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

Chicago’s Architecture Biennial, kicking off October 3, will showcase a broad range of work. Artist Bryony Roberts will enlist a drill team to perform at Mies van der Rohe’s Federal Center. With more than 100 projects from every inhabitable continent descending on Chicago for the city’s first architecture biennial, the work on display might seem to be grounded in a placeless globalist ether rather than the dozen represented countries. At least nine of the participating practices are located in two or more places at once, with one partner splitting time in two locations, or two partners based thousands of miles

A view of Chicago's 606 park, set to open Saturday. Chicago’s 606, the nation’s second elevated rails-to-trails park, will open June 6, and its designers and client have taken pains to ensure that it’s a unique expression of the Second City, not just to be compared to New York’s High Line. In form, function, and funding, the 606’s evolution has taken a different path. “The High Line is a bridge with a garden on it,” said Matthew Urbanski, of Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, the project’s lead designers. “This is a landscape.”Located on the former route of the derelict Bloomingdale industrial

Although Chicago-based Krueck + Sexton is well known for projects like Millennium Park’s Crown Fountain or the Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies on Michigan Avenue, the 18-year-old architecture firm is designing its first speculative office project just now. Image courtesy Krueck + Sexton Developer Tishman Speyer commissioned Krueck + Sexton to design two 12-story, glass-clad office buildings in Washington, D.C. Related Links: Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies Developer Tishman Speyer commissioned Krueck + Sexton to design two 12-story, glass-clad office buildings in Washington, D.C.’s emerging North of Massachusetts Avenue neighborhood, or NoMa. Currently one tower is under construction and will

Alvaro Siza, the quietly respected Portuguese architect, is the recipient of the 2009 Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) Gold Medal. The award honors a body of work amassed over a lifetime that has had an international influence. Siza will receive the award at a ceremony at RIBA’s Florence Hall in February. Photo courtesy RIBA The Royal Institute of British Architects announced on October 7 that Alvaro Siza is the recipient of the 2009 Gold Medal. “He’s a very complete and profoundly thoughtful architect, and it’s high time he got the RIBA Gold Medal,” says RIBA President Sunand Prasad. “There’s