David Brown

David Brown works on The Available City, the potential of Chicago’s 10,000+ city-owned vacant lots as a collective space system, an urban design, and a future we can have today. Iterations of the speculative design have been exhibited in the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale and the 2015 Chicago Architecture Biennial. Brown was the Artistic Director of the 2021 Chicago Architecture Biennial, which had The Available City as its focus and theme. His essays and drawings presenting the transformative impact The Available City can have on Chicago’s South and West Sides are found in CENTER 18: Music in Architecture—Architecture in Music, the Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies, volume 2, and Flat Out 4. Those essays continue his study of architecture and design in relation to structures in jazz that facilitate improvisation, which he initiated in the book Noise Orders (University of Minnesota Press, 2006).