3.C.City, Chicago Biennial
3.C.City: Climate, Convention, Cruise proposes a new symbiosis between ecology and infrastructure, public and private, the individual and the collective. Developed for the inaugural Chicago Architecture Biennial, in collaboration with Chip Lord and Curtis Schreier of the radical architecture collaborative Ant Farm, the project builds on Ant Farm’s polemical explorations from the 1970s, transforming them to meet today’s global context.
The project is a vessel, a research lab, a conference center, and a vehicle of dreams – a floating city designed to facilitate dialogue and debate between people and other species. Resting on three floating stability pods, a thickened perimeter of housing encloses a giant interior landscape of participation, centered on an interspecies congress hall. A shingled skin of solar panels, pockets of greenhouses and gardens, an algae farm for biofuel and a water-collection river combine to render 3.C.City’s infrastructure as architecture.
As part of the exhibition, WORKac also recreated the lost drawings of three of Ant Farm’s iconic projects from the 1970s: House of the Century, Dolphin Embassy and Convention City. A recorded conversation, “Hacking Ant Farm,” identified the two practices’ shared interests, laying the groundwork for collaboration on 3.C.City.
