Common Chicago

Our relationship with the built environment is continuously evolving. Environmental challenges, economic and social inequalities, shifting living patterns, and polarizing politics all contribute to the constant reshaping of the physical spaces and intangible conditions that bring people together—or keep them apart. Within this shifting context, how can architects and designers help create common spaces that build stronger and more equitable communities?

Common Chicago features projects by a spectrum of Chicago-based designers that address this question across a variety of scales and programmatic functions, including civic, institutional, housing, and open space.

Featuring large-scale drawings, collages, and conceptual models, Common Chicago presents thoughtful approaches to how buildings and common spaces can contribute to a thriving, equitable, and sustainable Chicago.

Architecture and landscape architecture offices featured in the exhibition include Borderless Studio, Civic Projects Architecture, Converge Architecture, Could Be Design, Drumlin, Future Firm, KOO, Latent, LBBA Architects, Norman Kelley, Nowhere Collaborative, Perkins&Will, Resolver Studio, Ross Barney Architects, Site Design Group, Studio Becker Xu, Studio Gang, Tom Lee Studio, UrbanLab, UrbanWorks, Vladimir Radutny Architects, Wheeler Kearns Architects, and X, Nilay Mistry, and Chicago Public Art Group.

The exhibition is presented within the context of SHIFT: Architecture in Times of Radical Change, the sixth edition of the Chicago Architecture Biennial.

GALLERY VISITS

Gallery visits are available September 19, 2025–January 31, 2026 by appointment. To book a visit, please use our calendar form to see available dates and times.

The MAS Context Reading Room is located on the second floor, which is only accessible by stairs.

If you have any questions, please contact us at info@mascontext.com.

RELATED EVENTS

Friday, September 19, 2025, 5–7PM
Opening reception. Free and no need to RSVP.

Sunday, October 19, 2025, 2PM
Tour

Sunday, December 7, 2025, 2PM
Tour

Sunday, January 18, 2026, 2PM
Tour

PROJECT DESCRIPTIONS

Borderless Studio
Creative Grounds

When Chicago closed fifty schools in 2013, there were no clear pathways on how to address a challenge of unprecedented scale—the largest closure of schools in the United States impacting 13,000 students, 3 million square feet of building space, over 100 acres of land across twenty-five neighborhoods—most of them Black and Brown communities. As we reflected on this issue and values of spatial justice and equitable design, we decided to take action with our skillset, through research, community engagement, and design. How might art, design, and architecture contribute to more equitable and just processes for schools repurposing?

Former Overton Elementary School became ground zero to showcase how inclusive, joyful, and community-led activation efforts would look like. Located in the heart of Bronzeville, Overton was named after Anthony Overton, a business and civic leader in Chicago from the early-mid twentieth century. Creative Grounds is a project about reclaiming space through collective action—through design, and by design. This drawing represents a tool for reimagining—this drawing includes layers of activities, projects, and installations that have come to life since the inception of the initiative in 2016.

Civic Projects Architecture
Beyond the Library Walls: Library as System

The role of the public library in the twenty-first century has become blurred, decentralized, and boundaryless. It has in turn become less about the object and more about the idea. Is the primary purpose of a library building still to act as a container for books?

Throughout its evolution, the public library has consistently remained a civic institution that provides knowledge and services for its local community. Here, the library branch model is reinterpreted as a network of social infrastructure where people and programs are sourced, distributed, and circulated throughout their local neighborhood.

Our installation invites you to help inform and expand the library system by creating scenarios that imagine how and where you would like to engage with a chosen topic of interest.

Converge Architecture
MAAFA Center for Arts & Activism

With words from community leader Marshall Hatch Jr, “Everything starts with faith—a belief that the community can do it—and we believe Art can play a transformative role in inspiring the people and children of West Garfield Park, giving them hope and bringing them together around a collection of ideas.”

