With a portfolio of train stations, chiller plants, and border stations, Carol Ross Barney has built one of the nation’s most vital practices, from utilitarian public infrastructure that seldom gets the attention of a designer. But these pieces of urban connective tissue, expanding outward from her home base in Chicago—where she founded her firm, Ross Barney Architects, in 1981—are not, in her hands, unassuming. Her Chicago Riverwalk (on which she collaborated with Sasaki) synthesizes landscape design and architecture to create an engaging pedestrian corridor along Chicago’s founding waterway, generating a new civic connection to the water.
In response to the pandemic crisis and last year’s uprisings against racist police violence, demands for equitable public space are reshaping conversations around this sort of infrastructure, just as the horizon of what’s politically possible opens up a pathway toward more investment in cities and towns. By selecting Ross Barney for the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum’s 2021 National Design Award for Architecture and Interior Design, the institution honors a designer who has found ways for the prosaic and noble to hold us together. The architect spoke with Zach Mortice for RECORD.
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