ARCH 432 - FALL 2025
UG3
UNDERGRADUATE STUDIO
ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN III
ARCH 432 - FALL 2025COORDINATOR
Thom MoranPROFESSORS
Nitzan Farfel, Mick Kennedy, Malcom McCollough, Thom Moran, Jonathan Rule, Claudia WiggerUG3 builds on the knowledge, expertise, comprehension, and skill sets acquired in previous undergraduate design studios – UG1 & UG2 – to develop a mid-scale, programmatically complex building (~25,000 sq.ft. of conditioned space). The studio requires students to contemplate human occupation and behavior, environmental analysis and stewardship, and building construction, with a complexity level surpassing what they've previously experienced.
The studio encourages students to think about their building designs not as isolated entities, but as members of an interconnected network (geographic, logistical, cultural), enmeshed in the particularities of site and place. Students will practice addressing the architectural and environmental design issues mentioned above in a systematic way by studying the problem (analysis), formulating and executing the strategy (process), and ideating and maturing the solution (synthesis). UG3 is loosely coordinated. While the program is shared across all sections, each individual studio instructor defines the conceptual framing, specific site, design process and representational outcomes.
The Community Rehearsal Center
(Misfit as Method)
Demolition produces fragments. Photogrammetry reconstitutes matter. Assemblies assert autonomy. Collision produces consequence. The Community Rehearsal Center binds fragments into civic form.
On the former site of Cabrini-Green in Chicago, prolonged demolition has reorganized the ground. What remains are photographs, infrastructural traces, partial grids—the material evidence of collective life. These remnants are not cited; they are reconstructed.
Archival images of the demolished towers are processed through photogrammetry and 3D scanning into spatial propositions. Registration errors, distortions, and gaps are thickened into assemblies—autonomous systems with structural demands. The archive becomes mass.
These assemblies are non-negotiable.
Within a 25,000 square foot Community Rehearsal Center—combining performance, archive, storage, and education—the fragments do not integrate. They interfere. Volumes bend. Circulation detours. Joints remain exposed. Thresholds thicken.
Misfit is not aesthetic effect; it is disciplinary rigor.
Fragments absorbed become ornament. Collision without consequence becomes image. In a site shaped by demolition, architecture must carry the weight of its residue.
STUDENT
Maddie Tay
PROFESSOR
Nitzan Farfel
Cabrini-Green once provided housing for thousands of Chicago’s low-income residents. Over the years, it became a symbol of public housing failure after years of disinvestment by the Chicago Housing Authority. As the high-rises fell into a state of disrepair, they were demolished and the lots were left empty. The proposed community center occupies one of these empty sites, surrounded by new developments and the remaining historic row houses. Positioned within this layered context, the center integrates old and new through form, materials, and programming. Repair is the ultimate definition of combining old and new—it’s a temportal layering. By prioritizing repair through programming, it honors the neighborhood’s history, rendering acts of making and mending visible as a form of cultural remambrance and resistance to erasure.
STUDENT
Paige Osterkamp
PROFESSOR
Nitzan Farfel
Choosing to design where the new homes meet the original rowhouses, my goal for this project was for the building to be a place of collision of the past, current, and future identity of the neighborhood. My design focuses around the design principle of 3+1; meaning three volumes joined by one volume colliding through those spaces. I call this form “the link”. The link serves as a converging point of the programs within the community center, providing peekaboos into spaces while concealing others. It’s a space of versatility from study spaces to windows into studios. We also incorporated photogrammetery models from archival photos of Cabrini to produce space-making assemblies. The exterior form of the building aims to shelter these programs and signify its protection over the neighborhood.
Aquamart
The studio explored design propositions for the rich community provision, production and consumption of food along Chicago waterfront engaging the tangle of thresholds between the public sreet and community space. Re-siting a food market hall to the waters’ edge(s), the studio projects explored these thresholds at a range of urban, community and personal scales.
The studio began with the design a small fleet of floating ‘food carts/boats’ and their associated docking points along the Chicago River. Design focused on the community and cultural sources of food and the ergonomics of small scale food. producton,marketing and consumption and the detail development of points of interface between water and land, stove and plate, food and hand.
