Objects of Common Interest
Surfaces in Flux at the Chicago Architecture Biennial 2025
September 19, 2025–February 28, 2026Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago, USA
Surfaces in Flux is an installation that reimagines the architecture of gathering through a suspended inflatable dome and a modular communal surface that responds to movement, weight, and touch, presented at the Chicago Architecture Biennial 2025, SHIFT: Architecture in Times of Radical Change. Hovering overhead, the soft, inverted dome creates an ethereal canopy, while below, a low-lying platform formed from individual cylindrical inflatables straps together into a shared ground.
The space invites people to sit, recline, and lean into one another, allowing the structure to subtly shift and redistribute itself in response to its occupants. This mutability becomes both a physical experience and a metaphor for the ways communities form, dissolve, and reassemble.
By embracing air, impermanence, and softness as primary materials, the work challenges the fixity of traditional architecture. It proposes an open, non-hierarchical environment that supports connection, care, and shared presence—a gentle counterpoint to the static and monumental, and an invitation to imagine new ways of being together.
