Based in the South Side of Chicago, Theaster Gates is an artist, professor, social innovator, and founder of Rebuild Foundation, which reimagines the potential of vacancy and abandonment through the power of arts, culture, and creative empowerment by building a constellation of spaces that unearth the value and beauty in Black space.

Trained as a potter, sculptor, and urban planner, in 2010, Gates founded the Rebuild Foundation as a non-profit platform for artistic intervention, cultural development, and social transformation in Chicago’s Greater Grand Crossing neighborhood. Rebuild’s work focuses on predominantly Black and Brown neighborhoods on the South Side of Chicago that have suffered decades of disinvestment. Its mission is to demonstrate the impact of innovative, ambitious, and entrepreneurial arts initiatives. The Foundation leverages the potential of communities, buildings, and objects that have been discarded. Art and culture are used to strengthen community, and the work is informed by three principles: Black people matter, Black spaces matter, and Black things matter.

Rebuild’s most celebrated project is the Stony Island Arts Bank, a former loan and savings bank – and symbol of Black wealth – that sat abandoned for years. Gates purchased the bank from the City of Chicago for one dollar and through a combination of fundraising and the sale of “bank bonds,” raised funds to transform the building into a site of creative exploration, cultural preservation, and artistic engagement. Re-opened in 2015, the Bank is now a gallery, media archive, library, and gathering space. 

In 2016, Samaria Rice, the mother of 12-year-old Tamir Rice who was shot and killed by a Cleveland Police Officer, asked Rebuild to create a temporary home for the deconstructed gazebo near where Tamir was murdered. In 2019, Ms. Rice joined Gates and the Rebuild team to erect the gazebo in its full form on the Stony Island Arts Bank lawn. The Tamir Rice Memorial Gazebo now stands on the South Side as a reminder, a monument, and a call to action for systemic justice.

The Foundation also operates a Kenwood Gardens, a public garden that was transformed from thirteen contiguous vacant city lots. The gardens hold a retreat at Currency Exchange Café, a currency exchange turned not-for-profit café and incubator for culinary and hospitality artists of color; Dorchester Art + Housing Collaborative, affordable art and housing collaborative with space for public arts programming; and a community hub for creative entrepreneurship at a former elementary school. 

Studio TAMassociati is a nonprofit architecture firm that specializes in designing healthcare facilities in war-torn areas, highlighting the connection between the built environment and the basic needs of life.

TAM champions human rights-based design in partnership with Emergency, an Italian NGO that provides medical treatment to victims of war. The decade-long collaboration of the two organizations has resulted in a replicable model for free, high-quality healthcare and educational facilities in Sudan, Sierra Leone, the Central African Republic, Iraq, and Afghanistan. 

The first TAM/Emergency collaboration was on the Salam Centre, a cardiac care hospital at the periphery of Khartoum, Sudan. It is the only hospital in the region providing highly specialized care to patients affected by heart diseases free of charge. Almost a decade of research gave the team a solid understanding of the unique needs of the patients as well as environmental and political factors that had to be taken into consideration.  The result is a system of buildings and related spaces; hospital blocks patterned around a large courtyard, an admissions area, technical and service areas, a guest house for relatives of patients, a prayer/meditation pavilion, and a housing compound for international medical staff.

Together, TAM and Emergency have built five hospitals on the African continent that have treated more than 700,000 patients. In addition, as an extension of their efforts to treat civilians affected by war, they have collaborated on seven clinics in Italy—four of which are mobile units—to provide healthcare to refugees. Emergency and TAM work to create clinics that meet, if not exceed, Western standards while respecting local traditions.

Other projects of Studio TAM include the Anabah Maternity Centre in the Panjshir Valley of Afghanistan, the only specialist and completely free facility in a very large area which is inhabited by at least 250,000 people; health centers in the Kurdistan area of northern Iraq to offer high-quality and free of charge basic healthcare in Refugee Camps and Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) Camps; and the new Children’s Surgical Hospital in Entebbe, Uganda with design by Renzo Piano Building Workshop & TAMassociati together with Emergency’s Building Division. 

To learn about one of TAMassociati’s newest, non-healthcare-related projects– an eco-village in Senegal, click on the link to the left for a DOMUS video interview.

Suzanne Lacy is an American artist and activist who uses her work to tackle themes of gender violence, segregation, and other issues related to social justice. Her work combines “social practice art,” intended to involve communities in discussion or debate, and “new genre public art,” which is her term for public art that is created outside institutional structures to engage directly with an audience.

