Morphological Echoes is the first exhibition in a three-part series titled The Undeniably There, which invites faculty and staff from the UIC School of Architecture to confront conjectures, specters, and obsessions—forces that continuously shape and inspire how we teach, practice, and think about architecture.
Borrowing its title from Dalí’s painting, Morphological Echoes invites contributors to share ideas that generate a deliberate, systematized confusion—one that provokes thoughts, sparks discussions, encourages both agreement and disagreement, and opens, perhaps, the way to unforeseen connections. Contributors are asked to reveal things they cannot release—fixations, fascinations, or lingering questions that have long haunted, or are now haunting, their work and thinking.
The Undeniably There, a year-long, three-part exhibition series, is organized within and for the UIC School of Architecture by faculty Barbara Materia and Spencer McNeil. This series is envisioned as a platform for exchanging ideas while serving as an informal pedagogical tool—a platform for students to explore theoretical questions about architecture and participate in school-wide discussions on various disciplinary themes.
Rather than presenting finished objects, the three interconnected exhibitions—one in fall 2025 and two in spring 2026—invite the school’s faculty and staff to inhabit the interval between concept and construction, where conjecture and rigor, delirium and method, work side by side until speculation acquires the density of fact. The series aims to disrupt conventional narratives of architectural production and reveal the many lives an idea can take on its way to becoming form. Additionally, it seeks to explore architecture as a language—an evolving system of signs, symbols, and associations through which ideas are generated, debated, and ultimately made tangible.
Participants: Alaina Griffin, Andrew Jennings, Andrew Zago, Aura Venckunaite, Clare Lyster, Cody Tyler Schueller, David Brown, Francesco Marullo, Grant Gibson, Kelly Bair, Misiuna / McCarthy, Nile Greenberg, Paul Dolick, Penelope Dean, R. E. Somol, Studio Becker Xu, Sarah Blankenbaker, UrbanLab, Uthman Olowa, Zehra Ahmed.
Special thanks to Igo Kommers Wender and Daniel Mellis for their graphic support.
November 21, 5:30 pm
3550 Octagon A+DS
845 W Harrison Street
Chicago, Illinois