Advanced Studios

Chicago's expansive waterfront includes the banks of the Chicago River. The studio explores the potential design for an innovative “living museum” linking Chicago’s extensive riverfront with Chicago’s inland grid.

The objective of the studio is to advance design proposals for a museum of the 21st century – a museum supporting abundant yet imperiled urban life. Considering the historical precedent and the contradictions and challenges inherent in it, the museum will find its starting point within its site: the Chicago River. The river and its attendant ecology will inform and directly influence the museum’s design. From the façade to interior spaces, the museum will help us understand how organisms live, cooperate, and co-evolve with one another in Chicago’s unique physical environment.

The Chicago River flows through the heart of downtown Chicago, past forest preserves and parks, and all kinds of urban communities. The river tells a complex and powerful story of Chicago's history and growth, industry and resourcefulness, and environmental progress. The Chicago River stands at the intersection of urban planning, biodiversity, architectural majesty, recreation, transportation, clean water, and commerce. The time has come for a museum to represent the river’s importance to the city.

The program for a living museum of the 21st century is to be considered open and deliberately incomplete. The studio acknowledges the important shifts taking place in the realm of exhibiting illustrious histories, and focuses on the future of ecology and ecological education. The student’s task is to rethink the design, form, and structure of the contemporary museum. Following a research-based design approach, the studio will start with typological analyses and discussion of the historical and the modern museum as well as “living” material investigations.

In a world filled with complexity and constant change, the principles that have guided our societies, economies, and relationships with our environment are being called into question. The challenges we face are no longer merely problems to be solved but signals that a deeper transformation is needed.

This studio’s aim is to explore the fundamental shifts that must occur to envisioning a sustainable, equitable, and nurturing society. It is about reimagining the existing structures and relationships and recognizing that the path we have been following may no longer serve us or our planet.

Each of the students will explore reciprocity, gratitude, and interconnectedness. We’ll seek to replace competition, extraction, and separation with principles that honor balance, collaboration, and giving back.

We need to open the door to innovative solutions, more compassionate relationships, and a future where reciprocity is not just a concept but a lived reality.

The President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities (PCAH) published a landmark report, Reinvesting in Arts Education: Winning America’s Future Through Creative Schools in 2011. Chicago, too, in 2012, stepped up to the challenge with the creation of the first citywide Cultural Plan in 25 years in which arts education was deemed the number one priority in the City. One of the biggest challenges that the Chicago Public Schools face in order to realize this initiative is the lack of space within their current facilities to allow people across disciplines to work collaboratively. At the same time, IIT has continued to seek ways to provide educational opportunities for residents of Bronzeville and the greater South Side community.

Therefore, the challenge for this studio is to design a dynamic and flexible space on the IIT campus, to explore new settings for creative teaching and learning, that encourage interactions between the IIT community and its surrounding neighborhood. Integrating arts education within the traditional academic subjects is where real collaboration and innovation can occur. The objective of the studio is to enable students to develop a critical engagement with program, the site and vision simultaneously.

The studio’s site is within the megalopolis of Tokyo, Japan. Tokyo is famous and infamous for its density. A reconsideration of the megastructure seems appropriate in a culture that gave us, for example, Kenzo Tange’s Tokyo Bay project as well as Kisho Kurokawa’s Nakagin Capsule Tower — Tokyo is the perfect sites for macro and micro architectural experimentation. The speculative projects we develop will be both tiny and enormous. We will anticipate and design scenarios for both scales.

With the addition of program, we will imagine new forms of collective associations as promised by Modernism. But, whereas Modernism proposed rationality and singularities to deal with the problems and potentials of the city, we will play with irrationality and multiplicities. We will engage density directly. But heeding the predicted future of the “Generic City” in which cities becomes indistinct from one another, this studio will begin with a contrary hypothesis: we will view globalization as reinforcing differences in patterns of localized urban behavior, formal uniqueness, and infrastructural specificity.

With the addition of infrastructure, we will posit that architecture can be both/and — it can be both about growth and about the environment — through the manipulation of form and the tactical deployment of ecologically based systems.