Bradley Silling




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Overstory

2024
Chicago, IL

With:
Andres Camacho
Lindsey Krug

Our contribution to the 2024 Chicago Sukkah Design Festival.

In the same way Sinai Hospital acts as the overstory—the protective layer—for the Lawndale community, this sukkah opens up to the neighborhood on all sides and welcomes us to gather under its elevated canopy. After the Festival, the sukkah will provide a community stoop for Sinai Hospital’s bustling campus. Under the canopy, seating takes a cue from the porches of nearby residential buildings along West 15th Place, offering a new outdoor space where everyone can reflect and gather. Just as the hospital has evolved to meet North Lawndale’s needs, this pavilion aspires to be a backdrop for the lives of those who give and receive care, as well as for the many people who continue to shape the Sinai campus and the broader Lawndale community.

Thanks to:
Sinai Chicago, Goodfriend Magruder Structure, Unfettered Art & Supply, Chicago Canvas & Supply

Photograph by Brian Griffin for the Chicago Sukkah Design Festival.


A Room in Camp’s Mansion

2019
Harvard University Graduate School of Design

Advised by Jennifer Bonner

In constructing their domestic spaces, Queer people have always had to set up camp. That is, to make carve out space fleeting spaces in ill-fitting contexts.

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Everything Loose

2021
Los Angeles

With:
Jonathan Rieke
Benzion Rodman
Morgan Starkey

Los Angeles’ history of loose construction seems to confound the very real problems the city faces in a rapidly deteriorating climate and severe crisis of housing. The cheap and dirty methods of building with which we’ve grown comfortable now seem wasteful and shortsighted. Our impulse is to tighten things up: seal the gaps, sink the foundation, and accumulate layers of protection on building skins.

Our entry for Low-Rise: Housing Ideas for Los Angeles proposes a looser alternative, a radically sustainable typology that adapts LA’s blasé vernacular to the city’s new priorities. With a non-commital attitude towards its own site, a commitment to stupidly smart assemblies, carbon-hungry hemp-based materials, and a communal approach to outdoor living, we feel that the very looseness that has helped push the city to the brink of crisis could in fact become its saving grace.

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Sobremesa

2023
Mexico City

With:
Lindsey Krug
Andres Camacho

Sobremesa is a 9 x 9-meter pavilion with 9 tables at Alameda Central in Mexico City. 

Amid months of confinement to our homes, we established new relationships between our bodies, our possessions, and our spaces. Some of us were isolated in spaces that felt cavernous without family and friends. Others struggled to find peace in newly overcrowded spaces. As we return to our more public lives, new questions emerge concerning how we want to live at home, how much of our lives can fit into our limited spaces, and how our changing routines put new pressures on our domestic spaces. What does it mean to find a home that fits?

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The Grandest Canyon

2018
Harvard University Graduate School of Design

Mack Scogin Studio

 Like archaeologists, architects tend to work against the grain of forgetfulness. When confronted with an artifact, our instinct is to turn things — nameless and inscrutable — back into objects. We stabilize matter’s meaning with language, undoing the effects of time which would tend towards formlessness. The preservation and reproduction of an object’s position in culture helps it to resist heat death, the inevitable cold dark nothingness that awaits everything at the end of the universe. And while there is nothing more terrifying than staring at some thing we cannot explain, the ability reckon with entropy is crucial for an architectural understanding of time.

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