Lafayette Park & The Canopysphere: Natural Landscape as Urban Design Framework for Public Spaces in Large-Scale Private Developments

Abstract

North American cities are in constant growth and expansion. Cities like Chicago, home of the fastest growing neighborhoods in America, face the challenges introduced by demographic expansion. Chicago is dealing with a social crisis, the result of decades of poor public policies and their relentless implementation. All this at a time of climate crisis at a global scale. The expansion of Chicago’s urban landscape takes place in its abandoned industrial yards. These sites are large enough to attract private capital towards developing them into large-scale communities. Currently, these large-scale private developments are designed, and later assessed, by city authorities focusing on the building stock and sidelining their public spaces. Since there is no availability of tools to design nor assess these developments, their public spaces are but a byproduct and not the center of these private developments. The design of new large-scale private developments ought to adopt design and assessment tools commonly employed in parks. Should such design and assessment tools exist, which frameworks would its performance rely upon? The Canopysphere is a proposed architectural, landscape, and urban design framework concentrating strategies that harness the qualitative virtues of the tree canopy. For The Canopysphere framework, my research conducts a thorough case study analysis of Lafayette Park in Detroit. This 1956 large-scale private development is the brainchild of a collaborative effort between Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, an architect, Ludwig Hilberseimer, an urbanist, and Alfred Caldwell, a landscape architect. Through thorough and exhaustive digital photographic and video documentation of Lafayette Park, my research aims to catalog the different strategies which define The Canopysphere. These efforts are undertaken as an essential piece in crafting and assembling The Canopysphere as a design and assessment framework at the service of architects, landscape architects, urbanists, and policy makers.