JGMA’s design strategy for the Engineering and Advanced Manufacturing Center utilizes building transparency to showcase machines, equipment, and products integral to the learning objectives of the colleges as well as provide a visual connection to the surrounding West Lawn community. The seamless fluidity to the building’s form was inspired by the constant and linear flow of the manufacturing process. The building spans the main thoroughfare of 76th Street with a strong industrial bridge that links the south and north campus of Richard J. Daley College.
River Point is a mixed-use project comprising a fifty story office tower with retail and restaurants; a spacious lobby; a 1.5 acre public plaza; and three levels of parking. Located on a triangular site at the broad confluence of the branching North and South Chicago Rivers, River Point enhances the character of this prominent river frontage while concealing the existing railroad tracks below.
The Wintrust Arena, like Tulsa’s BOK Center, is a multi-purpose events space that hosts the performing arts as well as sports and convention-related events like keynote speeches. While not performing arts centers in the traditional sense, these venues benefitted in a very essential way from Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects’ experience with performing arts center design. The firm’s performing arts team at PCPA led the design effort on these projects, and many of the consultants who contributed to the performing arts centers, including acousticians, theater planners, and stage-lighting consultants, are part of the team.
The Northeastern Illinois University (NEIU) El Centro intends to inspire minority students, most of which will become the first in their family’s history to attain higher education. The main objective for this project was to create a building that would become a beacon for the community and inspire students from various ethnic backgrounds. It aspires to break down the emotional and psychological barriers of walking into a college building to provide a sense of belonging, create a sense of place, and make students, faculty, and the community feel welcomed.
Located at a busy commercial intersection near Lake Michigan and adjacent to a commuter rail stop, City Hyde Park is designed to become a pedestrian-friendly hub that helps encourage the greater urban evolution of its neighborhood. When complete, the 500,000 sf mixed-use project will bring new options for living, shopping, and outdoor recreation and leisure to its full-block site, formerly an underused parking lot and strip mall.
“Umami,” a word of distinctively Japanese provenance, is used to describe the elusive 5th taste; a nuanced and complex combination of salty, sweet, sour, and bitter. “When Umami came to us for a new concept to unify their brand, we suggested bringing the mystery of Umami to life. We wanted to create a space as purposefully composed as their mouth-watering recipes. Using a 360-brand approach, we filtered traditional Japanese design queues through a modern, American lens,” explains Cleo Murnane, Co-founder and Creative Director for Project M Plus.
Design Studio JGMA Celebrates Pilsen’s Identity with the Creative Office Campus ‘Mural Park’
JGMA to rehab two vacant warehouse buildings in Chicago’s Pilsen community
Chicago, Illinois: Pilsen, in Chicago’s Lower West Side is well-known for its richness in culture and diversity as well as its abundant public art, particularly, lively murals. Chicago common brick façades have become canvases for local artists that frequently embody Mexican heritage and American dreams. To encourage the sustainable development of Pilsen by respecting the resident’s vision for their community, design studio JGMA, Condor Partners and Chicago Development Partners are collaborating with the National Museum of Mexican Art and community groups to create the innovative office campus ‘Mural Park’. Mural Park is designed to be an inclusive organic community accessible to existing local businesses, new economy users and more traditional flex-office users.
JGMA focuses on generating energy from food waste by reviving silos and invigorating a community. Food is at the center of our daily lives: fueling human bodies, supporting a natural energy cycle, and is one of the most significant reflections of human culture. Despite this, food is continually wasted, in the City of Chicago as at rate of 55 million pounds per month according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Anaerobic Digesters can capture this food waste and generate usable energy in the form of methane gas, which could be the cleaner substitution of energy production within the city. Chicago’s Damen Grain Silo site in Pilsen, a site that once boasted massive grain production in the city has remained unoccupied along the south branch of Chicago’s river. Using the once stratifying infrastructural elements such as a vehicular bridge, the river, and aged vacant grain elevators, a new architecture emerges to suture disparate communities and ultimately connect neighbors to exciting new jobs, educational facilities, and recreational amenities. This area will mark the future of a new model for community-centric infrastructure, focused around bio-digesters, boasting a new international public market, restaurants, public parkland, wholesale food distribution, educational facilities, and a museum dedicated to a century of energy in Chicago.
Within the constraints of an otherwise non-descript box, design studio JGMA has inventively designed an attractive and engaging transformation that provides a constrained space with multi-functional capacity, while reinforcing the identity of a visionary school. Working on a small renovation budget, the Ancona School in Chicago’s southside Hyde Park had been fighting loud reverberating acoustics and harsh lighting in their undersized gymnasium, making use of the space nearly unbearable. The room is much smaller than any typical gym–a retro-fit holdover from an out-dated 1960’s construction–but it houses many of the school’s primary athletic functions and is the only school space large enough for family gatherings and school performances.
Organized as a village-like cluster of distinct volumes that surround a central hub, the building’s form resonates with the character of Glencoe’s downtown. The theater’s two performance spaces—a main stage and a smaller black box venue—employ innovative staging and seating configurations to maximize the sense of intimacy between actors and audience and to enhance the immersive experience of Writers’ productions.
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