Ann Lui (left) and Craig Reschke (right) of Future Firm.

Ann Lui and Craig Reschke see themselves as "the ones that start awkwardly dancing to jumpstart a bigger dance party." As founders of the Chicago-based practice Future Firm, the two are pushing boundaries in urban architecture and design by starting conversations and sparking fresh ideas. A core group of four, the small office collaborates with a network of people to manifest new futures, working across a range of mediums, scales, and disciplines. For this week's Studio Snapshot, we talk with Ann and Craig about agency in architecture, the need for a public architect, and the feminist activists, the Guerrilla Girls.

How many people are in your practice?

We see the practice of architecture as collaborative, expansive. We are a small team at the center of a network of people with overlapping ambitions. We’re the ones that start awkwardly dancing to jumpstart a bigger dance party.

Right now, Future Firm is a core group of four: Ann, Craig, Paul and Heidi. Our dog Canna is the office mascot. Additional part-timers and interns join when projects grow and during the summer. Craig’s dad, a retired builder, is helping grow a design-build arm. A strong bench of advisors: our firm’s business therapist, Irv Michaels; our accountant; our lawyer. Jeremiah Chiu of Some All None is designing our new graphic identity and website and, by proxy, our sense of self. Builders and consultants constantly refine our sense of the line between impossible-possible, provocative-expensive: Conrad Szajna at Formed Space; structures; MEP. We could go on—architecture is nothing but the unexpected alignment of dozens of people around a shared idea.

How did you (Craig and Ann) meet and what was the motivation for starting your own firm?

Craig: We met while working at SOM. We were working in the same studio on a small team for what we used to call a “small project.” It was at least 90 times bigger than anything we work on today. We love the way the project turned out, but still often talk about all the things we would have done differently. We started our own practice to define our own design direction, choose which clients we want to collaborate with, and to develop our own research.

We’re interested in large-scale questions and the ways these complex and hard-to-visualize systems have very real effects for the built environment

Ann: We wanted to start a firm where our shared interests could thrive. We’re interested in large-scale questions: policy, ecology, economy, and the ways these complex and hard-to-visualize systems have very real effects for the built environment. We’re also both interested in atmospheres... the quotidian spaces and props which bring people together: house parties, dinner tables, exhibition spaces, alleys and garages. Future Firm aims to do work that shows how architecture is the key that ties these two scales together into something meaningful.

What have been some of the biggest obstacles for starting a practice?

Cash and clients. When we started the office we had neither.

In your work for Between States, an exhibition at Chicago Architecture Foundation during the Chicago Architecture Biennial, you touched on the need for residents to have a right to a public architect. Can you talk a bit about this?

Craig: When we opened Future Firm with no cash or clients, we naively thought we would just make a website, list a phone number and design-driven jobs would roll in. Instead, the jobs that came in were all focused on resolving building violations, which in Chicago requires an architect’s stamp. These were Chicagoans that legally needed an architect, but had very limited budget for construction, let alone professional fees. Sometimes they were single-family home owners struggling to resolve a building violation in a complex bureaucratic system; sometimes they were landlords who had done or wanted to do illegal construction. We began to understand that very few architects want to or can afford to do this work. This means that in many cases, violations stack up, building are eventually condemned, and then added to the city’s very long list of buildings to be demolished. Ultimately it’s the tenants and communities that are suffering in these situations, often in underserved neighborhoods.

When issued a building violation, should you also have the right to a Public Architect?

We argued that if, when you commit a crime, if you cannot afford a lawyer, you have the right to a public defender. When issued a building violation, should you also have the right to a Public Architect? We reference Clara Foltz who is the first person to ever suggest an Office of the Public Defender. At the time everyone thought it was crazy—the New York Times called it “absurd”—but in time it’s come to be expected that everyone has a right to a lawyer.

Ann: We imagine the Office of the Public Architect might also benefit the discipline. It could provide training to young architects through public service under the oversight of experienced designers. It could also become resource for city-wide data on common materials, construction practices, and health and safety issues, all of which might provoke policy change or new building technology. We all know that the code is enforced unequally and that resources around architecture are privileged: there needs to be change within the profession as well as at the City to address these imbalances.

The firm also operates The Night Gallery, an exhibition space. Can you talk a bit about this project and how it feeds back into the practice’s built work and other projects?

The Night Gallery is more of exhibition “plane” than exhibition “space.” It’s the surface of the front window of our office. During the summer months, from sunset to sunrise, we exhibit film and video works by artists, architects, and designers.

The Night Gallery is a space to explore drawings and other forms of representation that are “live” and responsive, cinematic and shifting, rather than static. We’re also interested in how Night Gallery takes over and transforms the sidewalk in front of our office. On opening nights, passerby negotiate with the group viewing the work and hanging out on the sidewalk. They often end up joining, asking questions about the work, the event, having a beer and some movie snacks. It’s a low-stakes way of getting the city involved in architecture discourse.

The firm’s work touches a lot on issues of equitable and inclusive design—what would you like to see from the profession of architecture in terms of pushing these goals forward?

Craig: More politically engaged professional organizations. 

Ann: A broad change in discourse which sets the stage for hard conversations on individual, boots-on-the-ground projects and efforts.

What are some of the biggest factors preventing this from happening, do you think?

Ignorance, fear, an aversion to transformative change—all things we sympathize with but do not condone. We believe the agency of architecture, as a discipline and as a practice, emerges from: first, the ability of architects to visualize vibrant new futures which respond to urgent ecological, political, and economic crises. Second, from architects’ unique skill at manipulating the extremely complex technical, bureaucratic, and material conditions through which we can manifest those new futures. As a discipline, we need to energetically take up this agency and not spend all our time insuring ourselves against it.

What is the next for the firm: Is scaling up a goal and what sort of projects and/or issues would you like to tackle in the future?

Scaling up. Bigger, public-facing projects with reach, impact, and scale. Complex projects without easy answers for diverse clients.  

What are the benefits of having your own practice?

Not having to worry about having an excess of free time. (Inspired by the Guerrilla Girls.)