted V-shaped trusses. concrete pavement. The result is an exterior prof le that enlivens a once- While the boathouse is not glitzy in any way, abandoned riverfront on a city park site, miles from the there is an undeniable elegance to its low prof le and waterway’s main branch through downtown Chicago. interlocking, naturally lit interior space. The ceiling The design encourages human interaction with nature – over the large second-f oor training room, which can the stag ered clerestories opening to southern sun double as a reception hall when the rowing machines in the winter and cool breezes in the summer – echoing are removed, is a continuous membrane of curved the sport it houses, ‘where each person has to be in tune unpainted plywood sheets. ‘We’re interested in creating with other people in the boat’, says Gang. complex surfaces with simple materials,’ says Gang. The boathouse commission came to Studio Gang It may seem remarkable that one of America’s most through happy coincidence. In spring 2011, Gang was distinguished architects (Gang was a 2011 MacArthur teaching at the Harvard Graduate School of Design Fellow, recipient of the $500,000 ‘genius grant’) and challenged students to design a dam structure would occupy herself with a brief for which a shed primarily to prevent invasive species swimming through might have suf ced. But the project chimed with the Chicago River into Lake Michigan. The project her objective of designing beautiful buildings that led to a publication, Reverse Ef ect, which addressed are both sustainable and economical. And with the opportunities to transform the Chicago River’s the sawtooth façade of her boathouse, she has created overall ecology. an eye-catching landmark on the riverfront. ‘We Simultaneously, Chicago mayor believe that to change the world you have to work conceived a series of initiatives to revitalise the river at multiple scales,’ says Gang. ‘Addressing urban blight network, which runs some 20 miles along three and climate change – these things can’t be resolved branches within the city. Chicago’s lakefront was in just one way.’ a 20th-century triumph and the mayor was determined The mayor agrees. ‘Jeanne Gang shares the city’s to do the same for the river. The WMS Boathouse, vision of transforming the future of our river.’ He one of four planned on Chicago Park District land calls the boathouse ‘part of broader ef orts to revitalise (Studio Gang will soon design another), provides the river as the next great recreational frontier’. facilities for competitive rowing, as well as more It’s a worthy goal for a city project that has casual canoeing and kayaking, to locals and nearby quickly brought life to the waterway among younger schools. The project came about in part through money Chicagoans, unaware that an older generation once donated by WMS Industries, a slot-machine maker called a stretch of the river Bubbly Creek because with a glassy new of ce building on the opposite of the methane caused by old stockyard waste. bank of the river. Today, riverfront projects like this one bear witness Gang, with Reserve Ef ect to her name, was an obvious to architecture’s ability to ef ect social change. ∂ choice for this f rst boathouse, and her research for the studiogang.net

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