IDA 2024 NOW OPEN -- Final Deadline November 30, 2024
Big Marsh Park is the Chicago Park District’s largest reclamation project. Once a natural landscape damaged by slag from steel mills, new restorative efforts have set the park on a path for industry and nature to coexist.
The facility features a permanent exhibit, classrooms, offices, bike repair area, restrooms, and storage spaces. Its materials reinforce its mission: weathered steel cladding recalls the site's industrial past, and exposed NLT alludes to an environmentally-responsive future. The building’s wastewater wetland system uses the same processes from the marsh to clean blackwater.