The American Midwest has been shaking up the world of architecture. As part of our Next Generation series, we meet Latent Design, a small practice pioneering big change‘We’re probably always going to suffer from small firm syndrome,’ Katherine Darnstadt says.
Being a small firm has allowed Darnstadt and her team the nimbleness to take on a wide variety of projects and to use planning, zoning, codes, and financing as creatively as most of her peers are using AutoCAD and renderings.
For her 2018 project Boombox, she transformed shipping containers into affordable micro-retail spaces, bringing small businesses into Chicago neighbourhoods that, she says, are ‘normally locked out of commercial real estate’. She’s now working with one of those businesses, 40 Acres Fresh Market, on a full-scale standalone grocery store on the West Side of Chicago. ‘It’s not a food desert,’ Darnstadt says of that neighbourhood. ‘It’s food apartheid.
The team’s work is ‘really based in looking at those kinds of placemaking provocations that reveal a gap, or reveal the inequity, and then turn that into something more permanent’, says Darnstadt. ‘That’s either a policy piece, a piece of architecture, or a business model.’ They may be a small firm, but they’re mighty. §
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