Chicago’s “Hymn to the Lake”: The Art, Architecture, and Landscape of the World’s Largest Water Filtration Plant

Chicago’s Central District Water Filtration Plant was the first major public infrastructure project completed under the administration of Mayor Richard J. Daley, and one of the first Modernist or “Miesian” projects by the architecture firm of C.F. Murphy. Taking more than ten years to complete—and emerging triumphant over a lawsuit by residents and property owners on Chicago's lakefront—the plant opened in 1965 and included an amenity not typically coupled with infrastructure: a ten-acre public park organized around the display of water. Designed by landscape architect Dan Kiley, the park features five circular pools—representing the Great Lakes—as well as a dramatic, cantilevered triangular platform for viewing the Chicago skyline. Sculptor Milton Horn contributed a monumental work in cast bronze, which today is no longer accessible to the public.

In 1966, the park was dedicated in memory of Chicagoan Milton Lee Olive III, the first African-American recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor for service in the Vietnam War. Today the facility remains the world’s largest water purification plant, processing nearly one billion gallons of water each day to serve more than six million customers in the greater Chicagoland area, which includes over 100 suburban municipalities. This paper discusses the history of this public utility and its designed landscape, its commanding view of the city and popularity as a site for photography, its function as a memorial, and the facility’s uncertain future for preservation, as it argues for our consideration of the aesthetics of urban infrastructure.