Future Friday: Chicago

Chicago’s riverfront is one of the city’s most iconic and democratic public landscapes. Once treated primarily as infrastructure, the Chicago River has been reshaped into a civic space through design ambition, policy decisions, and everyday public use, though transforming it required careful planning and collaboration.

This Future Fridays session brings together three of the Riverwalk’s designers, planners, and civic leaders to share the stories behind that transformation. The program will open with remarks from Lynn Osmond, President and Executive Director of The Richard H. Driehaus Foundation. Participants will then hear reflections from the people who made the riverfront what it is today and have the opportunity to ask questions and contribute to conversations about access, identity, and the future of Chicago.

This program is made possible by the generous support of The Richard H. Driehaus Foundation and is part of the National Building Museum’s Future Cities Initiative. A special thank you to our sponsors AARP, Enterprise + Wells Fargo, Whayne and Ursula Quin, Rooted Communities, National League of Cities, CBRE, and Kohn Pederson Fox Associates PC. 

About Future Fridays 

Future Fridays is the National Building Museum’s signature online series as part of the Future Cities initiative, hosted by James Darius Ball, director of Future Cities. Each one-hour session highlights the people, stories, and decisions that shape cities and everyday life in communities across the country. 

In its second year, the series emphasizes personal narratives and community perspectives, showing how residents, planners, designers, and civic leaders influence neighborhoods, public spaces, and city life. Participants can share their own perspectives, ask questions, and gain insight into how local choices reflect broader trends shaping American cities. 

Future Cities programming extends beyond Future Fridays, with a four-year slate of exhibitions, events, lectures, publications, digital activations, and community-based engagements designed to reach audiences from all walks of life and encourage participation in shaping the places where they live, work, and play. 

About the speakers

Carol Ross Barney, FAIA, HASLA, was honored with the 2023 American Institute of Architects Gold Medal, recognizing her as a visionary architect, urbanist, mentor, and educator. Throughout her career, she has relentlessly advocated that excellent design is a right, not a privilege. Dedicated to design of public buildings and spaces, her exploration into the power of how the built environment can improve our daily lives has produced distinctive structures and places that have become cultural icons. Notable projects include the design of the Oklahoma City Federal Building, replacing the bombed Murrah Federal Building, the Chicago Riverwalk, flagship restaurants for McDonald’s in Chicago and Disney World, the Searle Visitor Center at Lincoln Park Zoo, JRC Synagogue, CTA Cermak and Morgan Street Stations, the University of Minnesota Duluth Civil Engineering Building, and the Multi-Modal Terminal at O’Hare International Airport. She also designed the NASA Aerospace Communications Facility, Railyard Park in Rogers, Arkansas, and Chicago’s new DuSable Park. Her work has earned over 200 major awards, including the AIA Gold Medal, Cooper Hewitt National Design Award, fourteen National American Institute of Architects Honor Awards, two AIA COTE Top Ten Project Awards for sustainability, and more than 45 AIA Chicago Awards. Carol is a graduate of the University of Illinois and served as a U.S. Peace Corps volunteer in Costa Rica planning national parks. She has taught an advanced Design Studio at the Illinois Institute of Technology for over thirty years.  

Ciere Boatright was appointed commissioner of the Chicago Department of Planning and Development (DPD) in November 2023 by Mayor Brandon Johnson. An experienced real estate and economic development executive, Boatright is responsible for leading DPD’s economic development, planning and zoning functions while promoting inclusive, equitable growth across the city. Priorities include the transformation of City lots as “Missing Middle” housing, office-to-residential conversion projects downtown, pro-development re-zoning of neighborhood commercial corridors, grant making for neighborhood businesses, and development process efficiencies through Mayor Johnson’s Cut the Tape initiative. Boatright was formerly vice president of real estate and community development at Chicago-based real estate firm CRG, overseeing some of the company’s highest-impact real estate projects, and vice president of real estate for Chicago Neighborhood Initiatives, managing the planning and development of new projects on the South and West Side. Local business publications have named her among Notable Women in Commercial Real Estate, 40 under 40, Notable Black Leaders and Executives, and Notable Executives of Color in Construction and Commercial Real Estate. Boatright holds a master’s degree of urban planning and policy from the University of Illinois at Chicago and a bachelor’s in psychology from Hamilton College. A Chicago native, Boatright resides on the South Side with her husband and two children.  

Michelle Woods has more than thirty years of experience in municipal government, working for the City of Chicago. She was a project manager for the Department of Transportation in the Division of Engineering where she worked on the design and construction of $550,000,000 in infrastructure projects including the Solidarity Drive bike path on the Lakefront Trail, North-South Wacker Drive Reconstruction and multiple phases of the Chicago Riverwalk, including the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. As Deputy Commissioner of the Bureau of Asset Management in the Department of Fleet and Facility Management, she oversaw a wide variety of critical city functions, including operations of the Chicago Riverwalk and Millennium Park, Graphics, Energy Procurement, Records Management and the city’s leased real estate portfolio. She established the wildly popular and successful concession  program on the Chicago Riverwalk. During her tenure with the Riverwalk, concession program revenues grew to over $20 million annually and the Riverwalk marketplace was established to provide opportunities to minority and women owned businesses. She currently works with Public Sphere Projects, a national planning and placemaking consultancy. The assists a variety of organizations on urban planning, community develop, public policy and creative placemaking. Michelle is a graduate of DePaul University where she received a degree is Urban Studies and French. She is a volunteer docent for the Chicago Architecture Center and serves on the board of the Intuit Art Museum.