ILLINOIS

frank lloyd wright was one of the most influential american architects and is perhaps best known for his prairie style which emphasized the horizontal. in this light, his 1956 proposal for the mile-high ILLINOIS skyscraper would at first seem quite ironic.

his proposal would tower one mile high, with 528 inhabitable floors and over 18 million square feet of floor space. its general form is that of a tripod, tapering along its height. it was to rest upon a "tap-root" foundation, an inverted pyramid tapering toward the bedrock beneath the building. the structural core of the building would consist of a steel frame embedded in lightweight concrete. each floor would cantilever from the central structural core. wright had applied this method of construction (albeit at a smaller scale) in his recent built work including the imperial hotel in tokyo and the price tower in oklahoma. here, wright applied this inside-out approach to design (rather than outside-in of traditional steel from construction) in the spirit of organicity: his building is as a tree, with the structural core acting as trunk, the cantilevered floors as limbs, and the foundation as roots. wright conceived the tower as city within itself, housing all aspects of society including residences, businesses, government, entertainment, etc. he estimated that it could sustain approx. 45,000 permanent inhabitants and another 67,000 transient inhabitants (staff, visitors, etc.) for a total population of over 100,000 people. for the sake of comparison, only 251 of the 23,435 municipalities in the u.s. have more than 100,000 inhabitants. wright also provided parking for 15,000 cars and 100 helicopters.

a comparison to today's skyscrapers


one of the most basic implications of wright's mile high skyscraper is its role as a symbol. despite his earlier utopian views of the city, Wright had accepted the role of the city in american society and as such placed the Illinois at the center of his previously utopian broadacre city to be its most powerful symbol (the symbolic nature of a utopia, he realized, was no longer enough). had it been built, the Illinois would have been a symbol unrivaled by anything manmade, and would remain so to this day.


the ILLINOIS's shear size would have made is visible from 89 miles away (disregarding atmospheric conditions and topography). this means that if the Illinois were built in manhattan, it would be visible from philadelphia and beyond. an identical structure could be built 178 miles away to allow the two structures to be mutually visible at all times. this creates an interesting parallel to the observation infrastructure used in the past that relied solely on visual communication. an archepelego of mega towers creates the opportunity to use technology to create a tangeable/sensory connection over great distances (rather than the ivisible data that connects us today).











visibilty (if placed in nyc)
























a building of this size would also passively make itself known locally with its emense shadow. this model shows the mid-afternoon shadow in winter, which would stretch 3.4 miles. it is interesting to consider how the building's shadow becomes the largest physical manifestation of the building in the horizontal plane that wright worked in so often.

again, the building has been sighted with its original orientation, but in nyc. the shadow is cast on the winter solstice at 3:30 pm.














new york land use
source







the most interesting implication of wright's proposal is its potential to be a city within itself. i looked for an analogue in a existing city whose configuration could be applied to the Illinois. i realized however that my conception of a skyscraper as a series of repetatively stacked planes centered around a core would was incongruous with the organic nature of the layout of a city. in his book reinventing the skyscraper, ken yeang proposes that we rethink the skyscraper and plan it in the model of an existing city. so, the following is a study of the land use of manhattan and quick studies on how this use could be applied to planning a mega skyscraper.






















studies on applying nyc's land usage to Illinois. these studies make it clear how the typical repition found in a skyscraper could not apply to a vertical city.


as a traditional horizontal city grows, changes, and recreates itself organically, so to should a vertical city. this study it meaant to suggest how the illinois could be built over time, constantly growing vertically but also changing vertically. this implies than the designer would have to plan the structure to allow this change. but in order to contend with gravity, it seems that a certain degree of rigidity in planning would be required. this could be compared to the city grid of a modern city. but in a city, the grid is a response to the needs of the city. when the needs of the city change, the grid system can change, either in whole or in part, to repsond to these needs. in the vertical city, however, the development of the city must always respond to some degree to the 'grid'; if the needs of the vertical city change, the 'grid' cannot be changed in part becuase this would undermine the entire system. the only remedy for change would therefor be destruction and rebuilding.