What Chicago Architects Are Building Next

On April 16, MAS Context's Now Arriving series brought three emerging architecture offices to the table: Orders Architecture & Design (Jordan Hicks), Range Design & Architecture (Casimir Kujawa and Mason Pritchett), and Tom Lee Studio (Tom Lee), to talk about projects they've just finished and what's coming next. The format is simple: two projects, one complete, one in progress. But what emerged was something more nuanced than a project showcase. It was a portrait of how the next generation of Chicago architects thinks about the city, and about how we will live in it tomorrow.

Here's what struck us.

Renovation as reinvention.

All three offices are working within the city's existing fabric. Jordan Hicks's first completed project with Orders is his own home in Belmont Gardens, a 1928 bungalow he and his partner renovated through a series of deliberate, surgical moves: skylights punched through an unfinished attic, a recovered semicircular arch that had been walled over for decades, seven pieces of custom furniture. He calls them "portals," moments where a small intervention changes how a space feels from anywhere in the house.

Range has been working with the same client for years, across four contiguous lots in a single Chicago neighborhood. Their current project — a bar, restaurant, and courtyard space — has been revised, value-engineered, and rethought multiple times since 2020. Time, economics, and client needs have combined to reach a final version that Casimir and Mason are excited to bring to life.

Narrative is doing a lot of work right now.

Tom Lee opened by saying his studio gravitates toward narrative-driven projects, then demonstrated exactly what that means with two projects that couldn't be more different. One is a production facility for a millwork company in Woodridge, organized around a single idea: what does it look like when you reveal the layers of a material rather than conceal them? Precast panels, plywood veneers, steel — all shown at their edges, their joints, their actual thickness. The building focuses squarely on honesty in construction. The second project, located just five minutes away, is a Buddhist temple. How an emerging firm managed to land an industrial facility and Buddhist temple in a Chicago suburb is apparently a story for another day, but we were intrigued. Lee’s design for the temple follows the landscape, works with an existing barn on site, and gives form to the ritual of procession, thinking carefully about how worshipers will approach, ascend, and arrive.

Both buildings present a clear thesis. That's increasingly rare.

The city's vernacular inspires.

Jordan's house renovation draws on the Chicago Imagists — painters like Philip Hanson whose work layers color, pattern, and spatial depth in ways that feel both local and strange. The kitchen trim literally drips over the backsplash. The dining table legs angle at 60 degrees so no one has to straddle them at dinner. These are small decisions made by someone who has thought carefully about what it actually means to live in a Chicago house in 2026, not what it means to renovate one.

Range's structural material of choice for their upcoming project is structural brick — dimensionally similar to CMU, core-filled, reinforced, and behaving like Chicago common brick on the exterior. It's practical, local, and load-bearing in every sense.

Small practices are asking the biggest questions.

All three firms are smaller, emerging practices noted for their thoughtful, critical takes on Chicago vernacular. Orders began two years ago. Tom Lee Studio just turned three; Range is four. Yet the scope of what they're thinking about — acoustics, landscape integration, the ethics of material honesty, what it means for an industrial facility to be a good neighbor — is not small at all.

What MAS Context's Now Arriving series keeps surfacing, year after year, is that the future of Chicago's built environment is being shaped incrementally, by people who know the city well and care about it deeply. Together, creatively. Portal by portal.

The Raygency covers architecture and design in Chicago and beyond. If you're doing work worth talking about, we'd like to know.