The studio continued with the design of a home for the food fleet on a site along the Chicago River, part of the design a large Market Hall, Community Kitchens and a Small Food Business Incubation Center to support entrepreneurship between two thriving ethnic communities: the Mexican American Pilsen neighborhood and Chicago's "Chinatown".
Hybrid communities lead to hybrid foods to hybrid activities, prompting considertion of hybrid program, space, structure and materials.
Students were prompted to determine what aspects of spatial, structural, material and environmental permanence is appropriate as programmatic elements continue to shift, relocate, adapt, grow and change in response to the peculiar riverfront urbanism in a city which is anything but permanent.
STUDENT
Emily Xu
PROFESSOR
Mick Kennedy
The Echo Market is a multifunctional market hall and community center that seeks to compose parallel lanes of program operating independently within interlocked masses. This project also examines the bisecting and connecting effects of inbetween space, despite the partition of programs.
Situated between the two distinct cultural communities of the Mexican American Pilsen and the Chinese American Chinatown in Chicago, the Echo Market serves as an inbetween space itself: a venue for connection, communication, exchange, and echoing of both materials and cultural manifestations. The market aspires to redefine the urban and social landscape by functioning as a point of intersection.
STUDENT
Elliot Lavigne
PROFESSOR
Mick Kennedy
The area between Cermak Road, Grove Street, South Canal Street, and the Chicago River sits between Pilsen and Chinatown, but the site feels disconnected. Intersecting infrastructures have scarred the land, leaving it fragmented rather than continuous along Cermak. Movement is interrupted, so the site reads as broken pieces instead of one unified place. Only a few community focused nodes bring moments of activity, creating rare points of connection in an otherwise separated landscape.
Mid Mart studies the formal and programmatic characteristics of the track and the intersection between unorganized program and production as a way to create resiliency through a new market.
Gather
With all UG3 studios doing community centers in Chicago, this one created a neighborhood hub for a community of pratice in glassmaking, located on the city's north side in the much-admired Ravenswood Industrial Corridor. Architecturally this was an unusual project for UG3 because it worked with existing buildings. The program combined new facilities for learning and glasswork with reuse of a vaulted meeting hall, joined across a courtyard to be remade from a parking area. The site featured an assortment of unremarkable outbuildings behind the century old landmark, the Deagen Building. This allowed variations by individual projects in which pieces to reuse or remove, also whether to connect more to avenue or to alleyway, or in some cases between those. Thus in effect the overall subject matter of the studio was typological: what it means to inscribe small scale work into a light industrial vernacular.
The studio was named from practices both artisanal and communitarian. When a glass- blower pulls a blob of molten material onto their rod from the mouth of the furnace they call that “making a gather.” This studio designed a ventilated hot shop for making gathers, plus an open meeting hall in which so many neighborhood artisans and their admirers could gather— as community.
STUDENT
Taylor Horsfall
PROFESSOR
Malcolm McCullough
The project draws from the dense, adaptive fabric of Chicago’s industrial corridors, especially Ravenswood, to repurpose an existing hall and transform the Deagan Building’s service yard into a deliberate, enduring hotspot for its creative community. Respecting the site’s historic light-industrial architecture and present use, it expands a “community of practice” anchored by the Chicago Glass Collective and artisans ranging from glassworkers to chefs.
By activating underused outdoor spaces, and through operable screens, semi-canopies, and knee walls, the design studies the haptics of urbanism to shape human-scale interactions, guiding circulation and negotiating intense hot-glass work with spaces for learning and exchange.
STUDENT
Evita Christou
PROFESSOR
Malcolm McCullough
Located in Chicago's Ravenswood neighborhood, this community center for glass artisans leverages the area's historic vernacular through adaptive reuse. The design features a distinctive sawtooth roof and sets of perpendicular spines, creating a community of practice where building functions can evolve over time.
Strategic geometric shifts and intentional lines of sight bridge the gap between private creation and public education. Notably, colored tempered glass columns form screens before the hot and cold shops. These screens manipulate light through refraction while challenging perceptions of glass's fragility.This project aims to foster an interactive environment for visitors to learn, teach, and appreciate the craft.