Chicago Studio Spring 2025 Final Books
In collaboration with the Chicago department of planning, our Spring 2025 Virginia Tech students developed project proposals for a site located in the Avondale neighborhood of Chicago.
The projects include multigenerational affordable housing with senior living spaces, as well as community spaces such as shared kitchens, cafeterias, and health and wellness centers.
Amp & Hayden
Host Firm: Olson Kundig
Liminality
Liminal space is the ephemeral relationship between people and spatial environments. Our concept is the exploration of in-betweenness or third space, where space is in a position of otherness, not bound to one condition or another. A place that is neither here nor there, but somewhere in-between. Discovery, Delay, and Blur are strategies used to achieve liminality.
Lana & Ben
Host Firm: Perkins + Will
Disruption by Design
This 120-unit affordable housing development challenges the assumption that affordability must come at the expense of quality, individuality, or inspiration. In a city facing a deficit of over 126,000 affordable units, our design aims not only to provide housing but to reimagine what affordable living can be – dignified, dynamic and deeply human. We reject the rigid, repetitive forms that have long defined affordable housing and instead embrace a design language rooted in individuality.
Marjie & Isabelle
Host Firm: Perkins + Will
Reinhabiting the Cartesian Grid
Our concept explores how the strict logic of the grid—so often used to divide, regulate, and control—can instead be used to organize relationships between people, space, and shared life. Rooted in Chicago’s identity of a deeply gridded urban fabric, we aim to work within and reveal this inherited framework to invite exploration and foster community: reinhabiting the grid as a place for both individuality and collective life.
Chhavi, Sterling & Jack
Host Firm: JGMA
Exposing Connection
Connection has become increasingly important for communities in the aftermath of the pandemic. The concept of exposing connections is rooted in three key elements: Community, Space and Each other. All are essential in rebuilding meaningful human connection. However, connection is a lived experience that must be expressed in our daily lives. Each individual is part of a greater whole. Architecture consisting of individual parts that come together to form a unified space exemplifies this concept. Typically, connection is viewed as everything coming together; however focusing on the connecting areas that bring a part to a whole creates tension between these spaces.
