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Editor Kathryn Clarke Albright
Authors
Kathryn Clarke Albright, Andrew Balster, Chip von Weise, John Syvertsen, Ashraf Salama, Karine Dupre
Graphic Designer
Shuang Wu
ORO Managing Editor
Jake Anderson
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Foreword
Chapter
Chapter
Foreword
Urban Insights and Sparks of Brilliance
Many years ago, in the late 1980s, I was working as an architect/urban planner at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) in San Francisco, in the planning studio. We were a small but “mighty” group, maybe six professionals total, essentially running a small practice in a large firm. We were optimistic, and were convinced we could change the world, improve urban livability, increase transit ridership and walkability, and bring ecology back into our cities. One day, Kathryn Clarke (Albright), a young architect, joined our studio from the architectural design studio and declared her commitment to urban design and the future of cities. My sense is that she never looked back.
Years later, I was a partner and working at SOM in Chicago leading the urban design and planning group in what we called firmwide, “City Design Practice.” Kathryn was teaching at Virginia Tech and had an idea that sounded simple yet unique, not found often in academic settings. She wanted to encourage the architecture students to step out of the studio, out of the university setting, and into a major city to address real issues that urban communities were facing. It was a brilliant idea.
Image 0.1 Looking west down the main branch of the Chicago River. Photo by Cat Piper.
This was important. Students leave architectural schools not realizing that most of their efforts will be with larger teams of people. Collaborations with complex client groups and communities will be, for many, the daily professional experience. Kathryn had an idea that this experience needed to be brought to students before they graduated to help shape their views of the design profession, and I was totally on board. Kathryn reached out, and SOM was one of the first firms to commit to this program. Chicago formed the common ground for the work. . . . So, of course, the program became known as “Chicago Studio.”
Chicago Studio is an academic program that is unique, collaborative, and critical for tomorrow’s architects. The program is place-based, and combines architectural students with professional practice, Chicago city governance, and community outreach and involvement. It brings architectural education and professional practice together with city agencies, much as you would find in real life in actual professional practice.
The program, over the years that I have known it, evolved from a traveling program to a residency program with urban design and building design integrated and emphasized. The program continues to evolve, investigating construction practices, advanced building materials, and the influence of AI and digital technologies within the design process.
Reading this book will help readers understand how Chicago Studio is a bridge between the university and the city of Chicago communities, and between architectural study and practice. It points to strategies that define solutions for urban life in this century. The program raises awareness of students, it encourages communities to have a significant voice in the design process, and it proposes government agencies to collaborate together in a creative design process. Chicago Studio is a critical asset in addressing the challenges that our cities and urban communities face today and in the future.
By 2050, nine to ten billion people will most likely be living on the planet; 75 percent of this global population is expected to live in cities or wider urban regions. If we do little, we can expect a “business as usual” future with disastrous consequences.
Image 0.2 Orleans Street Bridge, Chicago. Charcoal drawing by Phil Enquist, 10 ×14 in.
Cities are a complicated subject. Students’ efforts to imagine and engage in the exploration of what the future city will be is not an easy task. The future city involves looking at many systems simultaneously and finding not only the optimum operating strategies but also how these systems overlay and interface with each other. The overarching objective is to improve the daily quality of life for many, not just the residents of a particular building but also the neighborhood and the larger district.
Chicago Studio, and the guidance provided by Kathryn Clarke Albright and the Virginia Tech faculty, is a model for twenty-first-century urban problem-solving, innovative thinking, and action. Since 2002, for over twenty years, the city of Chicago and the architectural students who have participated in this program have benefited greatly. The ideas and the commitment have been breathtaking. What you will see in the following chapters will inspire you with the complexity of the challenges and the collaborations that point Chicago in a better direction.
Importantly, this book will give readers a behind-thescenes insight of architecture educators into how to sustain excellence in student-led research and design, and promote experiential learning; it will further expand the leadership of practitioners on how to engage with tomorrow’s agents of change (the students) and navigate the fine line between the city as one’s “own professional backyard” and the common good.
