ARCH 432 - FALL 2025
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.