The People's Architect: How Carol Ross Barney Gave Chicago Back Its River

Look at Ross Barney Architects’ portfolio, and you’ll find train stations, power plants, federal buildings, and parks. Is that architecture? “My answer is ‘yes,’” Carol says. “Design improves every single one of those things. It’s the connective tissue of the city — the stuff that you touch, you see, that affects your life every day.”

Carol’s design philosophy is simple: Design is a superpower, and its value should be democratically applied. “Our planet, our societies, our neighborhoods are better when we’re working well together,” the lifelong Chicagoan says. “We approach design as problem-solving. If it’s buildable, if it’s economical, if it works well, it will be beautiful.” 

Building the Chicago Riverwalk to be fun and functional

The 1.25-mile Riverwalk checks all Carol’s boxes. She calls it a “medium to small urban project” with a roughly $200 million price tag. And it is indeed beautiful, with its paving, trees, precast benches, and “rooms” between bridges. But that’s only half the story. 

The Riverwalk is double-duty infrastructure, co-starring as part of Chicago’s flood-relief system. When storms overwhelm the city’s storage capacity, the river can rise by seven feet. The walkway is designed to be inundated. Then drain. Then reopen.

Amrize materials helped the project realize both objectives, says Nollaig Forrest, Amrize’s Chief Marketing & Corporate Affairs Officer. “We had to bring technical innovation at every step: high-performance materials that could withstand flooding and at the same time age gracefully in Chicago’s harsh climate.”

Rails to trails to community connections with the 606 

Like the Riverwalk, the 606 turns an unloved Chicago artery into a beloved community attraction — with the help of the “People’s Architect” and 5,000 tons of Amrize materials.

With street-level trains causing dozens of deaths per year in the late 1800s, Chicago elevated its rail lines. These embankments were designed to keep people out. A century later, Carol and her team would be figuring out how to let them in as they helped turn the Bloomingdale Line into an elevated park. 

Collaborating with numerous partners, including landscape architects Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, Carol led the community engagement for what would become the 606 and its path, the Bloomingdale Trail. They began with a workshop at a local theater. They ended with a trail that deliberately passed by churches, schools, and parks, so kids could bike between them without touching a city street. 

“It really brought the communities together,” Carol says. “It’s an in-my-backyard community, let’s-make-neighbors project.”

‘Materials make architecture possible’

In 2023, Carol became the first Chicagoan to win the American Institute of Architects Gold Medal since Mies van der Rohe more than 60 years earlier. She credits materials as part of Chicago’s architecture legacy — the steel frame that made the skyscraper possible, the terra cotta that fireproofed it, the concrete that pushed it higher.

“Materials are essential to architectural design; they make architecture possible,” Carol says. “I think the partnership between the architect and the creator of the materials has to continue. It has to be strengthened.”

As Nollaig puts it: “When Carol Ross Barney imagines civic spaces that bring people together, Amrize is there with the materials to make it real. That’s what we do. We build Chicago.”