Architects:Alsar Atelier

Area:55m²

Year:2026

Photographs:Alejandro Saldarriaga

Category:Temporary Installations

City:Chicago

Country:United States

Text description provided by the architects. In the first months of 2020, the coronavirus pandemic evolved from a localized infectious disease into a chronic global emergency. The bizarre took over human existence, and everyday life was transported into a state of magical realism. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez describes how the town of Macondo was subject to strange phenomena, such as the overnight proliferation of rabbits that paved public spaces with small animals, or the sudden fall of leaves carpeting the streets in green within hours. During the pandemic, these strange phenomena were not far from human reality: animals reclaimed urban spaces during mandatory quarantines, and streets transformed into vibrant communal areas filled with greenery and public life in a short period of time.

In response, architects and designers adopted methodologies that transformed urban voids into transient communal architectures. These architectures, much like the genre of magical realism, embellished the ontology of ordinary materials, distorted the longevity of structures in the built environment, and critically engaged with contemporary socio-environmental dynamics. Given this collective state of magical realism that humanity experienced, is it relevant to speculate whether the pandemic catalyzed a new design methodology? Can this methodology be applied to address diverse chronic crises in the urban realm? Could it even transcend into the architecture of temporary exhibits?

"The embellished, the transient, and the critical", being part of the latest edition of The Chicago Architecture Biennale, is a 1:1 installation of an architecture of post-pandemic magical realism within the context of temporary exhibits, where inhabitable objects have short lifespans and materials used to build them more often than not result in waste. As such, the installation is a space that transforms quotidian plastic pallets, lumber, insulation, and gravel into a single enclosed space that showcases the atmospheric possibilities behind ordinary materials, which can go back to their original use after disassembly. The design does this through a single vertical partition, through which, by a composition of solid versus void between organic and orthogonal geometries, the user is able to experience an intimate and seemingly monolithic interior atmosphere being held up by a visibly tectonic enclosure.

Said architecture is exclusively erected through off-the-shelf materials and "dry" unions, hinting toward a different permanence of architectural atmosphere while guaranteeing the return of the materials to their original purpose or lifecycle after the deconstruction of the proposal.

To conclude, this spatial experiment is a manifesto that critically addresses the economic and environmental implications of experimental ephemeral design. By embracing "off-the-shelfness" and "dryness" as structural principles, the installation fulfills a role within both magical realism and post-pandemic architecture: it embellishes the ordinary, accepts its own impermanence, and challenges norms through critical material choices.

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