Eleanor Boathouse Multifunctional Complex

By Raymund Ryan - 5 May 2017

Studio Gang has been thinking about the Chicago River for some time. In 2011, Jeanne Gang taught a studio at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, her alma mater, a theoretical endeavor that led to a publication titled Reverse Effect: Renewing Chicago’s Waterways. That Harvard studio proposed designs for a hydrological barrier and center for limnology at the curiously named Bubbly Creek. The publication catalogs the student work but also lays out the history of Chicago’s multi-pronged river and many critical environmental issues facing waterways linking Lake Michigan and the Great Lakes to the Des Plaines River, just west of Chicago. In an extraordinary feat of manpower and engineering, the construction of the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal in the 1890s reversed the flow of the Chicago River so that sewage and other pollutants consequently seep into the Des Plaines River, a tributary of the Mississippi, and by extension south to the Gulf of Mexico. The Eleanor Boathouse by Studio Gang is both a tectonic exercise, i.e. a formal object, and an expression or outcome of the recuperation of Chicago’s complex hydrological network. It is the fourth such structure erected during the term of the city’s current mayor, Rahm Emanuel, and the second public boathouse designed by Studio Gang. The Eleanor Boathouse occupies a flat site with distant views of Downtown Chicago, with its iconic high-rises, to the north. It faces west across a basin of sluggish water at the juncture of the Chicago River and Bubbly Creek. The immediate context is today devoid of the stockyards and slaughterhouses for which it was once infamous. Indeed, Bubbly Creek’s name is due to the grease, chemicals and other filth dumped into this waterway where, as Upton Sinclair remarked in The Jungle (1906), “bubbles of carbonic acid gas will rise to the surface and burst, and make rings two or three feet wide.” The Boathouse both signals the geometry of exercise...