A former student of the iconic feminist artist, Judy Chicago, Suzanne Lacy first drew international attention with “Three Weeks in May,” an extended performance piece exhibited in May 1977 and later reenacted in 2013.  For the piece, she placed a large map of LA in the public shopping mall near City Hall. Every day for three weeks, she went to the police department’s central office to obtain the rape reports from the previous day and stamped them on the map. Additionally, she and a group of collaborators produced thirty events around LA, all relating to the theme of rape, garnering significant television and print media coverage for a topic normally considered taboo. 

This integrated, publicly confrontational approach is a recurring theme in Lacy’s work, drawing focus onto previously marginalized issues. In addition to rape, she has also tackled sexual violence, racism, aging, and class inequalities. Several of her projects, including Whisper, the Waves, the Wind, and its sequel, The Crystal Quilt, feature dramatic public performances involving hundreds of older women, focusing on the roles, needs, and inequities of gender and aging. More recent work in the United Kingdom has focused on bringing together Muslim and Christian communities in an abandoned mill to create a performance, resulting in a multiscreen video installation. 

Lacy’s work has been displayed at multiple major institutions. In 2019, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts held her first major retrospective. In addition to her work as an artist, Lacy has also inspired generations through her writing and her educational positions including serving as the Dean of Fine Arts at California College of the Arts from 1987 to 1997, and previously as the Arts Commissioner of Oakland, CA. She currently teaches at the University of Southern California, Roski School of Art and Design. 

Listen to the episode below.

Rotterdam based Superuse Studios has been at the leading edge of ecological thought and sustainability for several decades. Their work pioneers ideas around moving beyond the "green economy" to a new "blue" economy, where commercial enterprise is organized according to ecological principles and the waste stream of one business becomes the source of raw materials for another. By creating these ecological chains of activity, Superuse encourages a new way of thinking about business, urbanity and ecology.

Superuse focuses on waste with no obvious secondary purpose or easy means of recycling. One of their most visible projects involved windmill blades—objects so large and heavy that they defied efficient recycling. Superuse was able to repurpose them as playground equipment and public benches.

Their first commercial project was a shoe store built from almost 100% surplus materials. The shoe fitting benches are made of surplus wood with a conveyor belt from a supermarket counter centrally in between. Shoes are displayed on former Audi100 windscreens.

The firm’s design process works to rethink the functionality of a thing, and to understand how it could perform a new function once it has served its initial purpose. Superuse has distilled this process into 16 different ‘flows’ that enter and exit buildings and cities. Each project begins by mapping these flows and then examining where the flows interconnect. The ideal design solution is one where the flows intersect, overlap and take advantage of one another, leading to a wholly integrated design product.

Superuse doesn’t restrict themselves to discarded building materials; they take into account all the resources and waste streams of the city. Surplus food, energy, water and traffic are all grounds to rethink and redesign.

We were lucky to spend some time with Jan Jongert on our podcast, Social Design Insights, where he gave us a window into the incredible “blue” economy of the future. Listen to the episode below.

Understanding the work of Bucharest, Romania’s studioBASAR’s requires an understanding of Romania’s history. Prior to the fall of communism in 1989, Romania was ruled by a brutal dictatorship. As harsh as things were, a certain amount of security was assumed. As with many communist regimes, everyone was assured a place to live and a job, at least on paper. With the fall of communism, an aggressive wave of privatization occurred and the country’s assets, which had all been considered public, were returned to private hands. This brought on dual waves of unemployment and eviction.

Thirty years later, many Romanians still face questions of security, and even survival. According to Amnesty International, “What we see in 21st century Romania is the deliberate expulsion from the society of vulnerable people who live below or on the poverty line and suffer from inadequate housing conditions. The current housing legislation in Romania falls far short of the international standards adopted by the Romanian government. In particular, it fails to ensure the right to adequate housing for all its citizens and to prohibit forced eviction.”

StudioBASAR was founded in 2006 by Alex Axinte and Cristi Borcan. It is an architectural office, and also a self-described “­search ­and rescue­” team which works at both urban observation and intervention. The “search” dimension works across Bucharest, looking for overlooked urban conditions that people had come to tolerate. That leads to the ‘rescue’ part of their practice, which can encompass a variety of architectural interventions, including ­developing single-family­ homes, exhibitions, and even a street installation of a pop-up pool made from stacked wooden pallets wrapped in foliage and filled with water.

