Charcoal, Mushrooms, and More Become Building Parts for a South Chicago Artist Residency

Close to the Illinois–Indiana border, where Chicago’s steelyards once churned out the materials that built modern America, now sits a bustling 14-acre urban farm. Nestled in the South Chicago neighborhood within Clara D. Schafer Park, the site is one of eight farms operated by Urban Growers Collective (UGC). The organization has produced more than 19,000 pounds of fresh produce this year to serve residents living under food apartheid, a term used to describe systemic, segregation access to nutritious sustenance. 

The farm network was founded by Erika Allen, an artist whose practice addresses oppression and structural racism in food systems and agriculture. Over the past 22 years Allen has established these farms to grow food, train young people in sustainable and Indigenous farming practices, and more. She calls this artistic medium—working with the earth and plantlife—"fifth-dimensional expression." As a participant in the 2023 Chicago Architecture Biennial (CAB), Allen has opened her South Chicago farm site to an architectural collaboration. Working with David Benjamin, associate professor at the Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (GSAPP), Allen is building a new space to host artists-in-residence that uses sustainable, earth-based materials that could become a prototype for future community-based development. 

This year’s biennial theme, This is a Rehearsal, was conceived as a lens through which city residents might view the layering of histories, land uses, and occupations, each being a "rehearsal" for what might be built next. Allen, who was invited by CAB curators from Floating Museum to participate as an exhibitor, says the theme aligned with her work, which "challenges entrenched structural racism components that make it difficult for community to innovate.

"UGC’s mission is to integrate the healing arts into our work," she explains. "We’re able to be on the farm but needed a designated environment where we can step away from the labor of the farm and create together."

Floating Museum paired her with Benjamin, who runs GSAPP’s Footprint Project, a graduate course that trains students in researching and designing the "invisible" building footprints—carbon, water, biodiversity, and labor. The course "involves a new way of thinking about the impact of architecture and ultimately redesigning it," he says. His students collaborated with Allen to design a structure that would use materials that could be found or manufactured on the farm. The building would also need to be able to evolve based on the diverse needs of artists working across many mediums.  

"We talked about a shared idea that buildings are living organisms—dynamic systems, rather than static objects," says Benjamin. "They grow and change over time in response to people, the natural environment, materials, and technologies."

The residency space is a simple form with three components: A wooden frame, a sheltered platform, and a ramp system. The ramps ensure accessibility but also, says Allen, speak to Chicago’s vernacular residential wooden back porches. This simplified structure is designed to allow each artist to enclose the platform as needed and to configure the space based on their own practice; subsequent residents will build off what is left behind.

The UGC and GSAPP team decided to employ materials from the farm, including reclaimed branches from local trees, used for ramp balusters. The team is also manufacturing biochar bricks on site: Plant waste from the farm is burned in a low-tech, oxygenless barrel to create a zero-emissions charcoal that is then mixed with earthen clay to create a carbon-negative building material. Residents will use those bricks, plus mycelium-based panels that use waste from the UGC’s mushroom farming, to enclose or change the structure over time.

The building is "meant to be a collaboration with the natural systems and forces that are already working on the farm," Benjamin says.

Collaboration over time became a contentious issue as the building was still under construction when the biennial opened in early November. Floating Museum team member Faheem Majeed couched its incompleteness by describing biennials as "infrastructure for long-term investment." Christopher Hawthone, however, wrote for the New York Times, "When architecture is content to operate as all means and no ends—serving agendas but never setting them—it may be doing little more than rehearsing its own marginalization." 

Allen disagrees with this framing.

"It’s a status-quo supremacist perspective around what [biennials] should do," she says. "The fact that it was in nascent states was part of the commentary—the inability to understand the inequities of representation within architecture around who makes decisions, what is valuable, and the co-design collaboration with nature that you can’t really control in time. It’s one of the things that we're trying to dismantle, the structure that really excludes voices like mine and many other community members."

When the building is complete this spring, it won’t be "finished." Allen says she already has several inaugural artists to be announced soon, and they will bring their practices to the space and begin helping to fire the first biochar bricks. Like the site that hosts the residency—once a place of industry, then a park, now a farm that moves through fallow and fruitful seasons—the building will begin, end, and begin again.

Related reading:

How One Community-Minded Designer Is Tapping the Potential of Chicago’s Vacant Lots

This Year, the Chicago Architecture Biennial Is All about Inclusion

Top image: Courtesy Chicago Architecture Biennial