Thrilled to announce that “All Magnificent and Wild” will open at the MAS Context Reading Room (
@mascontext ) this Saturday, March 14, from 5–7 pm, and will remain on view until April 11, 2026.
If you’re in Chicago, please stop by—the opening reception is free and no RSVP is required.
“All Magnificent and Wild” is an ongoing typological research project on Chicago’s residential hotels that I have been developing at the UIC School of Architecture over the past years (
@uicsoa @uic_cada ). The project was recently showcased at the Hull House Museum (
@hullhousemuseum ) and featured in The Brooklin Rail (
@brooklynrail ).
Residential hotels are a hybrid architectural form that emerged in the late nineteenth century to house a transient workforce seeking employment and inexpensive lodging. They include settlement houses, SROs, flophouses, YMCAs and YWCAs, charitable institutions, religious missions, women’s clubs, workingmen’s palaces, and cage hotels—traces largely erased by decades of urban renewal and gentrification.
Alongside new speculative reconstruction drawings, photographs, and visual juxtapositions developed during a recent residency at MacDowell (
@macdowell1907 ), the exhibition also presents 32 historical case studies redrawn by my fantastic students at UIC.
Proceeding like a forensic investigation—from scarce records and fragmentary evidence toward plausible reconstruction—this research proposes a counter-history of these buildings to imagine alternative futures for affordable housing in Chicago.
Among these types, the single-room occupancy (SRO) hotel best crystallizes the nomadic character of the residential hotel in its most classical form, defined by Chicago code as a building in which at least 90% of the units are single-room occupancies.
Beyond landmarking or preserving what remains, “All Magnificent and Wild” argues for a contemporary counterpart to the SRO: a mid-size co-living architecture tuned to today’s transitional demographics.
Opening reception
March 14, 5–7 pm
MAS Context Reading Room
1564 North Damen Avenue, Suite 204
Chicago, Illinois
Image credit: Ewing Annex Hotel, Chicago, 2025.
©️ Francesco Marullo
@genericarchitecture 
