Emerald Groves

Multi-chapter project 2011-2014

Once in a while there is a planned community unlike any other; a subdivision characterized by its distinctive pattern and unusual layout. If you look at the land from above, you might spot one, standing alone among Chicago’s familiar grids and cul-de-sacs. Guided by satellite images, I wandered through dozens of these peculiar subdivisions, asking, “what is this place?” One turned out to be a company town for builders of the B-29 bomber during WWII. Another was a residential airport. There was a bioengineering lab, a repurposed abandoned quarry, and a subdivision filled with house models such as “The Faulkner”, “The Alcott” and “The Steinbeck.”

What I found were not just rote developments, but stage sets designed to tap into a storyline of home. They were authored visions projected outward onto the land (and, in turn, up into space), and fit into exterior boundaries predetermined by the dimensions of the farmsteads, industrial sites, and undeveloped floodplains on which they sit. Edges form an inside and out, borders enclose a shared identity, property lines divide the land even further into family-sized lots. All the while, overlaying each space are two contradictory memory lines: a migratory nation’s ideological ties to a sentimental home in a past era somewhere else and the subsumed remnants of the land’s industrial or agricultural past.