On Saturday, October 21, 2023, MAS Context is organizing the seventh edition of our Tracing / Traces event when readers had the chance to get a behind-the-scenes look at selected items from the Ryerson & Burnham Art and Architecture Archives located at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Five architects and designers will select items of the collection and will discuss them in relationship to their practice, the discipline, and/or society. Nathaniel Parks, Tigerman McCurry Director of the Art Institute of Chicago Archives, will provide some background on the archives.

Participants include:

Catherine Baker – Nowhere Collaborative
Stuart Cohen – Stuart Cohen and Julie Hacker Architects
Alberto Ortega Trejo – Artist, Curator, and Architectural Researcher
Jennifer Park – ParkFowler Plus
Jonathan Solomon – Preservation Futures

The Ryerson & Burnham Art and Architecture Archives’ collections are notably strong in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century American architecture, with particular depth in midwestern architecture. Architects such as Edward Bennett, Daniel Burnham, Bruce Goff, Bertrand Goldberg, Ludwig Hilberseimer, Mies van der Rohe, Louis Sullivan, and Frank Lloyd Wright are represented in a broad range of papers. Major architectural events, such as the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago, The Century of Progress International Exposition of 1933–1934 in Chicago, and the World’s Fair of 1939 in New York, are also represented in an individual archive.