Studio Jacob

Vienna, Austria

Studio Jacob is a Master’s Studio at the Institute of Architecture, die Angewandte, Vienna, led by architect and educator Sam Jacob. The studio explores architecture as a form of representation—technical, cultural, and political—by asking who is represented, what is represented, and how. Through drawing, modelling, and material experimentation, students work with the medium of architecture itself, using making as a way of thinking. The studio embraces combinations: history and speculation, the everyday and the fantastical, figuration and abstraction—seeking to understand the kinds of architectural ideas these processes can generate.

2025 Biennial Project

Project Overview

Soft Dolmen

Drawing on ancient stone monuments and 1960s inflatable architecture, Soft Dolmen transforms heaviness into lightness and permanence into ephemerality. This inflatable structure reimagines one of architecture’s oldest forms: the Neolithic dolmen. Traditionally built from massive stones, dolmens marked sites of ritual, memory, and collective identity. Here, their heavy symbolism is reinterpreted through soft materials and air, drawing from radical visions of mobile, flexible architecture. The result is both monumental and temporary, serious and humorous—a “pop-archaeological” site that questions how architecture can carry meaning across time. The installation invites visitors to consider architecture not as something fixed or final, but as something in flux—capable of honoring the past while imagining new possibilities for how we live, gather, and build.

Venue

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Stony Island Arts Bank

Address

6760 S Stony Island Ave, Chicago, IL 60649

Neighborhood

South Side

Description

Designed by William Gibbons Uffendell and built in 1923, the Stony Island Loan & Savings Bank at 68th and Stony Island was slated for demolition before artist Theaster Gates rescued, restored, and reconstituted the structure in 2015. One of Gates’s most notable spatial projects in Greater Grand Crossing, the Stony Island Arts Bank—a 17,000-square-foot historic building housing Rebuild Foundation’s contemporary art and experimental archival program on Chicago’s South Side — has hosted free exhibitions, screenings, performances, live recordings, artist retreats, artistic and archival residencies, workshops and classes in partnership with local and globally-renown artists over the past decade.

Credit: Theaster Gates, Stony Island Arts Bank. Photo: Tom Harris, Hedrich Blessing. Courtesy of Rebuild Foundation.
Chicago Architecture Biennial