City design is the focus of my teaching and students’ studies at University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) where I work with graduate students in the Master of City Design program with a small team of gifted faculty. We look at city design and the urban environment through the lens of racial and also ecological inequality issues. We believe in a very “hands-on,” field-based learning experience where students are engaged with a broader community in defining the urban issues we are facing and in collectively defining future strategies.
I believe it is a critical time to focus on how architects can help shape the future city, repair damage due to racial injustice and ecological fragmentation, and create cities that offer a high quality of life for all living things.
Image 0.3 Clark Street Bridge, Chicago. Charcoal drawing by Phil Enquist, 10 × 14 in.
Introduction
Architecture Education Intertwining Professional Practices
In the fall of 2000, I was immersed in southern Switzerland teaching a small group of architecture students. We spent a full semester together engaged in the place and the culture while based at the Steger Center for International Scholarship, which is a Virginia Tech educational campus in Riva San Vitale, just south of Lugano. And we learned enough Italian to mind our manners, get around, have fun, and learn through experience.
Students’ studio projects were located on nearby sites and local architects periodically critiqued their work throughout the semester. With one of those architects, Laurie Galfetti-Hunziker, we visited exemplary buildings and places. Many times, she would take us to buildings that assisted the students in developing their projects. Every few weeks, we traveled for a few days exploring historic places and newly constructed buildings as far south as Genoa, Nîmes, and Barcelona, and north to Paris and Munich.
This is when I asked myself why such a potent way of learning was largely reserved for European study abroad. Why could we not replicate the experience at home, in a city where the DNA of American architecture is legible on every corner? Chicago is a quintessential American city, from its urban planning origins to the emergence of its distinctively American architecture and unique “L” transit system. My response was that our students should have this type of opportunity in the USA, specifically engaging practitioners and experiencing our country’s unique architecture while completing their studies for their undergraduate architecture degree. That is when I began thinking about the program that became known as Chicago Studio.
Image 0.1 Chicago Marathon at the LaSalle Street Bridge 2025. Photo by Barry Butler.
Image 0.2 Frank Lloyd Wright, Robie House, University of Chicago campus, 1910. Photo by Teemu08, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Frederick_C._ Robie_House.JPG (CC BY-SA 3.0).
Image 0.3 Terra-cotta clad commercial building, Louis Sullivan, Carson, Pirie, Scott and Company, 1899 and 1903, https:// www.khanacademy.org/.
Image 0.4 Mies van der Rohe, 900–910 Lake Shore Drive, Chicago, 1956, https:// buildingsdb.com/IL/chicago/900-910north-lake-shore/.
I was certain that involving practitioners had value in students’ learning experience because visiting practitioners had been a crucial component of the professional practice seminar I had taught since 1998. Their knowledge and experience provided everyday professional practice examples of the concepts and strategies I was introducing to the students. And I knew that plenty of collegiate architecture programs incorporated travel to urban environments and their buildings as part of students’ studies for their studio projects. However, combining that experience through engagement with, and mentorship by, practitioners seemed to offer circumstances for an architecture education that was as unique as Chicago itself.
My knowledge of Chicago and its origins of what is considered American architecture were important drivers. From the Prairie-style residences of Frank Lloyd Wright [Image 0.2] and ornate terra-cotta-clad commercial buildings of Louis Sullivan [Image 0.3] to the birth of the steel-frame high-rise by William Le Baron Jenney and subsequent development of high-rise buildings by Mies van der Rohe [Image 0.4] and modern skyscrapers by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill—Chicago offered a uniquely American opportunity for the domestic study of architecture. I also knew there was a strong community of architecture practitioners in Chicago.
So, I set out to conjure up what a semester of study in Chicago could look like. Not having a facility like the Steger Center in Switzerland, I knew this program would have to be structured differently, but not exactly what that might entail. I also had confidence to align with opportunities to engage Chicago’s local architecture and its professional practice culture. I knew enough alumni working there, some of them former students, who could play an instrumental role.
Many traditional education models emphasize learning within university confines and exploring design challenges in controlled settings. However, today’s rapidly evolving practice of architecture demands a more nuanced approach to architecture education. Design of the built environment transcends the mere consideration of form, space, and aesthetics. It encompasses human experiences, infrastructure networks, and an intricate sociopolitical fabric that shapes our built environment.