This physical collage, created by Annabell Ren of Converge Architecture for the MAAFA Center for Arts & Activism, assembles images of the architecture of West Garfield Park—the homes, parks, public buildings, shops, and roads with the eyes of MAAFA’s participants, alumni, children, and families. All elements converge into the form of a church’s arched window. A symbol of the neighborhood’s future.

The former St. Barnabus Episcopal Church is currently the headquarters for the MAAFA Redemption Project, a gun violence prevention and workforce development program. The MAAFA Center for Arts & Activism, “the MAC,” will continue to house this important work. A thirst for the Arts was identified through community engagement and market studies have revealed that the need is not being met. The MAC will deliver intergenerational arts programming for the community coupled with grassroots activism training and facilitation.

The transformed sanctuary will offer flexible arts and instruction spaces, meeting rooms, libraries, fitness areas, and event space for performances, classes, and community gatherings. A newly created garden will provide a space for reflection and congregation. The MAC will showcase the talents of the neighborhood and beyond.

The MAAFA Center for Arts & Activism sits within the Sankofa Wellness Village.

Could Be Design
Festival Cartography

The Chicago Sukkah Design Festival, rooted in the heart of Chicago’s North Lawndale neighborhood, is a participatory platform for community collaboration, creative placemaking, and cultural exchange. Drawing inspiration from the sukkah—temporary shelters traditionally built during the Jewish harvest holiday of Sukkot—the Festival invites local designers and community organizations to co-create nimble outdoor structures that offer inclusive gathering spaces.

A cornerstone of the Festival is the design and stewardship of its grounds, inaugurated in 2023 by community partners as James Stone Freedom Square. Once a vacant lot, the site has been reimagined into a welcoming, multipurpose plaza along Douglas Boulevard. With incremental additions each year, Freedom Square now offers permanent amenities—an accessible pathway, colorful signage, outdoor seating, and community-tended plantings—that extend the neighborhood’s network of vibrant public spaces.

Each year’s sukkahs are not only central to the Festival but also live on well beyond it. After each annual event, the structures are relocated to the permanent sites of partnering organizations, where they serve as program spaces aligned with each group’s mission. Past examples include a tool-lending kiosk, a meditation pavilion, an oral history booth, a community memorial, and a communal table for street vendors. In this way, the sukkahs embody a cycle of renewal: temporary architectures that leave lasting footprints in North Lawndale, while clearing the festival grounds for a new crop of designs the following year.

This drawing reinterprets the Chicago Sukkah Design Festival’s model of annual activation coupled with multi-nodal community development—an evolving commitment to cultivating the neighborhood’s public realm.

Drumlin
The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters Women’s Auxiliary Museum

The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters Women’s Auxiliary Museum, a sister museum to the National A. Philip Randolph Pullman Porter Museum, will highlight the invaluable role Black women have played in championing worker’s rights and establishing the first African American-run labor union. Situated in the Pullman National Historical Park, the museum transforms three derelict historic row houses into an intimate series of interactive spaces.

DRUMLIN’s approach celebrates the historic east façades, while completely reimagining the currently collapsed west façades. Referencing materials and the formal language of the surrounding neighborhood and the Pullman train cars themselves, rear and roof additions provide additional gallery and gather space. Once complete, the BSCP Women’s Auxiliary Museum will be a link in a block-long Labor Museum District dedicated to the Pullman Porters and the women that supported them.

Future Firm
The Right to Deep Water / In Praise of Wild Swimming

The hottest week of the summer, 100° day after day. Everyone is soaked in sweat and grumbling. You fly down the lakefront trail on an old bicycle. When you arrive at Buckingham Fountain in Grant Park, you make a hard right and coast 100m out into Lake Michigan down an orange jetty. You arrive at a sprawling, concrete diving pavilion. You are not the first one—there are already morning swimmers, tourists taking selfies, a couple napping on a bright towel. A soggy dog plays fetch off a series of low steps. You leave your bike behind and jump from the nearest ledge, diving into the icy water. Darkness, quiet. Your mind resets. Slowly, you resurface.

