1st Annual Design Competition 2019
Chicago Yacht Club’s Monroe Harbor building
The Chicago-Midwest Chapter of the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art is pleased to announce the inaugural Chicago-Midwest ICAA Design Competition, offered to all ICAA members and member firms. Competition judgment will be “blind,” and entries may be submitted by individuals or teams of any number. Participants will have 3 months to conceive and illustrate designs for a new formal Harbor House along the waterfront in downtown Chicago, replacing the Chicago Yacht Club’s Monroe Harbor building, which currently terminates East Monroe Street. This competition is for an entirely fictive design – and is neither solicited nor endorsed by the Chicago Yacht Club organization.
Underpinning this design challenge is a move to correct the private Yacht Club’s current interruption of the otherwise “public” waterfront with a multi-use edifice whose purposes are united under the marine theme: a Maritime Museum, watersport-oriented Park District Field House and/or lido, and new Yacht Club facilities. The resulting design should reshape Lake Michigan water’s edge as you or your team deem most-appropriate toward the objective of reinforcing the bilateral symmetry of the waterfront as envisioned in the 1909 Plan of Chicago by Burnham & Bennett. The siting of the new Harbor House building shall balance the Shedd Aquarium, mirrored about the east-west axis of Ida B. Wells Drive, at what is now the convex curve of the waterfront, offset from the “S-curve” of Lake Shore Drive.
Winner
Margaret Derwent Ketcham