Chicago Studio at Virginia Tech emerged as a transformative model of architectural education that seamlessly integrates academic rigor, professional mentorship, and real-world problem-solving into a cohesive, immersive experience. In this innovative framework, students evolve beyond their traditional roles to become urban explorers, deeply embedded in a city rich with challenges and opportunities. The program transforms Chicago into a living laboratory, where the complexities of contemporary architecture unfold not through theories but through direct engagement with the city’s streets, buildings, and diverse communities. This approach recognizes that the most valuable architectural education comes not from project assignments but from grappling with urban challenges in real time.
At the outset, how, who, what, when, and where students gained knowledge and skills for their studio projects, urban studies, and professional practice was unknown in its detail. Fortunately, the curriculum and pedagogy emerged through collaboration between me—the lead faculty member/academic—and the architects/ practitioners that engaged in activating the program And equally fortunate is that the subsequent leaders of the program have adjusted and evolved the curriculum to reflect changes in architectural education and professional practice such that Chicago Studio has persisted for over two decades.
Since its inception, over four hundred students from at least twenty countries and thirty-five states in the USA have enrolled in the program. Countries around the world include: India, Turkey, Ukraine, Russia, Dubai, Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Palestine, Somalia, Mexico, Columbia, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia, Korea, Japan, and China. Over twenty architecture practices have served as host firms and an additional dozen or more firms particpated in review of student work. And another dozen allied companies have hosted professional activities, and engaged with multiple of the city’s architectural institutions, including the Art Institute of Chicago, University of Illinois Chicago, and Illinois Institute of Technology, as well as Chicago Architecture Center, the Chicago chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA). Another key player is the long-term engagement of the city’s Department of Planning and Development.
Image 0.5 Book cover, of Building Community: A New Future for Architecture Education and Practice, Ernest Boyer and Lee Mitgang, 1996.
Image 0.6 Book cover of The Reflective Practitioner, Donald Schon, 1983.
1 Ernest L. Boyer and Lee D. Mitgang. Building Community: A New Future for Architecture Education and Practice (The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 1996).
When I sketched the first outline for Chicago Studio, I did so as an architectural studio educator with a keen interest in professional practice. Building Community: A New Future for Architecture Education and Practice [Image 0.5] had already influenced how I was teaching a required course, Professional Practice—in particular, Ernest Boyer and Lee Mitgang’s new model for architecture education that was based on seven priorities. For me, number six resonated, as it called for “a more unified profession based on partnership between schools and the profession.”1 In 1998, I revamped the structure of the professional practice course to integrate alumni giving in-person presentations and/or workshops about the array of professional practices. This was the beginning of my collaboration with practitioners in relation to their role in, and contribution to, architecture education.
Every time I discuss the principles of Chicago Studio, familiar questions resurface: Where does Chicago Studio stand in the wider pedagogical landscape? How is Chicago Studio different from community-engaged design-build programs such as Auburn University’s Rural Studio in Alabama? And isn’t this just a North American version of the Australian Work-Integrated Learning (WIL) or the increasingly adopted UK Degree Apprenticeship? A thorough pedagogical assessment referencing educational theorists and other place-based experiential learning programs around the globe is presented in chapter 4, Pedagogical Critique.
And while there was no formal literature review of pedagogical approaches to experiential learning at the outset, Donald Schön’s wisdom revealed in his book, The Reflective Practitioner provided guidance. [Image 0.6] In the preface, Schön wrote, “Because of these [his] experiences, the question of the relationship between the kinds of knowledge honored in academia and the kind of competence valued in professional practice has emerged for me not only as an intellectual puzzle but as the object of a personal quest.”2
A Compass for the Chapters Ahead
Architects usually write about buildings and their practices, but here the authors write about pedagogy and the collaboration between educators and practitioners. This book, Architecture Educators and Practitioners in
Collaboration: Chicago Studio Over 25 Years, tells the unwritten story about the pedagogy and outcomes that emerged from this alternative to traditional campus-based design studio and allied courses. Its distinctive structure promotes a collaborative design process encompassing multiple points of view within academia, the architectural profession, and the broader community. Academic studies incorporate a range of explorations, professional practices, and urban living.
