The Singer Pavilion Project

The Singer Pavilion Project is a multimedia exploration of the last remaining building in Chicago with design collaboration by Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius. Of his midcentury expansion of the Michael Reese Hospital campus, only the Singer Pavilion (also known as the Psychiatric and Psychosomatic Institute) remains standing but is vacant and severely deteriorated. In its bid to host the 2016 Summer Olympics, the City of Chicago bought the defunct hospital and in 2009 began to demolish the structures to make way for the proposed Olympic Village. Despite the eventual failure of the city’s bid, and the efforts of an international consortium of scholars, preservationists and architects, the legacy buildings continued to be demolished. The seven lost Gropius buildings were the subject of an earlier project, The Common Citizenship of Forms.

Beginning in 2019, one of my key goals was to capture and preserve a three-dimensional recording of this endangered historic structure in its current condition of suspended disuse. Using a drone for aerial 3D scanning as the starting point, The Singer Pavilion project has been developed as sculpture, digital images, installation, site interventions and sound. Reflecting on the important place this building occupies in both historic and future efforts to revitalize this historic yet under-resourced Bronzeville neighborhood, this project engages with evolving notions about urban development, architectural preservation, and the legacy of Modernist social philosophy. This project further suggests that architecture is a discipline of continuous proposal; it is the modelling of ideals rather than objects, and their success or failure is due not to engineers but to policymakers, institutions, and the public.

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