Is this library politics?
A new building filled with social service and education amenities at Altgeld Gardens is a test case for the limits of design and architecture.
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An aerial view of the new Altgeld Family Resource Center just outside the Altgeld Gardens public housing units
courtesy KOO/Mike Schwartz
Drive south on the Bishop Ford Expressway to Altgeld Gardens and you'll pass plenty of reminders you're in a landscape not meant for inquisitive visitors. There are looming grain silos next to a parked shipping freighter, a village-scaled water reclamation plant, and plenty of anonymous warehouses. But once you pass 130th Street and drive into the Chicago Housing Authority's (CHA) largest surviving traditional public housing community, that spell breaks on approach to the new Altgeld Family Resource Center (FRC), a combined childcare center, community center, and Chicago Public Library. There, over a rising and falling roofline, neon-blue atriums slide in and out of view, beckoning with a playful game of peek-a-boo. The amoeba-shaped building's curves are mirrored by Altgeld's street plan, an oddity for grid-obsessed Chicago. Twenty miles from the Loop at the city's southern tip, connected only by one bus route, its ring of curving and meandering streets give the feeling of a suburban subdivision, or maybe something else.