Chicago’s Garfield Park Conservatory is a historic structure known for its extensive botanical collections. For the next year, however, the nearly 90,000-square-foot glazed building will be home to a very different attraction—one that will illuminate the architecture of its contiguous display houses.
At the Chicago Architecture Foundation's exhibition on big data, a resin model of Chicago has been digitally enhanced to project statistics on everything from demographics to tweets. In the lobby of Daniel Burnham’s Railway Exchange building, the Chicago Architecture Foundation (CAF) has made the invisible, visible. For the exhibition Chicago: City of Big Data, CAF turned its centerpiece Chicago Model—a 320-square-foot resin replica of the city’s downtown, updated annually to reflect additions and subtractions—into an interpretive piece through which to “view” the city’s data. Encompassing everything from tweets to demographics to air quality, so-called big data is increasingly employed