The authors of each chapter bring to this book their own perspective as creative scholars, teachers of architecture, and practicing architects. Four of the authors have been involved since the formative years. One nurtured the transition from a travel program with two three-week stays into to a full-semester residency program. Another has served as a critic since 2004, a host firm starting in 2007, and as the director of the program beginning in 2016. One author was an initial supporter as a host firm in 2002 and continued in that role until 2015, and has taught the professional practice seminar since January 2020. All have come together to write their collective story.
Nonetheless, each author—myself, Andrew Balster, Chip von Weise, John Syvertsen, Ashraf Salama, and Karine Dupre—tells their portion of the story through their own voice. And while the book has a graphic continuity, the graphics of individual student work reflects the technologies of the time as well as oversight by faculty. Intentionally, this book presents the educators’ voice and perspective, leaving the students’ reflections for a forthcoming exhibition and catalog.3 Students’ reflections are currently being collected through videorecorded interviews and stored in the Virginia Tech Center for Oral History archive.4
Since the initial semester in fall 2002, there have been successive directors with differing takes on the pedagogy within the guiding structure of an academically guided experiential learning program immersed in professional practice in an urban setting. The book captures the formative years, the transitions, pedagogical critique, and a reflective outlook. Through the voices of the leaders of Chicago Studio, diverse readers will gain insight into the many ways this unique educational prototype persisted; how the details of
2 Donald A. Schön. The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action (Basic Books, 1983).
3 https://chicagostudio.vt.domains/.
4 Chicago Studio's direct link underdevelopment. Virginia Tech's Center for Oral History, https://lib.vt.edu/center-fororal-history.html/.
project site locations and building programs combined with partnerships with developers, city leadership, and community members that give students profound insight and guidance each semester. And how lunch-and-learn sessions and building and construction site tours with practitioners gave form to the educational structure for this experiential learning model. Readers will also learn how Chicago Studio took advantage of the architectural achievements and urban experience of Chicago while expanding experiential learning through short stays in the Midwest at various points in the semester. Students recorded their observations through photography and sketching. [Image 0.7, 0.8]
In the formative years, students experienced the architectural impact of the built environment in Cincinnati, OH, Columbus, IA, and Milwaukee and Racine, WI. The transformative years focused on Minneapolis, MI. More recent travels included some of these, while expanding to Detroit, MI, Moline, IL, Toledo, OH, Spring Green and Madison, WI, St. Louis, MO, and Bloomfield Hills, MI.
In Chapter 1: The Formative Years, readers gain insight into the foundations of the innovative approach— the underlying educational paradigm, and pivotal collaborators. The initial years, 2002 to 2006, tested the necessary components that activated this placebased experiential learning program across its three required courses—design studio, with an allied seminar, and professional practices seminar. Those years also established the long-lasting commitments of practitioners to this alternative educational model.
From study of the city’s neighborhoods to meetings with practitioners and community leaders, students expanded
Image 0.7 Students exploring Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin in Spring Green, Wisconsin. (1911-1959). Chicago Studio archive.
Image 0.8 Student sketches. Chicago Studio archive.
their awareness of the relationship of ethical and social issues to architecture in this distinctly American metropolis. There were assorted interactions, planned and accidental, as practitioners critiqued student work during formal reviews as well as spontaneously through daily dialogue.
In studying the infrastructure network, students gained insight into understanding the context is as important as buildings. In various and multiple ways, students were able to better develop their leadership, collaboration, negotiation, presentation, and listening skills.
Chapter 2: The Transformative Years divulges how the decision by Virginia Tech’s School of Architecture leadership to support having a faculty member in Chicago full time, prompted a crucial shift in the duration of students’ stay in the city to a full-semester residency. While it may seem to be a likely evolution, it was only possible due to the increased commitment of the host firms to provide students with resources every day for four months. The longer duration of residency also allowed for more engaged mentorship by practitioners, and deeper engagement with the community leaders around neighborhood issues that architecture and urban design could address. One other significant addition was an internship during the final weeks, in which students work in the capacity of architectural and design interns for the host firms. These practicums took on different forms depending on the firm’s needs matched with students’ skills.
