All Magnificent and Wild: Notes on Chicago Residential Hotels

All Magnificent and Wild: Notes on Chicago Residential Hotels is an exhibition curated by architect and theorist Francesco Marullo exploring Chicago’s residential hotels. The exhibition will be on view at the MAS Context Reading Room (1564 North Damen Avenue, Suite 204, Chicago, Illinois 60622).

Saturday, March 14, 2025, 5–7PM
Opening reception. Free and no need to RSVP.

All Magnificent and Wild is an ongoing typological research project on Chicago’s residential hotels—a hybrid architectural form that emerged in the late nineteenth century to host a transient workforce seeking employment and inexpensive lodging: settlement houses, SROs, flophouses, YMCAs/YWCAs, charitable institutions, religious missions, women’s clubs, workingmen’s palaces, and cage hotels—whose traces have been largely erased by decades of urban renewal and gentrification.

The forty case studies on view— each redrawn in plan and cabinet axonometric and correlated with archival material, texts, and historical maps—are the outcome of a graduate and undergraduate courses led by Associate Professor Francesco Marullo at the UIC School of Architecture. Proceeding like a forensic investigation—from scarce records and fragmentary evidence toward a plausible reconstruction—the research proposed to write a counter-history of these buildings for imagining alternative futures for affordable housing in Chicago. Among them, the single-room-occupancy (SRO) hotel seems to best crystallize the nomadic character of residential hotels in its most classical form—defined by the Chicago code as a building in which at least 90 percent of the units are single-room occupancies. Their spartan architecture and cryptic names, their modest appearance, mid-size scale, and structural and formal organization were flexible enough to allow for easy modifications and appropriations, enabling not just the accommodation of the highest diversity (of guests, of necessities, of programs and desires) but also avoiding the paternalism typical of larger-scale social housing, philanthropic complexes, missions, or municipal lodgings.

Beyond advocating for landmarking, protecting, or expanding what remains, All Magnificent and Wild calls for a contemporary counterpart to the SRO: a mid-size co-living architecture fitted to today’s transitional demographics. Such a model would expand the supply of compact, well-made dwellings for single-person households priced out of the market, as well as for temporary and seasonal workers, adults in transition, rent-burdened students, older adults, migrants, individuals moving out of shelters and informal units, and those leaving the criminal-legal system. Smaller units are typically less costly to build and easier to operate, reducing per-person costs, concentrating density where it is needed, and making shared living a viable alternative, thereby multiplying opportunities for the common and its everyday rituals. This is a design question with real political stakes, and if the smallest room is where the stakes become visible, the architecture—the society of rooms—is where it turns into form.