Ethereal Forest stands tall within a landscape of much shorter, more subtle outer-city structures.  Appearing to float, almost weightless above the rigidity of industrial parks, train stations, and highway culture, this building seems to almost breathe life back into the west side of Chicago. 

Consisting of ten floors varying in shape that shift dramatically from space to space, the building holds its overall shape of an extruded slab from the intrinsic stacking of each of these floors.  Following the stacking of floors, columns of varying size, thicknesses and material spread across each space and throughout the building, not leaving any space, aside from the auditorium and chapel, devoid of these vertical elements.  The columns range in size, thickness, and material, but also in orientation, in order to create more public or more private areas respectively as the building flows higher.  Glass windows that hold in the entire building stand inches between columns and the edges of each slab in order to create a more pronounced and obvious expression of horizontality of the slab across a now very vertically inclined structure. 

Furniture within the building responds directly to the changing column densities and placements.  From an aerial perspective, each floor would appear as a hatch within a hatch, the furniture becoming almost unnoticed within the pattern.  The combination of furniture and columns, the flow of pattern across each floor, spreads directly to the site creating a vast and densely filled garden space, welcoming in the otherwise seemingly dormant surrounding community. 

Ethereal Forest, a very obvious structure for its location, stands oriented toward the highway in order to serve as an active advertisement among the very inactive billboards standing a part of the highway culture.  Highway passerbys are meant to notice this right away and to see the movement occurring within and flowing throughout the structure, between and behind columns, appearing and disappearing, constantly moving … people are intended to become curious and therefore drawn in, causing a community of dormancy to become a community of rapid activity and liveliness. 

Check out the entire project on cloudwatching.net

(Honestly, some of the best images from the project were too large to upload, so please feel free to check it out and thank you for taking the time to do so).