You spend the whole day out there. In and out of the depths. Chicago’s skyline surrounds you. Kayaks come and go. A group of rowdy young people organize a flotilla of inner tubes. Older ladies swim backstroke in the natural Olympic-sized lap pool. Toddlers splash in a shallow zone, chubby limbs slathered in sunscreen. Floating plant systems sprawl roots, bob with the waves. A sign shows weekly activities: Morning Tai Chi, Shakespeare in the Summer, “Swim In” Movie Night. At dusk, you watch fireworks bloom and dissolve over Navy Pier.

Today, Chicago has twenty-six beaches where, at each, lifeguards restrict access to deep water. Yet Chicagoans’ relentless, rebellious spirits prevail: swimmers return to deep water after 7 pm or find unmarked locations. They gather together on piers and edges, young and old, to plunge into the cold shimmering water. This project celebrates swimming culture as civic culture. It creates a beach downtown, where there isn’t one, inspired by shoring and structural edges. A public amenity for future residents in the re-densification of the Loop. Buckingham Fountain was built in 1927. One hundred years later, we want water we can get wet in.

KOO
Altgeld Gardens Family Resource Center

The Altgeld Gardens Family Resource Center is located in Altgeld Gardens, a development built by the Department of Housing and Urban Development on the Far South Side in 1944–45 for Black soldiers returning from service in World War II. Situated in the “town center,” the building is located along gently-curving 131st Street, surrounded by two-story brick rowhouses and adjacent to the curvilinear, modernist “retail building” built by notable architects Keck & Keck.

Filling a longstanding physical void in the town center, the sinuous new building provides interior and exterior areas where children and adults can safely gather and find inspiration in a development that was once called “the toxic donut” due to its location in an industrial area, surrounded by 50 landfills, 382 industrial facilities, and an expressway. Altgeld Gardens has proven to be a resilient community that responds to adversity time and again. For instance, the Environmental Justice movement began at Altgeld when Hazel Johnson created People for Community Recovery in 1979, changing the course of people’s lives in the Altgeld Gardens neighborhood and beyond.

The Resource Center adds to a grand plaza that serves as Altgeld’s outdoor civic gathering space, and the building design challenges expectations of public housing architecture. The Center’s design is meant to invite Altgeld residents, and Chicagoans across the city, to see the neighborhood with fresh eyes.

Latent
Rusu-McCartin Club

The Rusu-McCartin Club is the first new Boys and Girls Club Chicago in fifty years, and anchors community development initiatives underway in Austin. This three-story community center steps outward transforming the Chicago Avenue streetscape with expansive glazing revealing program spaces dedicated to leadership development, academic success, and healthy lifestyles. A flexible community hub, the facility engages young people with state-of-the-art classrooms, collaborative study areas, and specialized studios for art, technology, and vocational skill-building.

Above the gymnasium, an outdoor learning classroom opens onto a landscaped meadow, providing safe access to a natural ecosystem with adjacent teaching studios. This green roof offers an immersive space for environmental science lessons, creative workshops, and quiet reflection. The sustainable rainscreen façade envelopes the structure in a dynamic composition of three distinct metallic profiles, celebrating shifting patterns of light and shadow throughout the day and reducing solar heat gain.

A targeted ten-session engagement plan invited input from students at eight local elementary, middle, and high schools, along with members of six Boys and Girls Clubs. Community workshops, focus groups, and interactive charrettes ensured the design directly reflects neighborhood aspirations. Stakeholders voiced overwhelming enthusiasm for the new hub, recognizing it as a vibrant resource that will energize the community, strengthen local partnerships, and inspire future generations.

By combining thoughtful design, sustainable strategies, and meaningful participation, the Rusu-McCartin Club exemplifies a new standard for civic architecture and youth empowerment on Chicago’s West Side. This collage represents our firm’s process from community workshops to design, through construction and use, tracking its success as students build ambitious plans for their lives.

