ArQ.uintana

Navigating Rooms, Imagining Future Narratives

by Paola Aguirre Sept. 26, 2016

photo by Matt Demers

We had a very exciting kick-off week that including meeting our program participants to visiting the Jane Addams Homes, and future site of the National Public Housing Museum. Our participants come from a diversity of backgrounds and professional practices which is one of the aspects that makes Archeworks’ certificate program so interesting; some of their current affiliations include the Metropolitan Planning Council, Elevate Energy, Chicago Architecture Foundation, Cannon Design, Barker Nestor Architects, 555 International, Daniel Weinbach & Partners, Change Agency, and Monterrey Tech University.

Todd Palmer, Associate Director and Curator at the National Public Housing Museum shared his presentation titled NPHM: A Chicago buildings with Paradox and Promise to introduce us to the mission, history, background and stories about the “making” of an institution. Raising questions such as what does it mean to put a museum—a public housing museum in a former public house? Why would you take a failed public policy and elevate in a form of a museum? We learned that the Jane Addams Homes is the last building standing of the ABLA Homes which housed around 15,000 residents; it was inhabited until 2002 by residents, and the complex was demolished in 2006. Among the most impactful aspects of this collaboration, the idea of memory and legacy resonates tremendously with me: the abbreviated story and timeline of how the Jane Addams Home building was saved by a grassroots movement with the intention to say “we were here”.

This week the group was also able to visit the building; it was very interesting to navigate the different floors, experience the scale of the rooms, find some fixed furniture (e.g. kitchen cabinets and bathrooms) giving a sense of time by their design features to the empty rooms, and imagine how residents would spend their lives in such a compact, yet well articulated complex. A great surprise/observation was the generous size of windows (boarded today) that allow plenty of natural light penetrating into the rooms. Although empty, there was something warm about these rooms; their domestic scale. Scale is an interesting aspect, and brings me back to Todd’s talk on Tuesday where invited the group to think at what scale does the museum best manifest “activism”? I guess that’s one of the avenues of exploration during upcoming weeks when the group is addressing our driving question: How can challenge current narratives about public housing?

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Crystal Wagner for SCOPE Miami.

Navigating Rooms, Imagining Future Narratives