The Brooklyn Rail

Developed from a theory seminar and a design research studio at the UIC School of Architecture, All Magnificent and Wild: Notes on Chicago Residential Hotels reconstructs the controversial history of Chicago’s residential hotels through forty case studies, each redrawn in plan and cabinet axonometric and correlated with archival material, texts, and historical maps.¹

Residential hotels are a hybrid species. They emerged at the turn of the twentieth century, when Chicago consolidated its economies of scale—lumber, meat, grain, steel—and cemented itself as the nation’s principal wholesale market and railway hub, binding East and West. Although the city was built and powered largely by migrant labor, Chicago was not prepared to accommodate the workers arriving from across the continent and overseas. And so, below the glowing office towers, warehouses, and wholesale stores—buildings designed to stock the growing accumulation of commodities—the city developed a second, more generic inventory of buildings for housing low-income, transient workers: a nomadic architecture that could inhabit different forms.

Their names alone evoke a catalog of euphemisms: boarding and rooming houses, welfare palaces, palace hotels, women’s home clubs, workingmen’s hotels, single-room-occupancy hotels, missions, charitable institutions like YMCAs and YWCAs, municipal lodgings, barrelhouses and flophouses offering lodging for short- or long-term rental. Accommodation came in gradations of affordability, ranging from rooms with a private sink and alcove in a brownstone house, to wooden cubicles with nothing but a bed and a chair, topped with wire mesh or, in some cases, to bunk beds and benches in an industrial warehouse.

The transient lives of their guests—working intermittently, traveling frequently—reshaped the nature of habitation itself, pushing traditional patterns of domestic life to their practical and social limits, blurring the lines between familiarity and estrangement, individuality and commonality, permanence and flexibility, asceticism and luxury, heteronormativity and queerness, and interior and city. The residential hotel expanded conventional ideas about collective housing, family, ownership, and the existenzminimum (sustenance level), replacing the commodified “house” understood as an assemblage of possessions and privatized rooms, with a collection of spaces to be used without being owned. The emphasis shifts from housing to dwelling. No longer a container of units but a sequence of practices—inhabiting as action. Home, in turn, is less a Heideggerian place to settle down than a site of provisional kinship—a way of staying and living with strangers. Proximity imposed by necessity produced, in many cases, dense social worlds and informal economies, characterized by exchange, mutual surveillance, care, and solidarity.

In this context, All Magnificent and Wild conjectures a ‘retroactive manifesto’ of the domestic hotel or, perhaps, an elegy for a somewhat elusive, vernacular, underground, subtle but impudent, and almost extinct urban type. At a moment when work has become more nomadic and precarious across fields of production and when US cities face a deepening housing crisis, rising homelessness, laws criminalizing unsheltered people, and speculative development, re-examining the stigmatized infrastructure of residential hotels is not an exercise in nostalgia. It is a way to reframe how the housing question is posed and to imagine other ways of dwelling together.

Among the examined case studies, the single-room-occupancy (SRO) hotel seems to best crystallize the nomadic character of residential hotels in its most classical and controversial form—defined by the Chicago code as a building in which at least 90 percent of the units are single-room occupancies. Their spartan architecture and cryptic names, their modest appearance, mid-size scale, and structural and formal organization were flexible enough to allow for easy modifications and appropriations, enabling not just the accommodation of the highest diversity (of guests, of necessities, of programs and desires) but also avoiding the paternalism typical of larger-scale social housing, philanthropic complexes, missions, or municipal lodgings.

Borrowing from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, we could define SROs as a minor architecture. Not because it is smaller or less important, but because it operates from a marginal position, both within and against the dominant architectural language, twisting and recombining the generic stock of speculative apartment houses and mid-range hotels into an infrastructure for collective living. If Franz Kafka’s enigmatic Odradek or Fyodor Dostoevsky’s grumpy underground rebel had a building type, it would look like this: an architecture of recesses and thresholds, wedged into the cramped interstices of the rising capitalist metropolis—difficult to name, easy to overlook, and stubbornly resistant to removal. SROs persisted in a world that would prefer them not to exist. The idleness of their architecture became, for some, a virtue and a subtle political stance: a Bartleby-like refusal to perform, a quiet rejection of a society that demands clearly defined, fully legible identities and life trajectories.

To complement their spartan accommodations, SRO hotels performed as dispersed buildings. Their programs stretched along the street, which provided all the necessary amenities, services, commercial infrastructure, and cultural entertainment: restaurants, bars, liquor stores, pawnshops, saloons, taverns, barbershops, gambling houses, theatres, union halls, employment agencies, bookstores, parks, cultural centres, and soup kitchens. The lobby often opened directly onto the sidewalk, and the street effectively became part of the hotel, transforming the entire neighborhood—the stem—into an ecology of its own.

Today, much of this is gone. Chicago’s main stems—West Madison Street, North Clark Street, South State Street, or Bughouse Square—no longer exist, subsumed by urban renewal and successive waves of gentrification. Most SROs, with a few exceptions, have been demolished or converted into boutique hotels and condominiums. Former residents were displaced or relocated; the small businesses and social infrastructure that once sustained them were stripped away. Over the past decade, Chicago has begun to counter this trend by working to protect and stabilize the remaining SRO stock, easing debt burdens and operating costs for owners while holding low rents and basic services for at-risk residents. This effort began under Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s SRO Preservation Initiative (2014), continued through Lori Lightfoot’s 2021 Chicago Recovery Plan, and is being carried forward under the Brandon Johnson administration.

Beyond advocating for landmarking, protecting, or expanding what remains, All Magnificent and Wild calls for a contemporary counterpart to the SRO—the residential hotel’s most contested form: a mid-size co-living architecture fitted to today’s transitional demographics.² It would expand the supply of compact, well-made dwellings for single-person households priced out of the market, as well as for temporary and seasonal workers, adults in transition, rent-burdened students, immigrants, older adults, individuals moving out of shelters and informal units, and those leaving the criminal-legal system. Smaller units are typically less costly to build and easier to operate, reducing per-person costs, concentrating density where it is needed, and making shared living a viable alternative—thereby multiplying opportunities for the common and its everyday rituals. This is a design question with real political stakes. If the smallest room is where the argument becomes visible, the society of rooms is where it turns into form.