Don’t Give Up the Ship!

During this event, Francesco Marullo will talk about the background and development of the exhibition All Magnificent and Wild on view at the MAS Context Reading Room between March 14 and April 11, 2026. Architect Dan Towler Weese, principal at Weese Langley Klein, and architect Susan King, principal at HED, will discuss their affordable housing work focusing on key projects of their office.

About the exhibition

Residential hotels are a hybrid architectural form that emerged in the late nineteenth century to house a transient workforce seeking employment and inexpensive lodging. They include settlement houses, SROs, flophouses, YMCAs/YWCAs, charitable institutions, religious missions, women’s clubs, workingmen’s palaces, and cage hotels—traces largely erased by decades of urban renewal and gentrification. In addition to a set of speculative reconstruction drawings and visual juxtapositions by Francesco Marullo, the exhibition also presents thirty-two historical case studies produced through recent graduate and undergraduate courses at the UIC School of Architecture.

Proceeding like a forensic investigation—from scarce records and fragmentary evidence toward plausible reconstruction—the research proposes a counter-history of these buildings as a way to imagine alternative futures for affordable housing in Chicago. Among these types, the single-room-occupancy (SRO) hotel best crystallizes the nomadic character of the residential hotel in its most classical form—defined by Chicago code as a building in which at least 90 percent of the units are single-room occupancies. Spartan architecture, cryptic names, modest appearance, mid-size scale, and flexible structural organization allowed SROs to be modified and appropriated over time, accommodating a wide diversity of residents, needs, programs, and desires—while often avoiding the paternalism typical of larger social-housing and philanthropic models.

Beyond landmarking, protecting, or expanding what remains, All Magnificent and Wild argues for a contemporary counterpart to the SRO: a mid-size co-living architecture tuned to today’s transitional demographics. Such a model would expand the supply of compact, well-made dwellings for single-person households priced out of the market, as well as temporary and seasonal workers, adults in transition, rent-burdened students, older adults, migrants, people moving out of shelters and informal units, and those leaving the criminal-legal system. Smaller units are typically less costly to build and easier to operate, reducing per-person costs, concentrating density where it is needed, and making shared living a viable alternative—multiplying opportunities for the common and its everyday rituals. This is a design question with real political stakes: if the smallest room is where those stakes become visible, architecture—the society of rooms—is where they take form.