Tracing / Traces: Architecture and the Archive

MAS Context is organizing the fourth edition with the current format of our Tracing / Traces event when readers will have the chance to get a behind-the-scenes look at selected items from the Ryerson & Burnham Archives located at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Five Chicago-based architects and designers will select items of the collection and discuss them in relationship to their practice, the discipline, and/or society. Nathaniel Parks, Director of the Ryerson and Burnham Archives, will provide some background on the same items.

Due to the current COVID-19 pandemic, this year this program will take place online.

This year’s participants include:  

Monica Chadha – Civic Projects
Peter Exley – Architecture Is Fun
Andres L Hernandez – Artist / Designer / Educator
Jayne Kelley – Editor / Writer
Francesco Marullo – Architect / Educator

The Ryerson & Burnham Archives’ collections are notably strong in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century American architecture, with particular depth in midwestern architecture. Architects such as Edward Bennett, Daniel Burnham, Bruce Goff, Bertrand Goldberg, Ludwig Hilberseimer, Mies van der Rohe, Louis Sullivan, and Frank Lloyd Wright are represented in a broad range of papers. Major architectural events, such as the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago, The Century of Progress International Exposition of 1933–1934 in Chicago, and the World’s Fair of 1939 in New York, are also represented in an individual archive.