Tracing / Traces: Architecture and the Archive 2024

Sarah Blankenbaker teaches at the University of Illinois Chicago School of Architecture, where she recently served as the Associate Director of Graduate Studies. Previously, she was the 2015–16 Garofalo Fellow. Her teaching and research focus on measure and challenges to standardization across a range of topics, including perspectival and axonometric drawing, the translation of photographic ideas into architecture, the depiction of mass-produced objects by twentieth-century architects, open plans, and sporting regulations. This work has appeared in exhibitions in Chicago and Los Angeles and as writing in Log, Future Anterior, Time + Architecture, and Flat Out.

Akima Brackeen is an educator, designer and researcher dedicated to promoting justice within the built environment. She is an Assistant Professor at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Community Design Director at Architecture for Public Benefit, and a member of the leadership team for the Equity in Architecture Education Consortium (EAEC). Her research focuses on water access and challenging racial perceptions and values of waterscapes aiming to transform engagement with contested sites through speculative interventions, narrative generation and community activations. Akima was the inaugural Rowe Fellow at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in Chicago.

Alexander Eisenschmidt is a theorist, designer, and associate professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s School of Architecture. He directs the Visionary Cities Project and leads Studio Offshore. Eisenschmidt is author of The Good Metropolis (2019), guest-editor of City Catalyst (2012), and the co-editor of Chicagoisms (2013) and The Project(s) of Modern Architecture (2017). His research and design works have been published and exhibited at a range of international venues such as the Venice Biennale (2012), the Art Institute of Chicago (2014), the Biennale on Urbanism in Shenzhen, China (2015), and the Lisbon Architecture Triennale in Portugal (2016).

Cofounded by Sharon Xu and Robert Becker, Studio Becker Xu practices architecture and design to search for meaningful ways of shaping our shared experience in the built environment. The studio engages in design across scales and contexts, asking how design can cultivate a sense of place and activate different scales of community. Locally, the practice contemplates, speculates, and engages the community through projects like a reimagined two-flat for Chicago Come Home Initiative’s exhibition on missing middle infill housing and Lawndale Gathering Tree, a playscape for the forthcoming One Lawndale Children’s Discovery Center for Chicago’s West Side. The practice is informed by past experience in the building of cultural spaces, social housing, and workplace design. Sharon and Robert both hold Master of Architecture degrees from Princeton University. Alongside practice, they are also educators at Illinois Institute of Technology and University of Illinois Chicago.

Antonio Torres explores expressions and sensations through architecture and various media. He cofounded the Bittertang Farm as a place to experiment with the physics, biology, behaviors, and emotions of our surroundings. He continues to create projects between his childhood home in Michoacan, Mexico, and the city of Chicago. He is an Assistant Professor at UIC School of Architecture and has taught advanced design studios at Columbia University in New York. Recently, he has built three inflatable pavilions, a pregnant, sugar-oozing piñata, a plush toy collection, a sagging birdcage, a room of wax, an edible environment, and a living amphitheater. Torres is the recipient of numerous architectural awards, including the Architectural League Prize and the New Practices Award from AIANY. He was a finalist in the MoMA PS1 Young Architects Competition and was awarded the TED Fellowship.