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The rest of the project creates additional urban thickness out of the horizontal ground plane. The shopping center—a second, smaller square of 17.8 acres—is but one story. An early version, shown in the Chicago Daily News photo shows the shopping center as having a single, flat, hovering roof, with a cinema/auditorium as an object along the southeast corner. The ensemble of overlapping bars and open spaces creates a dynamic, slightly imbalanced H-shaped shopping center. The CLCC brochure, published the same month as the Daily News model photo, however, shows a more conventional shopping center scheme, still an H, but this time a more balanced one with the parking surrounding the building's H with a U-shaped parking grid buffer. It is as if the large program components of the shopping center—the branch department store, super market, and movie theater—had settled down heavily, their size and weight pining down the previously more equalized pinwheeling forms. In a preliminary program statement done by the New York Life Insurance Company (NYLlC), it is noted that the shopping center is important both for "selling" the project to the community at large, but also to "stabilize and insure the overall investment of New York Life Insurance Company in the whole development area."(5)

Combined with the peeling away of the surface to reveal the underground parking at the center of the courtyard separating the two bar buildings, and the horizontal emphasis of the eleven two-story garden apartments, the shopping center contributes to this initial proposal's transformation of the ground plane from mute foundation to active participant.

The delicacy of the two housing bars finds additional echoes in the thin pathways traced over the flat green plain caught between the buildings. The distance of the aerial perspective's viewpoint makes the pathways and the city streets seem almost equal in scale, which domesticates the city's streets by turning them into park paths while simultaneously suggesting that the park is itself a small city, with its own street organization and blocks, not of buildings but of green. The contrast between this delicate tracery of paths and the enormity of the park plain, just like the contrast between the bars' thinness and their size, underscores the project's perpetual oscillation between architecture and urbanism.

Perhaps Hilberseimer's sense that Lake Meadows was "too big" was because this was a plan whose bigness outdid even Burnham. Housing, which would always be relegated to the background as a fabric building in the 1909 Burnham Plan, is here monumentalized into a building that operated at the scale of Chicago's regional landscape, seemingly ignoring the city as it had existed for a hundred years. But Hilberseimer's own contemporaneous plan for the Near South Side (which included the site for Lake Meadows), designed with his students at IIT and published in the "Community Appraisal Study" by the South Side Planning Board in May, 1952, similarly foregrounded housing and was similarly bold in its vision. Hilberseimer proposed to replace the Chicago grid with a fish scale-like street organization (what Albert Pope has referred to as "ladders" in his book of the same name) that would re-orient housing away from the streets (used solely for distribution of people and goods) and toward large communal green spaces that, like Clarence Stein's Garden City plans of the late 1920s, made it possible for children to walk to school without ever crossing a street. Hardly a small vision, Hilberseimer's proposal is presented as a three-phase progression that would eventually entirely replace Chicago's grid with a new order. But his was a big vision at a small scale: like the first SOM proposal for Lake Meadows, Hilberseimer's plan was a combination of low rise row houses and taller towers, but these Y and U shaped towers had small footprints and look from the model photographs to be only about eight to ten stories tall. Like its garden city forebears, the Hilberseimer plan was essentially a suburbanization of the city emphasizing low density housing and replacing the block with an oversized lawn. Lake Meadows was, on the other hand, an intensification of Chicago's urbanity, restructuring the block while maintaining its order.

When Lake Meadows's daring thinness appeared to be too radical to ensure financial backing, the ambition for this intensified urbanscape had to be achieved more by combining an articulated landscape combined with a programmed cityscape rather than through the startling combination of large-scale architecture and urban emptiness that had marked the first scheme. If the initial project put the emphasis on super, the second decidedly placed the stress upon the block. The revised scheme had some variation (five of the double-loaded slabs were twelve stories; another four were twenty-one stories; and the final building—meant to be the slightly higher end one—was a curious thirteen stories in height), but the overall plan was very evenly balanced in terms of building and open space—architecture and urbanism—especially in comparison to the earlier version. Having lost the extraordinary and enormous single open space of the first scheme, the second scheme accentuates smaller, neighborly, semi-public scaled spaces. The project's landscaped pockets—animated by playgrounds and clusters of benches—were carefully defined by curvilinear pathways, small hills, and trees with low canopies. Some of the buildings themselves were similarly broken down in scale: four columns of protruding balconies defined an A-B-A rhythm to the four twenty-one-story buildings; and color and balconies both work to give the thirteen-story building an A-B-C-B-A rhythm.
 

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