Giant windmills, floating skyscrapers and an "elevator to space" in Lake Michigan. An automated 64-lane superhighway in the center of Chicago. Navy Pier reinvented as a year-round farmer's market. A system of underground tunnels through which people travel throughout the city and state. A network of water-recycling "eco-boulevards." Houses made of bioengineered trees.

These were among the mind-bending ideas for what Chicago might look like 100 years from now, presented as part of "The City of the Future: a Design and Engineering Challenge," a competition of local architectural teams held last month at the Chicago Architecture Foundation. Sponsored by the History Channel (as an offshoot of "Engineering an Empire," a series that examines architectural and engineering marvels of the ancient world) and other groups, the contest featured eight teams that were given a week to envision and create presentations for the city in the year 2106.


...Garofalo's scheme is in some ways the most radical of the contest projects, envisioning the abolition of automobiles not only from Chicago but from the entire state of Illinois. In the team's vision, transportation (as well as shipping, heating and utility systems) would be accomplished by means of an "aeroduct," a network of underground tunnels along a one-mile-square Jeffersonian grid, with a station at every crossing point. The aeroduct would be powered by electricity generated by air drawn upward from below ground inside the walls of double-skinned skyscrapers. Old transportation systems, including the L and highways, would be converted to green space for use as recreational and/or arable land.

"The suburbs are sprawling to the west in not-so-aesthetic fashion, eating up land, being inefficient and creating an energy crisis," Garofalo says. "We don't like sprawl, but we don't think it will stop, so we're creating a kind of counter to it. In a nutshell, what we see ourselves doing is creating a different kind of sprawl and accelerating it -- bringing the sprawl back to the city in a different form, reintroducing the prairie and agriculture to an urban setting."