LBBA Architects
Dreaming of a World

This artwork represents a layering of time, memories, and stories honoring the lives of more than 10 million Americans who have called public housing home, specifically those who resided at the Jane Addams Homes. The domestic scale along with skillful and thoughtful design elements in the original buildings transformed common materials into a remarkable reflection of the midcentury optimism that embraced public housing as essential community infrastructure. Their modest architecture belies the undeniable culture of residents representing the diverse community of Chicagoans.

We continue dreaming of a Chicago where public and affordable housing can continue to provide a backdrop for people to share their everyday struggles and joys with one another. Through its celebration of ordinary moments made extraordinary by human connection, the collage affirms that behind every public housing development are real people whose narratives and dignity deserve recognition and preservation for future generations.

Collage includes photographs of Jane Addams Homes, Archer Courts, Raymond Hillard Homes, Robert Taylor Homes, and Cabrini-Green Homes

Norman Kelley
Lobby with Amphitheater

Interior alterations to an existing commercial lobby at 190 South LaSalle Street, a 40-story office building owned by Beacon Capital Partners located in Chicago’s prominent financial district. An amphitheater provides seating but also performs like a brass instrument. The building was originally designed by John Burgee with Philip Johnson in 1987 and while its form and finish are illustrative of a classical revivalism, the interior poses a complex acoustical challenge. The ceilings are fifty feet tall and vaulted. The amount of reverberation in the space makes it impossible to understand what someone is saying to you when only standing seven feet away. At the north end of the lobby is a bronze sculpture, Fugue, by Anthony Caro that was originally designed for the space.

The new amphitheater mirrors the sculpture’s purely instrumental metaphor with an actual instrument on the south—a semi-circular shape that will allow seated visitors to experience brass sounds responsively. The amphitheater’s sound is composed of multiple brass instruments and programmed to automatically generate elements from those sounds according to changes in weather, time of day, and day of week. The amphitheater is an instrument posing as a speaker with its risers clad with finely perforated brass panels and backed with an absorbent filler. The amphitheater’s interior holds 91 speakers with light sensors that tune the sound so that it minimizes noise pollution and maximizes the sound quality around a listener’s sphere of audibility.

Nowhere Collaborative
Snow Fence

Snow Fence explores the social impacts that result from the recontextualized design and placement of a visible infrastructural element.

Chicago has a bold tradition of modifying or controlling nature through infrastructure that is mainly unseen. Chicago literally raised the city to address plumbing drainage issues, reversed the flow of the Chicago River for sanitation, and built deep tunnels to collect and divert excess stormwater.

Unlike these infrastructure projects in Chicago, Snow Fence is designed to be seen and designed for interaction. Traditionally, a snow fence is linear, permeable—and counter-intuitively—it deflects or collects snow on the leeward side of the fence. As a permeable barrier, the snow fence visually controls, limits, obscures, and distorts.

The consequences of Snow Fence on natural and human forces will be examined at various scales, thicknesses, materials, and permanence. The snow fence acknowledges the historical impact of wind on the city—both natural winds originating from the lake and wind vortices created by skyscrapers and buildings. The snow fence reimagines landscapes during climate change. The snow fence may align with or disrupt the Chicago street grid. The snow fence may follow a linear path or may break apart to create eddies or drifts of focal points. The snow fence may become a passageway to collect community ephemera. The snow fence may invoke historical references to the original prairie landscape—now transformed in the urban context.

Perkins&Will
Damen Green Line Station

The opening of the Damen Green Line public transit station brings accessible train access back to a Chicago neighborhood last served in 1948, and will spur community-supportive reinvestment and redevelopment on the West Side. The station serves the Kinzie Industrial Corridor, the United Center, Malcolm X College, and surrounding residential areas on the growing Near West Side, and is adjacent to a newly announced $7 billion mixed-used redevelopment project around the United Center.