The studio’s early book “Evicting the Ghost – Architectures of Survival,” looks at the legacy of nationalization, retrocession and eviction in recent Romanian history. The study explores the history of evictions and the varying status of private property over the last 150 years. These conditions have created the varying ‘architectures of survival.’

In many Western countries, the battle for public space is a battle between commercialization, commodification and democracy. However, in many post-Soviet­ bloc countries, the struggle is entirely different. It is a reconciliation between the legacy of brutal authoritarianism and the new forces of the market. StudioBASAR works at multiple scales to confront these challenges.

STEALTH.unlimited is an architectural practice based in Rotterdam and Belgrade that challenges conventional notions about the limits of architectural practice. While the co-founders Ana Džokić and Marc Neelen were trained as architects, their work is equally based around contemporary art and culture. Intensively collaborative, STEALTH connects visual arts, urban research, cultural activism and special interventions. They have a particular focus on ‘common’ spaces; those shared by both the private and the public.

The group has developed interactive installations in Rotterdam, public art in Sweden, and a cultural development node in Medellin. They have collaborated extensively with cultural and educational partners, including the Netherlands Institute of Architecture and the University of Sheffield.

While many of their earlier projects were more piecemeal and experimental, the group has more recently embarked on longer term projects in both Rotterdam and Belgrade.

In 2010, the group was one of the initiators of a long-term initiative in Belgrade called Ko Gradi Grad (Who Builds the City). They began with a community-based process to attempt to include the voices that had been excluded by rampant, profit-driven development. Similarly, in 2014 they co-initiated ‘City in the Making’ in Rotterdam – a project that takes abandoned buildings and attempts to convert them to productive use.

Their process is straightforward: they take buildings off the market, convert them to affordable housing or workspace, designate the common areas free of rent, and democratically organize the administration of the building. Their projects are always self-organized and self-authorized.

The group has been lauded internationally for their progressive and diverse portfolio.

Stalker Lab is an experimental collective of architects and researchers. Founded in Rome by a group of university students, artists, scientists, and planners, all later joined. Now, it operates as a laboratory for urban art and spatial exploration. Their international exhibitions and conferences look at different ways to transform space.

The group takes its name from the deranged anti-hero of Andrei Tarkowski’s 1979 film “Stalker” and was founded in 1990 by a group of architecture students during an occupation of Rome University. Created as a response to the growing number of areas within Rome being neglected as a result of urbanization, privatization and capital-driven development, Stalker shies away from descriptions of themselves as “architectural,” as its members and collaborators have included artists, art historians, theoreticians, an astrophysicist, a geologist and a dentist.

The group has also focused its work on the plight of refugees and other migrants. In 1999, they began the occupation and transformation of Piazza Boario, formerly a slaughterhouse complex, into Campo Boario, their eventual headquarters. Campo Boario has been the site of innumerable projects, installations and workshops.

The site sits beside the Tiber River in Rome, an area that was steadily becoming a dumping ground. Stalker shares the space with transient Kurdish immigrants, who had been squatting there prior to Stalker’s arrival. Together they have subjected the complex to significant rehabilitation and it now serves as the largest Kurdish cultural institution in Rome, becoming a defined waypoint for all Kurdish refugees traveling through Europe.

Stalker is also well-known for their architectural walks and night-walks of Rome. These ‘walks’ are in fact explorations, and deliberate attempts to reconnect a city with its people. For any urban dweller, we become familiar with the parts of a city that are ‘our’ parts – where we live, where we work, where we play. The other parts cease to exist in our daily experience, but nonetheless affect the health of the city as a whole and our common futures. Stalker’s walks, therefore, aim to reconnect people with the areas, sights, sounds and experiences of the city which they had perhaps forgotten, or never knew existed.

We had a chance to unpack these theories with Lorenzo Romito on our podcast, Social Design Insights. Listen to the episode below.

Semillas para el Desarrollo Sostenible (“Seeds for Sustainable Development”) is a Peruvian NGO providing service to public and private entities in the design of educational, residential, and exhibition spaces, community centers, and spaces of public, cultural and heritage interest.

