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Big Marsh Park is the Chicago Park District’s largest reclamation project. Once a natural landscape damaged by slag from steel mills, new restorative efforts have set the park on a path for industry and nature to coexist.
The facility features a permanent exhibit, classrooms, offices, bike repair area, restrooms, and storage spaces. Its materials reinforce its mission: weathered steel cladding recalls the site's industrial past, and exposed NLT alludes to an environmentally-responsive future. The building’s wastewater wetland system uses the same processes from the marsh to clean blackwater.