Chapter 3: The Regenerative Years tells the story of the shift in leadership that occurred simultaneously with the change in curricular requirements for professionaldegree accreditation—the Integrative Design studio component. A building systems and technology seminar addressing the newly required technical components was developed to complement the design studio. Readers learn how the technological and technical expertise of practitioners became further integrated into the students’ experience as the intertwined courses fulfilled the Integrative Design requirements. Pedagogically, the design studio and technology seminar assignments approximately followed the workflow of a project in a professional office and best practices of architecture.
This structure manifested through two distinct project typologies. The first four years focused on developerled multi-use housing projects in prominent locations, typically in gentrifying or more developed neighborhoods. After COVID and the large-scale demonstrations in response to the killing of George Floyd, the programmatic focus changed to affordable housing in underserved communities. As part of this approach, the city’s Department of Planning and Development identified neighborhoods and sites they determined as desirable for this kind of development as part of the city’s Invest South/West initiative.
Two scholars, Ashraf Salama and Karine Dupre, globally known for their pedagogical contributions, who were not involved in the conceptualization, development, or delivery of Chicago Studio, situate the program among global experiments and ask what its next phase might demand and might look like.
Chapter 4: Pedagogical Critique: Peeling Back the Layers of Chicago Studio dissects Chicago Studio through lenses of placed-based, practice-embedded learning, authentic learning, and transformative pedagogy, benchmarking it against a series of alternative pedagogical models that dramatically differ from the conventional studio, including design-build, civic engagement, and live project pedagogies.
Chapter 5: Reflections and Going Forward offers ruminations and an outlook; it features an interview, interrogating the roles of place, leadership, and the architect/practitioner-as-educator. It speculates on the hybrid learning that the next decade may demand.
Collectively these chapters argue that Chicago Studio’s endurance emanates from its capacity to navigate between constancy and mutation, between its steady core and its constantly reshaping edges. Embedding inquiry, authenticity, and collaboration within an urban testing ground and one-of-a-kind city, the program offers an adaptable yet principled template for reuniting education with the profession in service of the public good.
The authors hope that through the lens of the components of Chicago Studio, readers will imagine their own version of this approach for place-based, experiential learning. The hope is that readers will lift the ideas that resonate and adapt them to their own contexts.
The key lesson of Chicago Studio is that education flourishes where curiosity meets accountability and where creativity meets technical competency. This engagement is critical but not dependent on where it occurs—in construction sites, offices of municipal officials, and in architectural offices or around conference tables shared by students, professional mentors, and community activists. As the city keeps evolving and reimagining itself, so must the studiobased architecture education that studies it and makes proposals for change while maintaining its identity.
The first twenty-plus years of Chicago Studio demonstrate that when educators, practitioners, and communities think collectively, co-produce proposals, and co-author learning, architecture becomes a vehicle for civic imagination.
The future will demand new alliances, new technologies, and new definitions of public good; may the stories ahead inspire you to build them. The coming decades will challenge architects with crises whose consequences we can only vaguely foresee.
I close this introduction, therefore, not with a blueprint but with an invitation. Take the principles you find in these pages—immersion without indoctrination, collaboration without hierarchy—and adapt them to the urgencies of your own place. Take the energy from the relationships between educators and practitioners— who have become one and the same—and find your collaborators. May Chicago Studio spark new alliances among all committed to excellence in architecture education and practice.
Image 1.5 Project sites along south branch of the Chicago River for 2002, 2003, 2004. Chicago Studio archive.
Image 1.10 Collage of students’ sketches, Chicago Avenue Corridor. Chicago Studio archive.
Chapter 2
The Transformative Years
This chapter reflects upon Chicago Studio as it operated during my tenure as director from fall 2011 to spring 2015. The program transitioned into a full-semester residency. Students no longer alternated between campus and city—they lived and worked in Chicago, fully embedded. This opened new doors for partnerships with firms, public agencies, and community leaders. The stakes and visibility increased dramatically. Demands on both students and faculty intensified. The dual pressures of academic depth and professional output required the sustained focus of all involved. Burnout— among students and faculty alike—was anticipated and addressed. Chicago Studio’s civic ambitions at times outpaced the institutional structures needed to support them.
