Last we heard of the Chicago Spire, developer Garrett Kelleher was asking starchitect Santiago Calatrava to go back to the drawing board and come back with a cheaper, two-building project that would be easier to build. But wait: A multi-building design for the Spire site already exists! Inhabitat dug up some renderings of The Chicago Gateway, a vertical farming concept produced by an unnamed IIT architecture student back in 2007, when high-rise vertical farming was still a novel idea. From Inhabitat:
The Chicago Gateway is composed of two vertical mixed-use towers supported by a leaning tower covered in a green roof. Offices and commercial space would reside in the vertical towers and residences in the leaning tower, which bridges over Lake Shore Drive. All of the structures are connected together via a vertical farm podium, and a network of sky bridges connects the towers and provides access to other nearby buildings. That big podium thingy would house mechanized hanging baskets of hydroponically-grown herbs and vegetables, because, well, farming is the best use for one of the city's priciest land parcels. A closer look at the rendering shows that the sky bridges connect to nearly every other building in Streeterville.
·Vertical Farm Concept is a Green Gateway for Chicago [Inhabitat]
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