THE SULLIVAN SLIP

Year: 2021
Location: 3648 S. Giles Avenue, Chicago
Status: Completed, for “Architecture of Reparations”
Contributor: Farnoosh Rafaie

A slip, a slide, and a ways in, the Sullivan Slip explores the nature of collective living for multi-generational households while peeking beyond the standard thresholds of vernacular row houses. Always stacked on stacked, row houses often maintain strict lines of delineation between one person’s room to another’s domain. These rooms are made as personalized boundaries. While the corridorlike manner of moving through the homes provides domestic variation against these spaces, why not simply choose to slip in and see these familial barriers fall away?

A deceptive play between the gargantuan brick structures of Alder & Sullivan that proliferated Bronzeville and their role cast to reinforce racist housing practices, the Sullivan Slip subverts these manners of spatialized redlining to break beyond what we see as maintaining our own levels of discriminatory comfort. This new manner of “type” encourages the not-so-typical nuclear family to maintain bonds of relations within the porous manners of living alongside one another. Come in & sneak a peak...