2G1/3G4 - ARCH 552 - FALL 2025
FUTURES
Building on the Institutions-wide program of MARKETS, the FUTURES studio explored carbon markets and their (questionable) role in incentivizing emissions reductions. Students designed a "Climate Exchange" for a site in downtown Chicago.
Commodity exchanges and stock markets played a central role in the urbanization of the Great Lakes region. Evolving from waterfronts, street corners and borrowed rooms, where buyers and sellers of agricultural products came together to make deals, the 1885 Chicago Board of Trade building and the 1894 Chicago Stock Exchange established new urban institutions to consolidate this activity within the city and at a distance from the actual spaces of production.
After these precedents, the studio approached the Climate Exchange as a hybridization of workspace, a market, and a space of assembly. Students had to identify who and what makes up their carbon market and how that informed their architectural strategy. Given the pedagogical aims of this core studio, the emphasis was on the articulation of program via building design. Students could incorporate ideas about energy, materials or building life cycles, though the studio did not emphasize low-carbon construction in the technical sense. Rather, the FUTURES studio worked on the cultural and social role of architecture within the climate crisis–can we speculate on new forms of Institutions that reflect a collective care for carbon management?