"This year, Chicago celebrates the centennial anniversary of the publication of Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennett’s Plan of Chicago. The Plan, now considered an ur-text of urban planning, was conceived with the greater metropolitan region in mind, and identified six cornerstones of development: highways, rails, parks, systematized streets, civic centers, and the lakefront. Over the several decades that followed, Burnham’s vision transformed not just Chicago’s visual landscape, but its social and psychological portrait as well. To honor the anniversary, the city asked local architects, planners and landscape architects to issue proposals for large- and small-scale developments for the new century. The results are startling—alternately haunting and comic, they offer both sweeping answers to systemic ills and imaginative exercises in, for example, an “umbrella of magnetic energy” that “powers public transportation.” (Below, see an overview of 9 striking proposals.)" - Steven Perez from Bookmarklet