It's an interchange that's tucked into the normal street grid of Chicago, taking up about 4 city blocks total, and requiring just 3 levels of bridges to get all the traffic to their destinations. The trick is that it relies on a windmill interchange rather than a stack (so the left turns aren't crossing each other in the center), and the Congress Parkway-into-Eisenhower Expressway goes from elevated highway to sunken highway over the course of the interchange. There's even a subway line in the middle of the interchange!
I think the better explanation is that the size of highway interchanges in Texas aren't meaningfully constrained, so there's little pressure to find ways to squeeze in more compact interchanges. Furthermore, I think Texas is motivated to make its interchanges high-speed--the highways look designed for a 65/70 mph speed limit, even near the city core, whereas the Kennedy Expressway near the Circle interchange drops down to 45 mph partially to deal with the confusion of the road (there are exits 51B-J on I-90 in this stretch, yes, that many exits in a single mile of road).
That is correct. All the (recent) freeways I experienced in TX were designed to go ~75 mph as a normal speed, even interchanges/overpasses, except the actual turn. Even then the turns on the cloverleaves were capable of a much higher speed than other places.
It's an interchange that's tucked into the normal street grid of Chicago, taking up about 4 city blocks total, and requiring just 3 levels of bridges to get all the traffic to their destinations. The trick is that it relies on a windmill interchange rather than a stack (so the left turns aren't crossing each other in the center), and the Congress Parkway-into-Eisenhower Expressway goes from elevated highway to sunken highway over the course of the interchange. There's even a subway line in the middle of the interchange!
I think the better explanation is that the size of highway interchanges in Texas aren't meaningfully constrained, so there's little pressure to find ways to squeeze in more compact interchanges. Furthermore, I think Texas is motivated to make its interchanges high-speed--the highways look designed for a 65/70 mph speed limit, even near the city core, whereas the Kennedy Expressway near the Circle interchange drops down to 45 mph partially to deal with the confusion of the road (there are exits 51B-J on I-90 in this stretch, yes, that many exits in a single mile of road).