School Kiosks

The Chicago Architecture Biennial’s efforts to enhance the lakefront through architectural commissions are realized with three kiosks created by an international selection of architects working in collaboration with Chicago-based schools of architecture, including the Illinois Institute of Technology, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and the University of Illinois at Chicago.

The kiosks’ series is completed by Chicago Horizon, designed by Team Ultramoderne.

The Cent Pavilion, designed by Pezo von Ellrichshausen in collaboration with the Illinois Institute of Technology, is a 12-meters tower meant to convey silent and convoluted simplicity. It repeats the same angled design over and over, resulting in an opaque monolith. When its commercial function ceases at the summer’s end, the kiosk complements the verticality of Chicago’s iconic skyline year-round.

Rock, the kiosk designed by Kunlé Adeyemi in collaboration with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, is a pop-up pavilion – a public sculpture – composed from the raw and historic limestone blocks that once protected the city’s shoreline. Its bold yet sensuous and delicate balance transforms Chicago’s lakefront into a magnet for social and cultural life. Situated at Montrose Beach, the kiosk is conceived as an “infrastructure box” consisting of materials and technologies that are found in or belong to the local environment. The composition’s resilient limestone and concrete elements can be uniquely assembled to suit different locations, vendors, and uses along the lakefront, providing shelter while contributing to the protection of the shoreline. Due to the sitespecific requirements of this kiosk, it will be built and installed along the lakefront in 2016, although the design team created a representative work at Millennium Park during the Chicago Architecture Biennial.

Summer Vault, designed by Paul Andersen of Independent Architecture and Paul Preissner of Paul Preissner Architects, in collaboration with the University of Illinois at Chicago, is a lakefront kiosk that accommodates a multitude of things. It consists of basic geometric shapes – a 3,6-meters-diameter barrel vault, a parallelogram, and triangles – combined to create a curious, freestanding hangout within the park. The interior of the skewed vault is divided into two triangular spaces – one enclosed by expanded metal screens and doors, and one open to the air but still within the vaulting. This two-part plan allows for commerce and community to occur simultaneously. It also reflects the kiosk’s Persian origins as a 13th-century garden pavilion, while embracing its contemporary use as a seasonal, commercial front and festive park retreat. Its openness allows year-round use, remaining active even in its retail slumber during the Chicago winter.