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Photo of a gallery shows a low platform with several pieces of brightly colored and irregularly shaped furniture. On the white walls behind are framed graphic posters and small paintings of architecture. Photo of a gallery shows a low platform with several pieces of brightly colored and irregularly shaped furniture. On the white walls behind are framed graphic posters and small paintings of architecture.

Five Picks from the New Architecture and Design Galleries

Gallery Spotlight

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This fall the Art Institute reopened the galleries devoted to our seminal collection of 20th- and 21st-century architecture and design. 

The Modern Wing space, collaboratively reimagined by the museum’s curatorial team and Chicago-based architectural office Norman Kelley, presents an elegant, modular system of walls and a cadence of generous and intimate areas for viewing both longtime collection favorites and newly acquired works on display for the first time—important drawings, models, furniture, graphic design, research projects, and film from the last century plus. Together, these objects invite visitors to consider intertwined themes and issues ranging from experimentation with materials and notions of domesticity to social justice and the reconceptualization of space. 

Here, five staff members who have contributed to the galleries’ reopening in very different ways reflect on works that are particularly resonant for them.

A Celebratory Work for Celebratory Galleries

Joanna Abijaoude, Administrative Coordinator, Architecture and Design


Joel Robinson


Mr. and Mrs. William W. McKittrick Endowment Fund

With its playful bursts of red, yellow, and brown dots reminiscent of sparkling fireworks, Joel Robinson’s Roman Candles textile inspires jubilation, making it a fitting fabric to celebrate the newly refreshed architecture and design galleries. The work also provides an opportunity to highlight Robinson, a groundbreaking African American designer of the mid-20th century. 

Robinson was a multifaceted creative professional who pursued fabric, furniture, and graphic design, as well as advertising; he eventually served as art director and executive vice president of the David D. Polon agency. While he first studied architecture—a practice alluded to in Roman Candles’s precise angular lines—he struggled to break into the field, facing barriers of structural racism in the predominantly white profession. In 1951, his lauded textile Ovals, one of several collaborations with manufacturer L. Anton Maix, was the first work by a Black designer featured in MoMA’s seminal Good Design exhibitions, a five-year series that showcased the evolving principles of modern design. Roman Candles was chosen for Chicago’s iteration of the exhibition, used to upholster a chair shown at the Merchandise Mart. The popular publication Ebony championed Robinson’s achievements in its May 1952 issue, praising his “strikingly original” designs and diligent work ethic. Roman Candles’s inclusion in the “Chicago Modern” section of the new installation gives much-deserved recognition to Robinson’s prestigious legacy.

An Ode to Labor and Laborers

Thomas Huston, Specialist, Architecture and Design


Clarissa Tossin


Architecture Purchase Fund. © Clarissa Tossin 2009

Rhythmic and hypnotic, Clarissa Tossin’s White Marble Everyday is a portrait of the labor necessary to uphold the utopian regime of modernism in Brazil’s capital, Brasília. Workers lather and wash the marble of the Oscar Niemeyer–designed Federal Supreme Court building each morning. Without this maintenance, the building would become quickly soiled in Brazil’s tropical climate, tarnishing its utopian promise of progress and newness. This video seems to me a tribute to workers everywhere, celebrating and making beautiful the largely invisible labor that sustains our world. It also recalls the many laborers within the museum—custodians, security guards, AV technicians, and art handlers, among many others—who create and maintain the white cube galleries in which this video is installed. 

In my capacity as specialist for the Architecture and Design department, I am responsible for maintaining our collection galleries and storages in addition to the more visible labor of moving and installing works of art. This maintenance is a part of my week that I find incredibly meaningful; it is time spent getting to know the collections on a deeper level than is afforded to most. These labors of care are invaluable to our museum, and to society more broadly, and it is powerful to see them rendered so beautifully in our own collection.

A Way to Understand Architecture’s Personal Impact

Elizabeth Mescher, Collection Manager, Architecture and Design

As collection manager for the Architecture and Design department, it is my role to care for the many artworks in our collection, manage new acquisitions, and oversee our installations. So I was particularly excited to see the newly acquired Star Apartments models chosen for the new permanent collection galleries—it was a chance to see what was once only an idea on a checklist become an installed object for all to appreciate.