Still, this period marked a bold leap forward. Chicago Studio pushed architecture students to see beyond the coursework itself—to recognize the city not as backdrop, but as systems they could shape. It made space for discomfort and demanded maturity. It showed that architecture doesn’t begin and end with a building—it intersects with policy, equity, climate, neighborhoods, and community.
Image 2.14 Living LIFE project, conceptual infrastructure proposal. Chicago Studio archive.
Image 2.13 Living LIFE project mapping of waste/energy flows. Chicago Studio archive.
Not all projects focused on form or typology. Some tackled infrastructure and systems. One of the most ambitious efforts, Living LIFE (Local Integrated Food & Energy), reframed architectural engagement as ecological intervention. Developed in collaboration with John Syvertsen and Peter Ellis of CannonDesign, and sustainability expert Dr. Raj Rajaram, the project asked students to treat waste not as a byproduct, but as a resource. [Image 2.13–2.15]
Set in the Uptown neighborhood, the project began with deep data work—mapping waste flows, energy networks, and food access disparities. Students learned that Chicago generates nearly 4.7 million tons of waste annually, much of it organic and potentially recoverable.
Armed with this insight, they designed a decentralized network of facilities to turn waste into compost and biogas, closing material loops and supporting neighborhood-scale resilience.
The work moved between technical rigor and speculative vision, resulting in proposals that blurred the line between infrastructure and architecture. The message was clear —systems matter. Design has a role in shaping them.
Collectively, the Uptown projects illustrated how architectural education, when embedded in real communities, can catalyze new systems of value across space, culture, and sustainability.
Image 2.15 Living LIFE project, student systems diagrams. Chicago Studio archive.
Image 2.19 Students’ proposal connecting Addison Red Line station to Wrigley via elevated ramp with shops at street level Chicago Studio archive.
Chinatown
In fall 2012, students focused on Chinatown, one of Chicago’s most symbolically charged and politically layered neighborhoods. Here, the question was not just how to design within a cultural context but how to design with it. In partnership with the city of Chicago’s Department of Housing and Economic Development (DHED) and the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning (CMAP), students’ work contributed to a long-term community vision. [Image 2.20–2.22]
Students immersed themselves in the neighborhood by walking its streets, interviewing elders and youth, documenting celebrations and storefronts, and analyzing patterns of migration and economic activity. Rather than treating Chinatown as a monolith, they surfaced its internal tensions and evolving identities.
Design proposals prioritized pedestrian mobility, civic gathering spaces, intergenerational infrastructure, and the preservation of cultural memory. A proposed new community center embedded with a cultural archive became the symbolic heart of the plan. The work culminated in a joint workshop with the University of Utah’s School of Architecture, expanding the project’s impact and anchoring it within a broader conversation about intercultural planning.
Image 2.20 Model of Cermak station proposal in Chinatown, Chicago. Chicago Studio archive.
2.21 Chinatown study area map and context. Chicago Studio archive.
Image
This structure is manifested through two distinct project typologies. For the first four years under my leadership, 2016 to 2020, the focus was on developer-led, multiuse housing projects in prominent locations, typically in gentrifying or more developed neighborhoods. [Image 3.5–3.8] We identified top-tier developers including CEDARst Development, Sterling Bay, and Related Properties. They had projects for which they were interested in exploring initial concepts with students that might inform their approach to the development and/or help with neighborhood ward’s leadership and community engagement. Local aldermen/women and other neighborhood stakeholders were invited into the design reviews to see the student work and give their feedback.
In this way, student work helped facilitate an initial dialogue [Image 3.9] as to how a particular site might be developed to balance the interests of the developer with the concerns of municipal officials and neighbors. Developers and stakeholders met with clients and attended reviews to follow the progress of the work and give their feedback to students.
Image 3.6 Site photo, Lincoln Yards. Chicago Studio archive.
Image 3.5 Site location, Lincoln Yards, Chicago. Chicago Studio archive.
