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But was Scheme 1 really too big? This original project for Lake Meadows would have entirely rewritten the terms of Chicago urbanism at a scale commensurate with the city's original Jeffersonian platting by constructing urban thickness out of architectural thinness. The two slender bars defined a crisp, large block of air within the city, whose orthogonality was attuned to the city and whose scale formed a transition between the small fabric of the greystones surrounding the project and the site's big neighbors: Lake Michigan, Daniel Burnham's lakeshore park, and Chicago's endless street grid. Air is made visible by being captured into an abstract block. Between them is a park area with underground parking for 750 cars. A rendering published in the Chicago Daily News in July of 1950 shows that block of space barely being held in place by the fragile bars: their scale, combined with the thickened air between them, transforms the massive scale of the entire project into something surprisingly light. Lifted off the ground plane by a glass lobby level, the bars look like sugar wafers precariously balanced on edge. The aerial perspective of the project, exhibited at MoMA and highlighted in the project’s publicity brochures, further underscored Lake Meadows’s combination of slenderness and magnitude: one of the bars neatly matches the thin, continuous line of the infinite street grid that stretches well beyond the perspective’s frame to some faraway frontier.

Additional urban delicacy comes from the strategic placing of the short (forty-foot-wide) end of the bars along the street edge, thereby not walling off South Parkway, but rather letting the space of the city slip right through the project to the lake beyond. A letter from Ambrose Richardson to the Federal division of slum clearance and urban redevelopment from July 7, 1950 underscores the importance of not barring the project from the streets that surround it so as not to create a separate enclave.(4) Running east-west in this manner, the buildings permit views of the immediate neighborhood, views of Chicago's skyline, and, most importantly, views of the lake, all while offering each unit the luxury of cross ventilation. The nine-foot wide "gallery in the sky" corridor, would have grille-work and glass, but would have essentially been open air, leading SOM to describe the project as stacked row houses: twenty-three stories of front stoops. In a rendering that accompanied the Chicago Land Clearance Commission's (CLCC) description of the project, the gallery space is shown to be more of a series of outdoor rooms than a corridor—the tiled surface of the apartment exterior takes on a domestic quality, especially when decorated with hanging plants and creating an alcove for a toddler's play pen and a bench and chair ready to accommodate a social gathering.

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