Founded by Marta Maccaglia in 2014, the organization is made up of an interdisciplinary team of national and international professional architects, specialists in cooperation projects, builders, artisans, and young professionals. Semillas is involved in people-centered processes through participatory methods, guiding self-sustainable management mechanisms, which are, in their opinion, the only way to empower the actors involved and one of the principal means to have political incidence. The goal is to change the paradigm of architecture and promote processes that aim to transform cities towards into just societies. 

From 2019-2021, Semillas worked on a nursery school in Alto Anapati, Peru. The development process was carried out through participatory workshops, which led to the idea of the school as the heart of the community, a place for the preservation of Nomatsigenga knowledge and territory. The building itself is located in an accessible area to the community and is organized into two blocks. On the southwest side is located the block containing the multipurpose room, the administrative area, the kitchen and the toilets. The multipurpose room, a classroom without walls, is directly connected to the “Aula bosque” (forest classroom) – a space designed as an outdoor classroom. All the enclosures are designed as dissolving boundaries that connect the interior with the exterior. Most of the materials used in the project are locally sourced, keeping local production alive and in line with the sustainability and maintenance capabilities of the community.

Semillas has built a number of other schools and education spaces in recent times, including a primary and secondary school in La Jalquilla, and a technological and environmental laboratory in Mencoriari.

For the past 30 years, SPARC has worked to organize, legitimize and advocate for India’s urban poor, seeking to achieve the improvement of living conditions and advancements in the recognition of their rights as citizens.

SPARC’s activities are based on the principle that the urban poor can and must become the makers of their own destiny and can play this role if given appropriate structural support. The strength of this organization comes through their alliance with the National Slum Dwellers Federation (NSDF) and Mahila Milan (Women Together), a collective of women living in slums. The alliance works within provisional communities to address housing and sanitation challenges, move individuals towards financial independence, and help them gain visibility and access to public services.

Insecure land tenure, inadequate housing and a lack of access to basic amenities for the urban poor are some of the core issues facing today’s rapidly urbanizing world. According to UN-Habitat, approximately 25 percent of the world’s urban population lives in slums. In parts of India, the situation is much more dire. The World Bank estimates that more than half of Mumbai’s inhabitants are pavement dwellers or live in provisional housing with inadequate sanitation, light, or water.

“Governments have allowed the proliferation of informal settlements by simply not caring for them,” says SPARC founding director Sheela Patel. “This is not going to change unless people who are from those groups start making demands and changing their relationship to the city.”

SPARC was founded in 1984 by a group of social activists fighting against the indiscriminate evictions of slum and pavement dwellers from their communities. The group expanded rapidly using their emerging relationship with NSDF and Mahila Milan to create an innovative federation model, named the Indian Alliance. Together, the Alliance organized the first comprehensive census of pavement dwellers, developed a credit system for their use while fighting for a more dignified habitat.

Today, through its alliance with NSDF and Mahila Milan, SPARC is active in more than 70 cities across India as a change agent with solutions that can be scaled for other groups domestically and internationally. In addition to policy advocacy, SPARC has facilitated the construction of housing for more than 8,500 families and built community toilets for more than 500,000 toilet seats in slums that have no facilities. Their nonprofit construction company—SPARC Samudaya Nirman Sahayak (SSNS) now jointly owned by the partners of the Alliance—has built 3,879 in-situ houses, rehabbed 3,900 units, built 878 community toilets, granted 1,324 loans to homeowners.

Slow/d was an Italian organization seeking to disrupt traditional supply chains in design by connecting designers, consumers & artisans directly.

For many small-scale designers, connecting products to consumers is difficult. The process therefore becomes controlled by manufacturers, almost by default. Manufacturers mass-produce, market, and promote designs that work well. This separates the connection between artisan and consumer. Interesting, useful products may never reach any market at all.

Slow/d used a variety of means to disrupt this paradigm. They worked with artisans to design supply chains from scratch. They also organized training sessions, workshops, and ‘moments of confrontation’ between design professionals and the allied professions which eventually utilize design services. Fundamentally, they were trying to ‘de-corporatize’ design – returning the authorship of design back to the people who really matter: the designer and the user.

From the Slow/d manifesto: “the blinding need to generate profits has created a system of production and distribution based on the exploitation of the weak. The environmental impacts of the global logistics system are unsustainable. We have to produce what people need, when people need it and where people need it. This means supporting local economies, networks of small producers of high quality goods, once again gathering people and processes in support of the culture of know-how.”

Slow/d closed operations in December 2021.