“This long-awaited CTA station is a transformative achievement for Chicago’s Near West Side,” said Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson at the official opening. “This visually stunning new station will enhance affordable and convenient transportation options for residents and help attract future investments that will make Chicago’s West Side a vibrant hub of residential, retail, entertainment, and public spaces.”

The station is aligned with Chicago’s Connected Communities Ordinance to advance equitable transit-oriented development—and comes amidst growing evidence nationally of the economic, social, and cultural vitality that modern infrastructure brings to communities. The multi-modal station puts passenger ease at the core of its design, allowing users to seamlessly connect with buses, or to use bikes or walk to nearby destinations. A grand stair and escalator, visible through the transparent glass façade, guide passengers to the platform level. A glass bridge connects the inbound and outbound train platforms, offering spectacular views of the Chicago skyline and orienting visitors to neighborhood destinations and attractions.

Resolver Studio
The Allegory of the Boulevards

At its inception, the Chicago Park Boulevard System was heralded a civic success as it connected the city through a “magnificent chain of parks and parkways,” as noted by urban developer John S. Wright, and provided ample space for carriage transportation and leisure activities for a certain class of Chicago’s residents. But what have we today?

This work reimagines the historic Chicago Park Boulevard System not for what it was, but for what it can be. The frame draws from medieval European frescoes harkening back to the invention of boulevards, or bolwerks in fourteenth-century Paris, as a peripheral fortification wall turned leisurely pathway. Similarly, the Chicago Park Boulevard system, established in 1869, was once on the periphery of the City of Chicago and has since become its geographical center. Fragments present along the boulevard system disrupt the ordered landscape of native prairie flora, revealing the harsh truths of this antiquated infrastructure in the context of today’s largely disinvested and heavily surveilled surrounding twenty-three community areas.

The central perspective presents the boulevards as a play set in a video game. Residents are challenged with issues that disproportionately affect Black and Brown communities along the boulevard and must battle to build constructive programs and activations that push forward their shared goals. Parades, barbequing, seasonal markets, and pop-up pavilions are imagined to stretch across the 26-mile- long system, encouraging use of this underutilized network of parkways, and promoting permanent solutions for housing, social services, recreational and arts facilities, and workforce opportunities.

Ross Barney Architects
Chicago Riverwalk

The Chicago River has always shaped the city’s identity. Burnham and Bennett’s 1909 Plan of Chicago imagined the Main Branch as a place of commerce and leisure—a vision realized a century later with the Chicago Riverwalk.

Stretching 1.25 miles from Lake Michigan to the river’s confluence, the Riverwalk has redefined downtown Chicago. Each segment is designed with a unique character, weaving together history, ecology, culture, and recreation into one continuous public experience.

Built with flood-resilient materials, the Riverwalk is both durable and adaptable. It celebrates Chicago’s past while enhancing everyday life in the city. For residents, it provides places to walk, rest, and connect with nature at the center of an urban core. For visitors, it offers an unforgettable way to experience Chicago, linking landmarks, entertainment, and the waterfront.

The Riverwalk has also generated more than $10 billion in economic value, catalyzing new development and setting a precedent for waterfront renewal across the region. More importantly, it enriches the city’s quality of life—encouraging health, connection, and civic pride.

As Former Mayor Rahm Emanuel said: “The Riverwalk creates a profound intimacy between our citizens and their river. It’s our Yellowstone. It’s our Grand Canyon. The Natural Park that defines our city.”

Site Design Group
Midway Plaisance Park Universal Playground

Created to serve people with and without disabilities, the Midway Plaisance Park Universal Playground transforms inclusive play theory into a living environment that invites exploration, engagement, and community. The play space is the result of a deeply collaborative and research-driven design process rooted in a custom-developed Universal Design Index.

Informed by research on mobility, sensory, and intellectual impairments, the design responds to the diverse needs of people with and without disabilities through a layered approach. Key criteria such as comfort, approachability, reach, and refuge guided decisions about surfacing, materiality, scale, and spatial organization. The result is a landscape that provides not only access, but equitable and immersive play experiences where children can navigate independently, feel safe, and find joy.

