Jeffri Jacobe
Structured Chaos
From the second-year graduate studio The Market, Spring 2020
Faculty: Paul Preissner
About the studio:
As markets metaphorically run the world, architecture provides material reality to the fluctuations of commercial speculation. This studio focused on the origin and organization of the market (in the physical sense), but the real project it investigated was two genealogies that form the critical basis of architectural dialogue: Abstraction and Thingness. Abstraction refers to all aspects of the architectural project that exist within opinion, while Thingness is the reality that enables the architectural meaning. These terms were investigated in their ability to organize the ephemeral and concrete, and created a product of marginal structural framing and volatile programmatic habits.
About the project:
Maxwell Street Market is deeply ingrained in Chicago’s culture, yet today it hosts meetings only weekly during the warmer seasons. What was once a permanent cultural hub for diverse goods is now a temporary event in a parking lot. When looking to house Maxwell Street Market, one mustn’t change its chaotic nature—a place where one can buy batteries or a pair of socks while eating a Polish sausage. While the market will always be there, its vendors are forever changing. Materially speaking, if tilt-up concrete is Chicago (strong, monolithic, and permanent), then steel bracing is its people (temporary, in-and-out, yet crucial).