Quriosity Aquarium is a research center for invasive species, the zebra mussels. The building is a small piece of a puzzle of a studio project I was participating in. The studio was a collaboration of landscape architecture and architecture students; we were asked to design a Filter Island located on the Eastern side of Chicago Loop. Thousands of small wetland chambers were designed as a bio-filtration strategy to filter water from Chicago River until it would join Lake Michigan.
Filter Island concept is a part of a bigger project supervised by Prof. Martin Felsen at IIT - the DAM project, which is proposing to lock parts of Chicago river and go back to its original direction, and filter islands are final pieces of the puzzle.
The project is taking responsibility of managing invasive species - the northern side of Filter Island will be occupied by 10 research centers designed by different architecture students, each studying different invasive specie. Each research center is supposed to be a hybrid of offices and labs with a community hub, such as a bike center, hydroponic restaurant, yoga center, etc. 
The invasive species of my interest were Zebra mussels, tiny freshwater mussels from the Black Sea and Caspian Sea. The research center will be combined with a skate park.