A photography gallery laments the death of timber construction in the fire ravaged city of Chicago, slowly rotting like the ‘vinegar syndrome’ of the negatives it displays. The architecture left standing offers a shrine to Chicago’s past and broadcasts a call to arms for the city’s future.

By 1840 the city of Chicago was solely dependent on lumber as its primary building material. Devastated by the fire of 1871 the people of Chicago looked for alternate building materials to reconstruct their city from, substituting their reliance on lumber for carbon-heavy building materials such as steel and concrete. Proposing a radical return to the city’s past reliance on lumber, the gallery stands as the first timber building to be built in Chicago for more than 120 years. It is also a bid to address our global addiction to carbon-heavy building materials.

Plagued by the eventual rot of the negative, the ultimate collapse of the architecture leaves a shrine to the city. Defying the rot, the darkroom gradually becomes re-embedded into the fabric of the eternally growing city, forever occupying the brief slice of time between the recent past and the near next, developing images of and by the city ad infinitum.