A VISION FOR CHICAGO, 2106

December 2006

Chicago, Illinois—The civilizations covered in Engineering an Empire on The History Channel achieved the impossible—they were the first to design and engineer marvels that astonished the world and transcended time. The History Channel, with its sponsors Infiniti and IBM, challenged today's top designers, architects and engineers to do the same in The City of the Future: A Design and Engineering Challenge.

These competitions—hosted in New York City, Chicago and Los Angeles—challenged teams to produce a vision of their city in the year 2106. Eight distinguished teams from Chicago's top architecture firms competed in The City of the Future Chicago competition held in November, 2006. Each team was given one week to imagine and design their vision of Chicago 100 years from now that, like the marvels of past civilizations, would have the staying power to endure for centuries to come.

IBC Engineering Services' Lev and Fieena Zvenyach were on board with Strawn.Sierralta, a design firm that was a finalist in the World Trade Center Memorial competition. Entitled “LAKE EFFECT: CH2 — The Lake Powering Chicago” their design centered around the creation of floating hydrogen collection vessels tethered to anchors in Lake Michigan. According to Lev Zvenyach, the team's mentor and the brain behind the vessels, the floating farms will extract hydrogen from the air, convert it to electricity and transmit the harvest to mainland Chicago for consumption. These "floating skyscrapers" will produce 75% of the energy the 9 million Chicagoans will be using, as well as scrub the air of toxins. The towers will be built upon buoyant bases that will serve as distribution hubs for H2 power.

The Strawn.Sierralta design was deemed "prolific and intriguing," but ultimately lost to UrbanLab's "Growing Water." Receiving an honorable mention and the IBM Engineering Innovation Award, Zvenyach sums up his involvement: “Instead of designing for a future aesthetic, our team concentrated on finding solutions to Chicago's possible shortcomings, like the crumbling infrastructure and increasing traffic congestion, so we're honored to have received an appropriate accolade for our team's more engineering—like approach.”

UrbanLab's winning design advances to compete online against the winners of the New York and Los Angeles competitions. Starting January 3, 2007, the public will choose the national grand prize winner, with chief juror Daniel Libeskind, architect of the World Trade Center redevelopment site, leading the consumer vote. Click here to vote.