Located on Los Angeles’s Skid Row, Star Apartments by architect Michael Maltzan is a mixed-use complex that provides 102 apartments for formerly unhoused individuals. Designed to offer permanent supportive housing, the building integrates shared public spaces and essential services, including a medical clinic and recreational facilities like a walking track, a vegetable garden, and communal areas.

Photo of a gallery space with a large square textile on a white wall. Multipastel-color bent plywood chairs sit on a low platform to the right. In the background are two video monitors and five rectangular models of interior living spaces.

A view of the Star Apartment models (2018) in the gallery


In an exploration of the relationship between architecture and the buildings’ residents, Maltzan’s team crafted 1:12-scale models of the interiors of units in the complex. What I particularly love about these models is that they are not solely architectural models but reflect the personal lives and self-expression of the building’s individual occupants. Each model includes details as specific as a tenant’s collection of guitars, a carton of orange juice, and even individual books on a bookshelf. Because I manage one of the largest architectural collections in the country, I don’t always have the opportunity to understand the impact a building has on an individual or a community, and the Star Apartment models gave me a new perspective on how an architectural project can be understood in a more meaningful way. 

A Critique on Exclusion and Divide

Schetauna Powell, Daniel F. and Ada L. Rice Curatorial Fellow, Architecture and Design


AD—WO

Butler-VanderLinden Family and Architecture and Design Curatorial Discretionary funds

My interest in the textile wall hanging Immeasurability: The Ridge by architecture firm AD—WO is multiple: I genuinely like the solid-blue background filled with colorful knots that, when viewed as a whole, reveal a global map. I also like that the work makes something that is usually only viewable digitally—information about tectonic activity, or the movement of the earth’s plates—into a tangible material object.

But as the Daniel F. and Ada L. Rice Curatorial Fellow researching African American architects and designers in Chicago, I am also interested in how Emanuel Admassu and Jen Wood, the founders of AD—WO, investigate the construction of race and space through practices of imaging and measuring. The map of Immeasurability: The Ridge depicts, in geological terms, the physical separation of the African continental shelf from that of the Americas. In its original installation, the textile hung amid sound elements and against a photo that evoked a landscape of lack that would be familiar to African Americans, a juxtaposition that foregrounded not only the loss of Black life perpetuated by the transatlantic slave trade but the constant negotiation Black identity must make in a place of underinvestment.

Photo of a gallery space with a large square textile on a white wall. Multipastel-color bent plywood chairs sit on a low platform to the right. In the background are two video monitors and five rectangular models of interior living spaces.

A view of Immeasurability: The Ridge in the newly installed gallery


The inclusion of Immeasurability: The Ridge in the Art Institute of Chicago’s permanent collection galleries, along with other items by Black designers like the View-Master by Charles Harrison and the redesigned 7UP logo by Thomas Miller, highlights the significant role Black design played in shaping American culture. Admassu and Wood’s depiction of the planetary scar that separates the African continent from America is an allegory that helps visitors think through the gap between the negative role architecture and design has had on African Americans and the positive impact Black imagination has on the built environment—and I find that really profound.

An Installation to Show Use, Safely

Kristen Gillette, Assistant Objects Conservator, Conservation and Science

Many of the furniture pieces in the architecture and design collection have lived several lives, including in homes where age and use has altered the appearance and stability of materials. Curators and conservators must take this into account as they collaboratively strike a balance between the care of artworks and the most compelling presentation for museum visitors.  

The wardrobe shown above is by Austrian-born designer Henry Glass, who began his career in the United States working with New York designers Russel Wright and Gilbert Rohde before moving to Chicago in 1942. An excellent example from his award-winning Swingline furniture group, designed for children, the wardrobe is reminiscent of a toy, with vertical rods acting as fulcrums for the brightly colored drawers and doors to swing open and closed.

Photo of a gallery space with a multicolored cabinet sitting on a low platform. In the background are two plus objects hung on a white wall. On the wall to the right is a large rectangular piece of fabric with a modern design of black lines and dots of yellow, red, and brown.

Glass’s wardrobe in the new installation


Glass’s innovative design prompted several discussions between conservators and curators about whether the work should be displayed open or closed. Repeated “swinging” of the doors and drawers would cause scraping and paint loss where sections rub against one another. The solution: discreetly securing almost invisible cord around the handles to prevent opening if pulled. Additional minor toning of paint losses allows viewers to appreciate the design with minimal distraction and to imagine the life of the object in use.

Check out these works and the entire installation in Gallery 285, on the second floor of the Modern Wing.

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