The Kennedy District
Nine-Parcel Public Landscape Over the Kennedy Expressway in Chicago's Near West Side Along a Highway Corridor Reconnecting the City
The corridor runs beneath street grade through the near West Side, separating the Fulton Market and West Loop from the neighborhoods to the west and north. Nine parcels sit between Van Buren and Wayman, each bounded by existing street bridges.
The site carries significant community history: residents on both sides of the expressway have experienced development as something that happens around them rather than with them. The proposal was developed for World Business Chicago's Horizon Lines: Visions for 2050 open call and was selected for exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center.
OAO contributed the urban design framework, development strategy, and architectural massing that make the landscape vision financially viable and buildable.
The intent was not to design another signature park but to demonstrate that capping this corridor is an implementable urban move, one that creates development value, improves environmental conditions, and completes the urban fabric rather than patching it.
The proposal organizes the corridor into nine distinct parcels, each with its own identity and public purpose, together forming roughly 40 acres of continuous new ground.
OAO's work established the development logic at the park edges: where new construction can occur, how ground floor program activates the park rather than turning away from it, and what density the corridor can absorb while remaining centered on open space. The cap is designed to feel like it was never there. Street bridges become park entries. The highway becomes invisible.
The proposal is almost entirely public realm. New crosswalk connections improve pedestrian access along and across the corridor.
New tree canopy absorbs sound and cleans air. The park surface reads as continuous urban ground, not infrastructure with a lid on it. The design centers the people already living and working along the corridor, not a new downtown amenity extended westward.
The central challenge is not design or engineering. It is financial and political, and the proposal says so directly.
Making that argument clearly to a civic and developer audience, without either oversimplifying the implementation path or retreating into abstraction, was the core tension in the Vision Statement. The competition brief leaned toward iconic object framing. OAO and the team made a systems argument instead.
The question it opens is whether a vision of this scale can move from exhibition to implementation through a parcel-by-parcel development strategy rather than a single public funding event.
Related Research.
This project is informed by applied research in transit-oriented development, supporting housing density near transit while maintaining neighborhood continuity.
Next projects.
(2016-25©)
