The LightBox

Project Description

This attached, masonry row house sits on an eighteen-foot wide lot in Chicago’s Grand Crossing, a neighborhood notable for its rapid genesis from an open field into a dense, beautiful upper-middle-class neighborhood in the 1880s. Luxurious and new at the time of the nearby Columbian Exposition, the building, four decades later, was crudely divided into apartments during the Great Depression. A contractor recently restored its single occupancy but cut the the rear of the building off from light and air. In his defense, the rear yard was not much to look at: a gravel and dirt pad. We set out to create an inside/outside space employing effects with light, color and material that would create a volume for family, community and mindfulness.