Image 3.7 Aerial view of site context, Lincoln Yards. Google Maps. https://www.google.com/maps/@41.9174528,87.6712874,946m/data=!3m1!1e3!5m1!1e4?entry=ttu&g_/. ep=EgoyMDI1MTEyMy4xIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D
Developer Project
Land size: 259,084 square feet
Zoning:
• Previous designation is M3-3 with and FAR of 3.0
• Rezoned Special District as part of “North Branch Corridor”
• Approved FAR of 6.5 for full site
• Minimum 30’ setback for public access / river walk at river
• Concepts:
• Extension of 606 under expressway to terminate on site
• Connect with Clybourn Metra Station
• River walk development and new water taxi stop
• Full site mixed-use programming approved for residential, commercial, hotel, retail, music venue, sports venue
Program:
• 35% of site reserved for open space: 90,680 sq. ft.
• Commercial: 800,000 sq. ft.
• Residential: 200,000 sq. ft.
• Retail: 70,000 sq. ft.
• Parking requirements: 0.5 spaces per residential unit, 1 space per 5,000 sq. ft. of commercial space
Image 3.8 Zoning and program brief. Chicago Studio archive.
Image 3.9 Examples of student work. Chicago Studio archive.
Image 3.10 Site photo, Avondale, Chicago. Chicago Studio archive.
Image 3.11 Zoning map, Avondale, Chicago. City of Chicago website. https://gisapps.chicago.gov/ ZoningMapWeb/?liab=1&config=zoning/.
After COVID, demonstrations following the killing of George Floyd raised awareness around race and social justice. We decided to lean into this and shift the focus of the projects toward equitable housing. We asked ourselves: How could Chicago Studio help students discuss equity in the built environment? And how could this dialogue become part of the larger discussion around housing and social equity in Chicago?
Using John Dewey’s Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education1 as a guide, we changed the programming to mixed-use affordable housing in underserved communities located in diverse areas of the city. As part of this approach, we now collaborate with the City of Chicago planning department who identifies neighborhoods and sites they have determined as desirable for this kind of development. [Image 3.10–3.12] Through the planning department, we engage with local stakeholders. Students’ work serves to initiate dialogue between the planning department and the community regarding the size of projects and the additional programmatic elements that may be included to the benefit of the neighborhood. [Image 3.13, 3.14]
1 John Dewey, Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education (Free Press, 1997).
Image 3.12 Aerial view of site, Avondale. Google Maps. https://earth.google. com/web/search/4052+West+Melrose+Street,+Chicago,+IL/@41.941512 27,-87.72985333,185.11225826a,1166. 26935751d,35y,0h,0t,0r/data=CiwiJgokCcGh1Hf590RAEZAlxQQe9kRAGeqsubot7FXAIcXavUHP7lXAQgIIAUICCABKDQj___________8BEAA?authuser=0
Affordable Housing
Program Summary:
In collaboration with the Chicago Department of Planning, the spring 2025 Chicago Studio will develop project proposals for a site located in the Avondale neighborhood of Chicago. The projects will include multi-generational affordable housing with senior living spaces. It will also include community spaces—such as a kitchen, cafeteria, and health and wellness spaces.
Project Address: 4058 W. Melrose Street Neighborhood: Avondale
Current Underlying Zoning: RT-4 (PD 462) Site Area: 88,700 sq. ft. (2.04 Acres)
Program Data:
• 6,000 sq. ft.— Kitchen + Cafeteria (100 People)
• 3,000 sq. ft.—Community Rooms (3)
• 1,500 sq. ft.—Health + Wellness
• (+ Breakout Spaces)
• 1,200 sq. ft.—Clinic (6 Exam Rooms)
• 2,000 sq. ft.—Computer Room / Library
• 1,000 sq. ft.—Coworking Spaces
• 1,000 sq. ft.—Pharmacy
• 1,500 sq. ft.—Convenience Store
• 17,200 sq. ft.—Total sq. ft
• Affordable Housing:
• Main Building—120 Residential Units, One- and Two-Bedrooms
• West Building —48 Two-Bedrooms or Three-Bedrooms w/ One-Bedroom Lock-Off
• North Site—4 Four-bedrooms + ADU
Parking Mix:
• Main Building —50–60 parking spots
• West building —24 parking spots
• North site—4 parking spots
Total square footage up to each student group
Image 3.13 Mixed-use housing project: program summary, data, and housing/ parking mix. Chicago Studio archive.
Image 3.14 Examples of research and analysis, Avondale. Chicago Studio archive.
