Bertrand's gift (CHA's Hilliard Homes)
2100 block S. State Street (designed by Bertrand Goldberg, completed in 1966)
chicagoreader.com/news-politics/the-goldberg-variation-hi...
The 12.5-acre parcel at State and Cermak was part of what a 1966 article in Architectural Forum magazine called “one of the city’s worst concentrations of junkyards and shabby bars.”
But right from the start, the vision for Hilliard was unlike that for any other CHA development.
Whereas other high-rise projects along the corridor were built on the cheap, the CHA brought in Goldberg to design the new project, hoping to mollify the protesting civil rights groups and promising that better architecture would lead to better social outcomes. It would be the agency’s final high-rise project, and “this last ‘statement’ was to indicate progress in Chicago’s treatment of its public housing problem,” Goldberg wrote in 1968. “The design was encouraged to provide a ‘crown’ for the new five mile ghetto to the south, as well as an oasis of park, recreation and housing near the loop.”
Indeed, when families moved in just a few months after Goldberg’s construction-site birthday party, Hilliard Homes was instantly recognized as a model community, socially as well as architecturally. Though the project’s residents were predominantly African--American, Hilliard managed to attract some Chinese, Hispanic, and even elderly white residents too—a first for the corridor.
“The grubby cross-section of Cermak and State suddenly has gone mod,” declared a Chicago Daily News article in November 1966.
Bertrand's gift (CHA's Hilliard Homes)
2100 block S. State Street (designed by Bertrand Goldberg, completed in 1966)
chicagoreader.com/news-politics/the-goldberg-variation-hi...
The 12.5-acre parcel at State and Cermak was part of what a 1966 article in Architectural Forum magazine called “one of the city’s worst concentrations of junkyards and shabby bars.”
But right from the start, the vision for Hilliard was unlike that for any other CHA development.
Whereas other high-rise projects along the corridor were built on the cheap, the CHA brought in Goldberg to design the new project, hoping to mollify the protesting civil rights groups and promising that better architecture would lead to better social outcomes. It would be the agency’s final high-rise project, and “this last ‘statement’ was to indicate progress in Chicago’s treatment of its public housing problem,” Goldberg wrote in 1968. “The design was encouraged to provide a ‘crown’ for the new five mile ghetto to the south, as well as an oasis of park, recreation and housing near the loop.”
Indeed, when families moved in just a few months after Goldberg’s construction-site birthday party, Hilliard Homes was instantly recognized as a model community, socially as well as architecturally. Though the project’s residents were predominantly African--American, Hilliard managed to attract some Chinese, Hispanic, and even elderly white residents too—a first for the corridor.
“The grubby cross-section of Cermak and State suddenly has gone mod,” declared a Chicago Daily News article in November 1966.