Integrated Design
Advisor: Chip von Weise
Partner: Yasmine Katkhuda

Seemingly unrelated to the built environment, elements of politics, economics, and technology become integral to understanding how a building, a neighborhood, or a city is realized. Regardless of implications, urban growth comes with inevitable change to communities. At this juncture where opportunity and resistance collide, architecture becomes political and contested. In seeking a linkage between the virtual or possible, and real or existing, an underlying rhizomatic structure begins a conversation on the realities of place and time.

Situated between Chicago neighborhoods Pilsen and Little Italy, this mixed use residential building grows one unit at a time. The community occupies the first floors through leasable commercial spaces, while the residents inhabit prefabricated micro-units atop a concrete infrastructure. Through such conditions, networks between the individual and the collective begin to manifest.

Over time, modular units are added when requested by the individuals who willingly adopt this system of living. Through this multi-layered system of development, the architecture no longer infringes on a community as an object on site. In resisting monolithic disciplinary identities at such a scale, the building advocates for growth driven and adaptable by any individual, community, or social formation.