Image 3.23 Chicago Commercial Window, Marquette Building, Chicago Architecture Center website, https://www.architecture. org/online-resources/buildings-of-chicago/ marquette-building.
Three major innovations drove the design of the Marquette Building—the use of steel as a skeleton frame, large expanses of glass, and the use of terracotta as a façade, or “skin” material. The steel frame was possible due to the invention of the Bessemer method, which reduced the costs. The steel frame also allowed for fast construction and spread the weight of the building onto multiple load points, unlike the massive masonry walls of the Monadnock.
Discovery of natural gas in Ohio and Indiana resulted in the availability of much less expensive glass, leading to the invention of the Chicago Commercial Window. [Image 3.23] This consisted of one large pane of glass flanked by two operable windows, maximizing light in the building and visually emphasizing the building frame. Terra-cotta, previously used to encase structural members against fire, was now used on the Marquette Building as a building enclosure material.
The Field Building was constructed after World War I and the Great Depression when building tall was no longer a novelty. Competition for tenants was fierce. Inventive amenities became the name of the game. Field was the first commercial building to have potable running water, a central vacuuming system, and air conditioning, although only on the first few floors.
The Federal Center is probably the most elegant expression of the skeleton steel frame and curtain-wall construction. While not a new invention, it elevates the simple idea to the level of an art form.
The design of Sears Tower, [Image 3.24] given its great height, was a collaboration between structural engineer Fazlur Khan, and architect Bruce Graham. With supertall buildings, there are two requirements not present in shorter ones. The building must be supported on caissons that rest on bedrock, about ninety feet below grade. And it has to be fortified against the lateral force of wind. Fazlur Khan devised an ingenious method of wind bracing called the “bundled tube.” The building is actually nine fifty-foot square buildings bundled together, each reinforcing the other.
Challenges take many shapes. The tour shows how varied and intertwined forces must be vectored in the making of cities. Catastrophes necessitate invention. Economic forces are put into motion by world events. Global events result in pauses in development during which technical invention continues, awaiting release on the new wave of development. The city marches on.
It is remarkable that The Berghoff, built immediately after the fire, still functions virtually exactly as it did one hundred and fifty years ago. In a way, it flew under the radar, challenge-free. Monadnock, on the other hand, faced the challenge of sinking under its own weight, the unforeseen challenge of Chicago’s poor soils on a tall heavy building. The developers of the Field Building debated whether to proceed with their plans given the challenge of the Great Depression. But they saw the opportunity in the challenge—inexpensive materials and labor—and proceeded. The second phase of the Federal Center [Image 3.25] was substantially delayed by the Vietnam War. (Mies van der Rohe saw the first phase completed but did not live to see completion of the complex). In a way, the most memorable stories of all of these buildings arise from the new and unusual circumstances in which they were built, and the new and unusual purposes for which they were built.
Regulations as Shapers of Urban Form
In addition to fire-proofing regulations post-fire, the most significant form-shaping regulation affecting new buildings was the adoption of Chicago’s first Zoning Ordinance in 1923. With the increasing number of taller buildings being built up to the sidewalk edge, there was growing concern about the lack of air and light available to occupants. The Ordinance stipulated the maximum building height at the sidewalk shall be two-hundred sixty-four feet. If set back from the sidewalk a certain distance, there would be no height limit. As buildings filled the zoning envelope, they took on the form of armchairs with high backs and two-hundred sixty-fourfoot arms. They were given the nickname “armchair deco.” They are present along LaSalle Street.
Image 3.25 Mies van der Rohe, Federal Center, Chicago, 1964–1974. Photos (top) Chicago Studio archive and (bottom) by John Syvertsen.
Image 3.63 Professional practice final presentation slide. Chicago Studio archive.
Image 3.64 Professional practice final presentation slide. Chicago Studio archive.
Final presentations are a celebration. Students often remark on how confident they felt during their presentations because the information had become ingrained through readings, writing reflections about readings, firm visits to exemplar practices, and discussions.
Image 3.65 Professional practice final presentation slide. Chicago Studio archive.
Image 3.66 Professional practice final presentation slide. Chicago Studio archive.
Image 3.93 Final project boards. Chicago Studio archive.
