Chicago Kiosk

Location
Chicago, IL

Year
2014

Status
Competition Entry

Project Team
Lori Choi
Kenji Hattori-Forth
Jonathan Lain
Homayoun Zaryouni

Chicago Kiosk is a competition entry for the 2015 Chicago Biennial lakefront kiosk competition. The kiosk reproduces, in miniature, elements observed during a Google Earth survey of the area around “The Loop,” Chicago’s central business district. The area is striated by height, from street-level interventions of food trucks, stalls, to the glass skyscrapers the city is known for, to the clouds in the sky above. The design of the kiosk mirrors this relationship, turning these elements into a literal stack. At bottom is a technical box with fold-out compartments for serving food; moving upwards a much larger, nearly blank box with hidden contents; and inside the box a crinkly foam-filled Tyvek bag that looks something like a cloud.

It’s a totem when closed, as inscrutable and inaccessible as Chicago’s skyscrapers are to the casual pedestrian. When overturned, the bag causes the totem to relax its rigid vertical orientation to become something more like a primitive jumble or hut that loosely encloses the area beneath.