For its first home, the National Public Housing Museum in Chicago fittingly chose a local public housing architect—not a globetrotting museum designer. After funding is secured, Landon Bone Baker Architects (LBBA) will adaptively reuse the last standing Jane Addams Home—one of the first public housing projects built in the city, named after a Progressive-era reformer—for the fledgling institution. It’s a unique-meta exercise for LBBA, which has excelled at designing community-oriented dwellings in a city with a tortured housing legacy. 

A museum dedicated to a stigmatized building type isn’t an intuitive choice, but LBBA’s Peter Landon says a closer look reveals a dense nexus of cultural, social, and economic history. From New Deal-era optimism, to decades of segregation and neglect, to endemic privatization and demolition, the development of public housing in many ways mirrors the evolution of 20th century American urbanism itself. “The American history that can be told through public housing needs a museum to gather all of it,” says Landon.

An exhibit now on view at the Addams building as part of the Chicago Architecture Biennial takes an equally broad look at housing, public and private. Organized by Columbia University’s Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture, House Housing: An Untimely History of Architecture and Real Estate assembles 23 historical anecdotes on private and government-assisted dwelling to ask why we feel so differently about each; to put the positive connotations of private “house” next to the ignominy of public “housing.”