BREAKTHROUGH: Housing Futures, installation view, 2025, National Public Housing Museum. Photo by Joe Nolasco.
National Public Housing Museum, 919 S. Ada Street, Chicago, IL 60607
Related event
The SHIFT Housing Summit continues on Friday with an afternoon session at 840 N Michigan Avenue.
Unfolding across two sites with morning and afternoon sessions, the summit frames housing not only as a spatial and architectural challenge, but as a political, social, and ecological question—and concludes with a poetry reading that opens space for reflection beyond disciplinary boundaries, underscoring SHIFT’s commitment to multiple forms of knowledge and expression.
FREE. But space is limited, please register in advance.
Lead support for BREAKTHROUGH and related symposium programming at the National Public Housing Museum is provided by the Alvin H. Baum Family Fund.
At the National Public Housing Museum, the morning program centers Chicago as a living laboratory for housing futures, convening civic, legal, and cultural perspectives to consider what it means to build housing systems grounded in equity and public responsibility. Discussions move across scales, from policy frameworks to the institutional and spatial conditions that shape access, stability, and belonging.
The session combines reflections with design-centered case studies that explore alternative models for affordability, shared living, and cooperative development including a conversation on breakthrough moments in Chicago’s housing history and the role of cultural institutions in shaping what comes next.
9:00 am: Coffee
9:30 am: Welcome by Lisa Yun Lee (National Public Housing Museum), Florencia Rodriguez (Chicago Architecture Biennial), Nora Daley (Chicago Architecture Biennial)
Ideas for Chicago
9:45 am: Marisa Novara (Chicago Community Trust)
10:05 am: Allison Bethel (Fair Housing Legal Clinic)
10:25 am: Lisa Yun Lee (National Public Housing Museum)
10:45 am: Break
11:00 am: Shelly J. Tucciarelli and Matthew Messner (Jigzibik)
11:20 am: Marisa Morán Jahn, Rafi Segal, and Ernst Valery (Carehaus)
11:40 am: Discussion moderated by Lisa Yun Lee (National Public Housing Museum)
12:10 pm: Conversation on the Museum’s BREAKTHROUGH exhibition, Lisa Yun Lee and exhibition curator Alexander Eisenschmidt
12:40 pm: Session close
The summit continues in the afternoon at at SHIFT’s exhibition venue at 840 N Michigan Avenue.
Presented as part of the sixth edition of the Chicago Architecture Biennial. Opening September 19, 2025 and on view through February 28, 2026 at locations across Chicago, SHIFT: Architecture in Times of Radical Change engages timely global issues through the lens of architecture and design.
A conversation with author, professor, and community organizer David Stovall on his new book, Engineered Conflict: Structural Violence and the Future of Black Life in Chicago.
