Fall 2025 - University of Illinois Chicago
2025–26 Douglas A. Garofalo Fellow
August 20, 2025 9:12am
Two Paths
The aim of this studio is to monofixate on the Farnsworth House, its site as a legal boundary, its site as a hydrological territory, its structure as a 501c(3) non-profit, its registration as a national historic landmark, its situation in a local and international economy. The complexity of the site is typical. There are overlapping and paradoxical structures and requirements that make it both bureaucratic and a typical design brief. The primary difference for architects is that at its core this site is a piece of architecture that is both relevant and canonized. Its form has transcended into a tome, a meme, or an image torturing architects (see treacherous transparencies by Herzog and de Mueron).
In this studio we will redesig the site to be relevant: floods will increase, economies will change, bureaucracy and non-profit structures will falter. But first a new form of masterplanning needs to happen, one that understands how things fail as well as how things grow. Amateurplanning or failplanning might be more appropriate. But something like resilienceplanning is wrong(a bigger wall preserves too kindly.) Techniques like Managed Retreat might be more interesting and something that the Edith Farnsworth House has examined. But there is a theoretical basis for all of this, Crisis Formalism, which situates itself within the flows of crisis, adopting crisis’ fluid and illegible structures.
We take two paths, the first is to fearlessly masterplan the site by adopting optimism and pessimism without hierarchy. The second path is to develop architecture that recognizes this new site, a out of it flows a piece of architecture suitable for this moment.
Syllabus
Reading 01 Crisis Formalism, Michael Abel and Nile Greenberg
Reading 02 Unfolding Structure, Detlef Mertins