Reclaiming Junkspace at the 2025 Chicago Architecture Biennial

How global voices and radical ideas are reshaping a vacant Michigan Avenue storefront into a global hub for architectural discourse

Invisible Flood by Estudio Planta at the Chicago Architecture Biennial’s exhibition at 840 N. Michigan Avenue. Video: Leah Ray

Chicago’s Michigan Avenue has long been a mirror of contemporary America—reflecting our economy, our society, and now, our unease. When the H&M at 840 N. Michigan Avenue shuttered in the wake of COVID-19 and George Floyd’s murder, it joined a litany of glittering but vacant storefronts along the Magnificent Mile. For decades, these façades embodied prosperity and growth. Since 2022, they have laid bare a national crisis and the fragility of systems once thought unshakable.

This fall, the Chicago Architecture Biennial has reclaimed that emptiness. Within 65,000 square feet of a former H&M, the Biennial has opened one of five exhibition sites for SHIFT: Architecture in Times of Radical Change. Inside, architects, artists, and designers from around the world gather beneath fluorescent lights once meant to sell fast fashion. The mannequins are gone. In their place: bamboo pavilions from São Paulo, earthen walls from Dakar, and modular airborne dwellings imagined for a flooded Buenos Aires.

It is, in the truest sense, an occupation of the ordinary.

Approaching on the street confronted with “for lease” and “space available” banners emblazoned across glass facades, it’s impossible not to think of Rem Koolhaas’s 2001 essay Junkspace, his critique of the sprawling, air-conditioned environments produced by consumerism and globalization. Junkspace, Koolhaas wrote, is what accumulates “while modernization is underway:’ an endless landscape of malls, airports, and office parks designed for transaction rather than connection, their comfort masking their emptiness.

Yet here we were, inside Junkspace itself, turning it inside out.

Led by Artistic Director Florencia Rodriguez, SHIFT invites us to look not only at what we build but also at what we’ve built over—the habits, hierarchies, and blind spots that made Junkspace inevitable.

Design for the Speakers’ Corner by Christopher Hawthorne, Johnston Marklee, and Florencia Rodriguez. Photo by Leah Ray.

The Biennial’s accompanying symposium, Ecologies, extends that provocation. Held in the same building, the half-day program explores architecture’s role within intertwined natural, cultural, and technological systems—human and non-human alike. Its opening session, “Urban Ecologies,” moderated by Antonio Torres of Bittertang Farm (Bainbridge Island and Chicago), brought together Erin Besler of Besler & Sons (Hopewell, New Jersey); Doelia Montiego of Estudio Flume (São Paulo, Brazil); Anna Leah of Estudio Planta (Buenos Aires, Argentina); and Nicolas Rondet of Worofila (Dakar, Senegal)—each working in contexts where architecture is inseparable from ecology, community, and survival.

Torres opened by framing architecture as a living system rather than a static discipline. “Our work is less about structures and more about cultivated relationships,” he said of Bittertang Farm, which operates as both studio and “farm” for ideas—growing, decaying, and regenerating across human and non-human scales.

Each panelist extended that idea of cultivation in distinct ways.

From Dakar, Nicolas Rondet described Worofila’s experiments with soil-based materials, local fibers, and low-tech construction methods that prioritize dignity, affordability, and the creation of local jobs. His work shows that architecture’s future may lie not in imported technologies, but in rediscovering what already exists within reach.

From São Paulo, Doelia Montiego of Estudio Flume spoke about designing with scarcity—seeing what’s already present in the environment as an opportunity. Her studio’s bamboo-built “bone refuge” and community kitchens on Brazil’s coast are acts of collective resilience: roofs raised first, like great umbrellas, so that building and gathering can continue through the rainy season.

From Buenos Aires, Anna Leah of Estudio Planta explained that her three-generation, women-led studio treats architecture as a form of coexistence rather than control. “We still have that craftsmanship and artisan way of doing things,” she said, describing her team’s experiments with bamboo, cardboard, and other materials that defy the global market’s preference for permanence. Estudio Planta’s installation, Invisible Flood, envisions a future Buenos Aires where rising seas and heat make the ground floor uninhabitable. In this imagined 2075, people build upward—lightweight, modular dwellings suspended in the air, stitched together through informal neighbor-to-neighbor agreements.

The vision relies upon an adaptive social contract built on trust and shared resourcefulness. Estudio Planta’s work shows that the architecture of tomorrow might not be monumental at all, but provisional, breathable, and alive to change.

Shared Resource by Besler & Sons at the Chicago Architecture Biennale’s exhibition at 840 N. Michigan Avenue. Photo: Leah Ray

From New Jersey, Erin Besler of Besler & Sons’ contribution, Shared Resource, extends that idea of shared authorship into physical form. The temporary timber-frame installation invites public participation through reconfiguration workshops and an interactive app. The structure explores how architecture can move, shift, and evolve. Inspired by rural building traditions rooted in cooperation, Shared Resource values redistribution over accumulation. Visitors are invited to shape, dismantle, and reimagine architecture not as a finished product, but as an open system of exchange.

Where Junkspace accumulates waste and inertia, Shared Resource disperses power. It transforms building into a gesture of renewal in a time when so much feels abandoned.

Five years ago, this exhibition might have read as dystopian. Today in Chicago, as masked federal agents patrol residential neighborhoods, tear-gas Halloween parades, and raid preschools, it no longer seems so far-fetched. The notion of home—safe, stable, private—has become fragile. Against that backdrop, the Biennial’s transformation of a defunct retail store into a shared civic laboratory feels urgent, even defiant.

Koolhaas called Junkspace “overripe and under-nourishing at the same time.” The work here offers nourishment in precisely that void, revealing architecture’s capacity to nurture and help us see one another again. The designers who spoke at Urban Ecologies posit that the future will be reclaimed, adapted, and cultivated one vacant space, one reimagined ecology, one act of care at a time.