Play features are intentionally open-ended, encouraging creative use and discovery. Varying levels of challenge are embedded throughout the design to allow children to self-select their level of activity and risk.

Three paths offer varied physical and sensory experiences, intersecting at inclusive play zones where children with and without disabilities are invited to play side-by-side. Five sensory nooks offer varying degrees of sensory engagement, including water, sound, and gathering nodes. Some of the nodes offer low-stimulation refuges, giving children a place to recalibrate when play becomes overwhelming.

Every element across the playground, from surfacing, circulation, signage, scale, and planting, has been carefully considered to support autonomy, social interaction, creativity, and sensory well-being. The resulting design creates a one-of-a-kind playground and a model for equity and accessibility in public space design.

Studio Becker Xu
Unscripted Play

Playlots are designated plots of land allocated for recreation in the neighborhoods of Chicago. From vacant lots on residential streets to schoolyards to park grounds, playlots mark prescribed points of physical and social contact within our communities. Increasing regulations on the design, access, and upkeep of these spaces of play have resulted in the serial appearance of commonplace structures—slides, swings, monkey bars—in uneven distributions and varying states of use/disuse across the city. Play has become a rehearsed act only to be enacted on certain stages. How can we reclaim play as a vital expression of creativity, autonomy, and civic engagement that permeates our city?

This play kit features geometric figures for curious encounters and creative occupation. Reassemble, reshape, and recreate to reimagine how we play.

Scan for perspectives, past and present, on play as a physical, imaginative, and political act in Chicago and beyond.

Studio Gang
Eleanor Boathouse at Park 571

As Chicago works to transform the post-industrial Chicago River into a public asset, Eleanor Boathouse invites communities on the South Side and throughout the city to share in the river’s ecological and social revitalization. Located in the Bridgeport neighborhood on a stretch of the South Branch known as Bubbly Creek for its historic toxicity, today the boathouse is reconnecting people with the river—forming a key access point to the water, reclaiming its edge for recreation and civic life, and fostering a new generation of river stewards.

Two structures make up the boathouse: a boat storage building and a multipurpose field house where community rowing teams train year-round and the public gathers for fitness classes, after-school programs, meetings, voting, and events. Like its “fraternal twin” facility on the North Branch (Studio Gang’s WMS Boathouse at Clark Park), the design translates the motion of rowing into an architectural roof form using two standard truss shapes. Clerestory glazing allows in southern light and warms the floor slabs in winter, and the building opens for natural ventilation in summer, reducing energy use year-round.

At the site scale, aprons and docks provide easy maneuvering onto the river. Native plantings, permeable surfaces, and additional green infrastructure allow the landscape to serve as wildlife habitat and to capture and filter stormwater, working toward the river’s ecological revival by softening its edge and reducing pollution and pressure on the city’s aging water system.

Tom Lee Studio
Rearscape: The Chicago Rear Setback Reconsidered

In Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 film Rear Window, perceived narratives unfold within a collective courtyard that acts as a fragmented social stage—lives observed but not interconnected. Drawing from this cinematic framing, our project interrogates the Chicago rear setback as a spatial and social construct, redefining it as an intentional collective space.

Chicago’s rear yards, established by zoning ordinance and building code, are among the city’s most equitable spatial typologies. Regardless of neighborhood or income level, every block shares a version of this hidden landscape—less polished than the street-facing facades but as authentic as they are ordinary. While the front projects a desired image and shields private life from public view, the rear reveals genuine everyday life within a resultant shared space. These typically modest, vernacular spaces are inherently communal, intimate, and unpretentious, yet are too often regarded as utilitarian afterthoughts.

