It’s not often that an exhibition is broadly visionary and distinctly do-it-yourself. But “Flyway City: Architecture for a Flourishing Ecosystem,” on display at the Chicago Architecture Center through Jan. 3, is both. 

And it’s mostly about birds and their migratory ways — not your typical fare at the CAC’s Skyscraper Gallery. 

It’s largely the brainchild of architect and Studio Gang founding partner Jeanne Gang, who has been obsessed with the relationships between birds and buildings since at least 2003. That’s when her firm won an international competition for the Ford Calumet Environmental Center. Gang’s design was never built, but the firm’s research into and design of “bird-safe” features have continued. 

“Flyway City” started with a conversation between Gang and CAC CEO and President Eleanor Esser Gorski around the question of what would cities look like if we designed them from the start with wildlife and people in mind. The exhibit was developed as a collaboration between their two organizations. 

“Chicago’s Living Habitat” — curated by the conservation-focused nonprofit Openlands with the CAC — provides a preface for the larger exhibition. It defines five very different habitats — prairie, wetland, woodlands, dunes and swales, and urban — that define the Chicago area. The tidy little exhibit highlights several publicly accessible examples for each. 

The birds that traverse our skies over each of these landscapes provide the focus for the larger exhibit. There are four major flyways in North America, the north-south routes that migratory birds take between Canada and Central and South America each year. Chicago’s location directly on the Mississippi Flyway makes the city one of the best urban areas to see birds in North America. 

Cities are living habitats, and birds play a larger role in this ecosystem than we often realize. “They........

© Chicago Tribune