Chicago Park District Headquarters
Architect: John Ronan Architects
Landscape Architect: Site Design Group
General Contractors: F.H. Paschen, ALL Construction Group
Structural Engineer: Thornton Tomasetti
MEP/FP Engineer: dbHMS
Civil Engineer: TERRA Engineering
Lighting Design: CharterSills
Location: Chicago, IL
The agency that administers Chicago parks itself becomes a park. As part of a larger effort to move city departments out of downtown and into the neighborhoods, the Park District left its downtown high-rise for Brighton Park. The Southwest Side neighborhood ranked at the time among the five community areas with the least public green space. The site is a remediated brownfield, a former railroad yard along the current CTA Orange Line. A two-story circular building, roughly 250 feet across, is bisected by a path separating the offices from a public field house and widening into a courtyard in the center. The walls consist of Chicago common brick salvaged from two demolished neighborhood buildings and set in a pixelated relief pattern.
