The Allerton Lobby at the Art Institute of Chicago is located within the museum’s first and oldest building on the AIC campus and constitutes a threshold through which visitors enter from the city—a place where the institution’s evolving identity has been inscribed over time. The transformation reexamines this space as an active participant in the museum’s ongoing narrative, proposing a series of precise, site-specific interventions that seek to recover the lobby’s most distinctive architectural qualities—its proportions, materials, and light—while introducing new elements that respond to present needs. This approach engages directly with the notion of architectural language, allowing what already exists to evolve naturally, coherently, and with renewed clarity. The result is a space both familiar and transformed, where past and present meet in quiet continuity.

Commission. Built.
Images by Simone Marcolin