Soil Lab

A Built Experiment
Eibhlín Ní Chathasaigh, James Albert Martin, Anne Dorthe Vester, Maria Bruun / SOIL LAB

This anthology is a critical reflection on the making of Soil Lab, a project built with a community in North Lawndale, Chicago, and hosted by the Danish Arts Foundation at the 2021 edition of the Chicago Architecture Biennial. The pages give space to a conversation that stretches far outside both the confines of the Soil Lab’s site in North Lawndale and the short duration of the biennial. The book is a meeting place for the voices which contributed to the Soil Lab project, and maps their constellation of disciplines—across architecture, art, anthropology, ecology, craft and community work—and global geographies, including the US, Denmark, Ireland, Puerto Rico and Austria. The story of the project, and the many lives and threads that it brushed up against, is told through histories, criticism, photographic essays, instruction manuals, soil recipes and interviews. 

With Contributions from
Catherine Fennell – anthropologist (US)
Emmett Scanlon – architect, writer, curator (Ireland)
Sami Akkach – architect and rammed earth specialist (Austria)
Traci Wile – architect, educator and community liaison (US)
Craig Stevenson – artist and community liaison (US)
Calvanita Fipps AKA Nini – artist (US)
Anjulie Rao – journalist and critic (US)
Ta-Nehisi Coates – writer and journalist (US)
Annette Skov – art facilitator and advisor (Denmark)
Amara Abdal Figueroa – agroceramist, artist and environmental advocate (Puerto Rico, Kuwait)
Will Quam – photographer, writer and brick specialist (US)
Ellen Braae – landscape architect (Denmark)
Benita Marcussen – photojournalist (Denmark)