YIMBY+

I began writing for Chicago YIMBY in 2020. The work meant researching proposals and construction, gathering drawings and project information, photographing buildings, and explaining what was changing. Each article brought together a site's design, scale, participants and place in the neighborhood.

Across those stories, another question kept appearing: what would all of these projects look like together? A photograph recorded what was there, and a rendering described one proposal. Neither could show the combined effect of a development pipeline on the skyline.

The December 2020 St. Regis article preserves that starting point: written reporting and original photographs, with the article's supplied architectural rendering separately credited to Studio Gang.

Chicago YIMBY's annual countdown of projects under construction gave me a concrete way to test the idea. I added the featured towers to a base model of Chicago in Unity, then used the model to accompany each day's article.

The visual hierarchy was deliberately simple: the featured project in cyan, previously introduced towers in green, and the existing city in grayscale. That let the reader locate one new building without losing the accumulated story of the others.

I could also compare the model with a photographic viewpoint. The question was whether the building's massing and position communicated its relationship to landmarks and the waterfront. This made the model useful as a spatial explanation before it became an interactive product.

Read the December 2021 countdown article and model credit

The early model read like a diagram. I wanted people to recognize a place they could explore, drawing on the familiarity of city-building games without making every surface compete for attention.

I moved toward natural building colors, materials and environmental context: water, parks, roads and a more complete surrounding city. Camera framing and highlights then helped a particular project stand out from that quieter base.

Analytical views still needed their own visual language. For height, a continuous property, I used ranges and a color progression. The distinction mattered: natural color helped identify the place, while an analytical layer explained a specific attribute.

Once the buildings shared a spatial system, I could arrange and compare them in ways that a collection of photographs could not. The model became a tool for examining both real development and alternative scenarios.

For canceled proposals, I showed the possible skyline in natural color and used a status view to distinguish the hypothetical buildings. Keeping that qualification visible is essential: a compelling rendering can otherwise make an unbuilt idea look like a prediction.

See the 2022 Waterview alternative in its original article

For the 2022 year-end countdown, I arranged Chicago and New York projects by rank, with familiar landmarks as scale references. The comparison made the size of the two construction pipelines legible in one composition. These are comparisons of the projects represented in that original work, not a measure of today's markets.

The important interaction was the connection between the year and the visible city. Someone could move backward, pause on a transition, and understand how a neighborhood's later density had emerged.

This presentation restores all 74 annual frames of the original Chicago River sequence. It depicts 1960 through 2033, combining historical building information with the future completion assumptions used when the work was created. Those later views remain an archival scenario.

Read the March 2023 West Loop analysis and model credits

A comprehensive West Loop article brought the earlier experiments together. Instead of considering one project at a time, I used multiple viewpoints and height bands to examine the development pipeline across a neighborhood.

Isolating a height range creates an almost X-ray view: buildings in the selected band remain legible while the rest supplies transparent context. This exposes clusters that a fully rendered city can conceal behind larger buildings.

The work sharpened the next product question. An article could provide selected views, but a research tool needed to let people choose the view and filter themselves.

Building information also describes relationships between developers, architects, contractors and owners. The earlier platform extended its project records into stakeholder views so someone could move from a company to its associated work.

Meanwhile, the city needed to become easier to reach in a browser. Unity remained useful for modeling and spatial presentation, while Mapbox with building overlays introduced familiar streets and geographic context into the web experience.

The tradeoff was practical. A city model excels at explaining form and scale; a conventional map helps people orient to a street, neighborhood or destination. Keeping those strengths connected was more useful than forcing every research task into one view.

The earlier platform grew to include building details, zoning information and more ways to view the model. A user could begin with the city, select a building and inspect its supporting information.

As the number of layers expanded, the design problem became one of control. A layer selector answers which property to examine; a range control narrows that property's values. Separating those decisions makes the filtering sequence easier to follow.

Viewing modes addressed another need. Color helps distinguish project attributes, while monochrome emphasizes form. Light and dark surfaces give the same model different presentation contexts. These controls change how information is read without requiring a new model.

The early work followed two paths: detailed city models in Unity and a Mapbox web experience that made development information easier to reach. Today, building models are authored in SketchUp, integrated in Unity and served through Three.js in the browser. Mapbox continues to support the separate 2D map.

The city timeline describes a building’s history. Model release history records when our representation changed. Building Updates and release comparisons make that second history visible: a reader can inspect a model revision, then locate the building in the city. Future timeline bins show scenarios, not confirmed completion dates.

Show the work behind a model update

A release comparison makes an authored change concrete. In the September 8 Chicago release, Bally's appears alongside its previous model so a viewer can inspect the revised form, then locate the building in the city. That connection turns an update list into a spatial explanation.

Keep a path back to the source

A project stage is more useful when its evidence can be inspected. The public Stage receipt shows research verification and supporting YIMBY articles, giving the reader a path from the displayed claim back to its sources.