“Dreams! Dreams!,” with these words the hero of Stefan Zeromski’s novel The Spring to Come, Cezary Baryka, greeted his father’s tale of glass houses in Poland. “Each glass house would have its own separate boiler and its own kitchen nestled against the building, providing heat in winter and cool air in the summer,” fantasized old Baryka.

It appears that the action of the novel has been transported to the Windy City. Yet in Chicago, imagination and literary fiction are becoming reality. Perhaps the city’s aldermen read Zeromski, and want to pay him a tribute: the ground is about to be broken for the Culver House (Grand /Walton), an eco-friendly glass condominium.

Chicago is the first city to make a total commitment to environmental practices. The birthplace of the skyscraper, Chicago is a city where architecture plays a vital role. The planned construction of a sustainable residential building made entirely out of glass comes as part of the Windy City’s green crusade. The idea was conceived by Dirk Denison, former assistant dean of the Illinois Institute of Technology and a Harvard graduate, who is also the project’s chief designer. The Culver House pioneers the application of glass in construction. Although Chicago’s reputation as a leader in sustainability is well-established, the new project paves the way for cutting-edge technologies and style. It inaugurates a new era in architecture, bringing innovative solutions to the private sector. The Culver House is also an object lesson in combining high-performance glass technology with simplicity of the Modernist tradition.

According to Denison, his project embodies the trends currently shaping the city. It responds to Chicago’s design initiative and its environmental efforts. The Culver House is part of a pilot program to provide a fast-track permitting process for LEED-certified buildings. The green roof, no longer a novelty on Chicago’s real-estate market, is a concrete example of collaboration between science and ecology. The Culver House architects, however, went a step further. A hanging garden is not the only green spot in the building; trees and flowers will be planted throughout the house. The designers and urban eggheads are of one mind: in order to appreciate and learn to protect it, man must be at home in nature.

Dirk Denison has become a star in the world of construction and architecture. It doesn’t come as a great surprise since he studied under such virtuosos of architectural design as Libeskind and Eisenman, both Harvard lecturers.

Denison’s eco-building features a double-skinned glass facade of low-emission glass. Its capa-city to exploit solar energy is vital to the sustenance of the condominium’s plants. As a high-quality material, glass lends durability to the structure and offers a reflective surface where the sky and the green space can meet. The three-dimensional vision might have been inspired by the Matrix. Yet the futuristic look was not the architects’ primary goal. The construction introduces natural air circulation and the process of photosynthesis into the city landscape. It represents a symbiotic union of natural and man-made worlds.

The Culver House appeals not only to the esthetic sense. Its pragmatic design aims at reducing the heat-island effect, cleaning the air, filtering

 the water, as well as regulating radiant heat gain. The house operates entirely on solar energy. Its innovative doors and windows allow the air to circulate freely, protecting the interior from extreme temperatures all year round. According to Denison’s office, the project meets all environmental requirements; even waste produced in construction is going to be entirely recyclable.

The Culver House was conceived primarily as a residential unit. As such, it is bound to create a sensation, and even revolutionize the Chicago real-estate market. It marks the introduction of new construction methods into the private sector. The Culver House will comprise eight condominiums: one single-bedroom and one four-bedroom unit; three two-bedroom and three three-bedroom units.

Chicago owes its place among the world’s leading cities in architecture not only to its skyscrapers, but also to its bold use of innovative technologies. The dream of glass houses has come true. Old Zeromski would have been happy to see his fiction realized.