Our exploration begins with the ubiquitous rear porch, long treated as mere circulation rather than a stage for shared life. Subtly reimagined, the porch becomes a spatial threshold—drawing neighbors into layered vertical connections and narratives through framed views and moderated privacy. This reframing, in turn, provokes a reconsideration of the garage, the quiet ground-plane organizer of alleys and backyards across the city. Envisioned as an infrastructural anchor, the garage could host gathering spaces, gardens, pools, playgrounds, or small theaters—communal amenities shared among next-door neighbors.

What emerges is a reimagined, collective rear setback that forms an urban ecology of shared space and life, stitched from the most ordinary structures of Chicago’s fabric.

UrbanLab
Speculative Streetworks

These Streetworks are questions with mass. Neither optimized, nor streamlined, nor finalized, they resist the tyranny of infrastructural standardization. Instead, they are speculative provocations—explorations of what civic space could become. Each is sited in the public way, that contested common ground we are all supposed to share. The Streetworks are wedged onto street corners, sidewalks, and parkways as deliberate disruptions. They operate as graphic experiments, prodding at the edges of what public architecture might still dare to do: test spatial limits, play with scale and program, spark friction, and nudge people together.

These Streetworks don’t resolve—they entice. They invite collective daydreaming through disposition. Set in stone, they favor slowness of sturdy presence and programmatic possibility. As streetside amenities, they adapt to changing contextual needs. They are public plazas, transit shelters, ride-hail pickup zones, bike/scooter-share stations, vending pods, restrooms and drinking fountains, information kiosks, charging stations, tourist booths, bulletin boards, micro-libraries, or pop-up markets. Each compact structure is monumental yet porous, tactile yet abstract, grounded yet goading. These proposals are shaped through form and affect rather than prescription. In an era of privatized, digitized, and fragmented public space, marble carrots recuperate a kind of architectural resistance—solid yet suggestive and anchored in the straightforward materiality of the everyday street.

UrbanWorks
Esperanza: Geometries of Hope

Esperanza Health Center South is an architectural beacon of healing and hope in the heart of Chicago’s Brighton Park neighborhood. Its boldness is a reflection of purpose. The sharp, radiant forms that slice across the white canvas echo Esperanza’s vivid yellow façade and angular geometry.

Each yellow edge captures the dynamic language of the health center’s exterior. Architecture becomes sculpture and form becomes message. The geometry flows inward, mirroring the physical structure’s seamless transitions into warm, light-filled interiors that welcome, connect, and uplift. These transitions create rhythms that link room-to-room, space-to-space, person-to-person.

The central motif celebrates and embodies community resilience. As the Esperanza Health Center anchors the neighborhood, these shapes anchor the canvas, suggesting movement, growth, and unity. Expansive windows allow light to pour in, blurring the boundary between inside and out, healing and environment, individual and collective.

The outdoor plaza unfurls as a natural continuation of the building’s generous spirit that extends beyond the building’s walls. Paths meander through green space, connecting Esperanza Health Center South to its broader context of schools, families, streets, and lives. There is intention in every architectural move. This Chicago Common exhibition piece reflects the building’s gestures of welcome, support, and the transformative power of design to promote health equity on Chicago’s South Side.

Vladimir Radutny Architects
Re-Revisiting Our Avenue

Re-Revisiting Our Avenue continues a speculative question we first posed in 2017 as part of the Chicago Architecture Foundation’s Between States exhibition: What if the avenue streetscape were transformed from a vehicular thoroughfare into a pedestrian-centric urban connection?

Originally presented as a single drawing, the Revisiting Our Avenue concept was further developed in 2020 through a series of drawings for our Burnham Prize submission. For this Common Chicago exhibition, these ideas move into physical form: a model capturing a fragment of North Avenue, reimagining it as a pedestrian landscape and exploring its relationship to new architectural interventions.

The avenue is envisioned as a network of pedestrian mobility zones, organized by one’s desired speed of travel. To support this configuration, we propose rewriting current zoning regulations for both new and existing buildings, introducing carved facades and revised setback requirements creating continuous overhead protection for pedestrians throughout the year.

A new transport strategy reintroduces the historic streetcar as a modern “Surface L,” which is integrated within a curb-less streetscape, fully returning the avenue to pedestrians.

This transformation extends beyond mobility: the avenue is ecologically revitalized through native plantings, localized stormwater management, and renewable energy, harvesting to power the corridor and its adjacencies. The result is a dramatic reduction in air and light pollution, noise, and heat-island effect—improving physical and mental health while offering cleaner air and clearer skies.

Ultimately, this proposal envisions a humanized streetscape—a pedestrian-centric network that reframes Chicago’s avenues as public realms of movement, ecology, and community, proudly echoing Daniel Burnham’s call to “make no little plans.”

Wheeler Kearns Architects
Social Fabric

This collage draws its inspiration from the AIDS Quilt of the 1980s, a powerful symbol that also influenced the facade of Chicago’s Broadway Youth Center. Much like its predecessor, the piece serves as a call to action, exploring how communities connect across time, space, and different communication methods. It encourages a community to unite and strengthen its bonds in the face of harmful political policies.

The artwork implores individuals, organizations, publications, professional groups, and politicians to bolster the crucial support networks for any marginalized community. Set in Chicago, the piece highlights the vital healthcare services provided by the Broadway Youth Center to the LGBTQIA+ community—services Chicagoans have fought diligently for over several decades.

The quilt emphasizes that when those in power use identity politics to dehumanize and exclude, we must build our own support systems. From individual buildings to the entire city, and from nonprofits to businesses, we need to create a “quilt” of services and connections to foster resilience.

This message extends beyond the LGBTQIA+ community to all marginalized groups facing pressure. The quilt reminds us there is no “them” and “us;” harm to one community ultimately affects everyone. There is no hierarchy in the quilt—every contribution matters, knitting together a network of care and support. While the piece focuses on one community, its core idea of connection means all Chicagoans are a part of it. What happens to one person in our city impacts us all.

X, Nilay Mistry, and Chicago Public Art Group
Coiled Serpent Mound

The Coiled Serpent Mound earthwork is installed along the western banks of the Chicago River in Horner Park. This homage to the ancestral practice of mound building educates the public about the rich cultural history of placemaking and activates the human connection to the river and its importance to Chicago’s development as a city.

The monumental earthwork was created with the support of many community partners, leaders, members, and individuals, including artist X, landscape architect Nilay Mistry, the Chicago Public Art Group, the Chicago Park District, 33rd Ward Chicago, and the Portage Park Neighborhood Association.

The Coiled Serpent Mound is matched by Pokto Cinto (Serpent Twin), an earthwork mound created in 2019 by the Des Plaines River in Schiller Woods West. Together, the two earthworks pay homage to the Indigenous ancestral practice of mound building.

These two sites are the anchors for a nine-mile conceptual outdoor museum trail called the 4000N. Through building with natural materials, promoting indigenous plant species, and highlighting restored habitats within urban public spaces, Chicago Public Art Group and the Portage Park Neighborhood Association activate our human connection to rivers and our existence with the earth.

EXHIBITION CREDITS

Curator: Iker Gil
Organizer: MAS Context
Printing: American Color Labs and James Florio
Participants: Borderless Studio, Civic Projects, Converge Architecture, Could Be Design, Drumlin, Future Firm, KOO, Latent, LBBA Architects, Norman Kelley, Nowhere Collaborative, Perkins&Will, Resolver Studio, Ross Barney Architects, Site Design Group, Studio Becker Xu, Studio Gang, Tom Lee Studio, UrbanLab, UrbanWorks, Vladimir Radutny Architects, Wheeler Kearns Architects, and X, Nilay Mistry, and Chicago Public Art Group
Exhibition Documentation: Dan Kelleghan Photography

The exhibition is presented within the context of SHIFT: Architecture in Times of Radical Change, the sixth edition of the Chicago Architecture Biennial.