Madlener House
4 West Burton Place
Chicago, Illinois 60610
Telephone: 312.787.4071
info@grahamfoundation.org

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Jon Satrom, Prepared Desktop, 2011

Jon Satrom, Prepared Desktop
Lampo Performance Series
Mar 26, 2011 (8pm)
Performance

Please RSVP

The Graham Foundation and Lampo partner to bring you Prepared Desktop, a new work by Jon Satrom presented in 3-D. For Prepared Desktop, Satrom playfully re-codes conventional computer programs and ordinary operating system elements into a glitch-prone audio/video instrument.

Jon Satrom (b. 1980, Bismarck, N.D.) is a Chicago-based new-media artist who spends his days fixing things, making things work and teaching. He spends his evenings breaking things, learning and searching for the unique blips inherent to the systems he explores and exploits. With a background in video, sound and new media, Satrom has kludged together a collection of home-brew systems for real-time performance, which include custom video games, renegade computer scripts, obsolete display hacks and corrupt data.

Satrom's collaborative projects include I Love Presets alongside Rob Ray and Jason Soliday, PoxParty with Ben Syverson, and Magic Missile with Soliday and Geoff Guy. He has been affiliated with the criticalartware dot net demo krew featuring Jon Cates, Jake Elliott, Tamas Kemenczy and Mark Beasley. He organizes the Chicago GLI.TC/H Festival with Rosa Menkman, Nick Briz and Evan Meaney. Satrom also runs a small production company called studiothread and teaches in the Film Video New Media Animation Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Satrom first performed for Lampo in June 2009, when he presented the ensemble audio/video project, “Magic Matrix Mixer Mountain,” with Beasley, Cates, Elliott, Kemenczy, Alex Inglizian and Nicholas O’Brien.

Founded in 1997, Lampo is a non-profit organization for experimental music, sound art and intermedia projects. For information and to add your name to the Lampo list, contact info@lampo.org or visit www.lampo.org.

Related Links
Jon Satrom
http://jonsatrom.com/

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Nicolas Grospierre, TATTARRATTAT, 2010.

Lost in Architecture
Nicolas Grospierre
Mar 03, 2011 (6:30pm)

To RSVP

Artist Talk: 6PM
Opening Reception: 6:30-8PM

Nicolas Grospierre will discuss the Graham Foundation exhibition and his most recent work. This event is free and open to the public.

Nicolas Grospierre (born 1975, Geneva, Switzerland) lives and works in Warsaw, Poland. He studied sociology at the London School of Economics and political science at the Institut d'Etudes Politique de Paris. In 2008, Grospierre and Kobas Laksa were awarded the Golden Lion for Best National Participant at the 11th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice for the Polish Pavilion project, Hotel Polonia. The Afterlife of Buildings. He works predominantly in an expanded field of photography, exploring the social organization of space. Grospierre's work has been shown internationally in exhibitions in Berlin, Brasilia, Madrid, New York, Venice, Warsaw, among other cities.

Related Links
Nicolas Grospierre
http://www.grospierre.art.pl/

For more information on the exhibition, One Thousand Doors, No Exit, click here.

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Probono

The Power of Pro Bono
Jeanne Gang, Bernarda Wong, Noah Resnick, Brian Hurttienne, & John Peterson
Mar 01, 2011 (6pm)
Panel Discussion

Please RSVP:

Celebrate the Chicago launch of the book The Power of Pro Bono, with a panel discussion and reception sponsored by Holcim Awards for Sustainable Construction.

The panel will give in-depth perspectives of projects featured in the book, including the Kam Liu Building of the Chinese American Service League in Chicago and the Roosevelt Park Masterplan from Detroit. Representatives from the firm and nonprofit client will be on the panel, moderated by Public Architecture’s Founder and President, John Peterson. The panel will discuss community involvement, the role of pro bono service in professional practice and how design can impact change locally.

Panelists include:
Jeanne Gang// Principal, Studio Gang
Bernarda Wong
// President, Chinese American Service League
Noah Resnick// Principal, uRbanDetail
Brian Hurttienne// Architect & Community Activist, Corktown, Detroit
John Peterson// Founder & President, Public Architecture


ABOUT THE BOOK

The Power of Pro Bono presents 40 pro bono design projects across the country. The clients include grassroots community organizations like the Homeless Prenatal Program of San Francisco, as well as national and international nonprofits, among them Goodwill, Habitat for Humanity, KIPP Schools and Planned Parenthood. These public-interest projects were designed by a range of award-winning practices, from SHoP Architects in New York and Studio Gang in Chicago, to young studios including Stephen Dalton Architects in Southern California and Hathorne Architects in Detroit, to some of the largest firms in the country, such as Gensler, HOK and Perkins + Will. Scores of private donors, local community foundations and companies, and material and service donations made these projects possible. So have some of the most progressive funders in the country, ranging from Brad Pitt's Make It Right Foundation in New Orleans to the Robin Hood Foundation in New York. Taken as a whole, the selected works represent six general categories: Arts, Civic, Community, Education, Health and Housing. This book is inspired and informed by the advocacy and design work of Public Architecture, a national nonprofit founded in 2002 by San Francisco-based architect John Peterson. The 1% program of Public Architecture challenges architecture and design firms nationwide to pledge a minimum of one percent of their time to pro bono service, leveraging in excess of $25 million in donated services annually.

ABOUT PUBLIC ARCHITECTURE

Established in 2002, Public Architecture identifies and solves practical problems of human interaction in the built environment and acts as a catalyst for public discourse through education, advocacy, and the design of public spaces and amenities.

Related Links
Public Architecture
http://www.publicarchitecture.org/home.htm

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The City as Spectacle: A View from the Gondola
Stanislaus von Moos
Feb 10, 2011 (6pm)
Talk

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Venice and Modern Architecture, or Venice and Modernism altogether make an odd couple. According to Filippo Marinetti, the author of the Futurist Manifesto (1909), gondolas are no more than “rocking chairs for idiots.” One hundred years later, we must acknowledge that rather than being its opposite, the passatismo castigated by Marinetti is a powerful aspect of modernity. In fact, John Ruskin’s incantations of the waves of the laguna dangerously rippling against the “Stones of Venice” have transformed the city into one of the 20th century’s proverbial tourist destinations and resulted in an extravagant race against Las Vegas. The lecture is about the architecture of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown and the way it has turned this race into art.

Stanislaus von Moos, a Swiss Art Historian, has published monographs on Le Corbusier (1968ff.), Italian Renaissance Architecture, the History of Industrial Design in Switzerland (1992) and the Architecture of Venturi, Scott Brown & Associates (1st volume 1987; 2nd volume 1999). More recently he published Le Corbusier Before Le Corbusier (ed., with Arthur Rüegg, 2001) and Ernst Scheidegger. Chandigarh 1956 (ed., 2010). Currently he is interested in the culture of the Cold War era and the cross-pollinations between architecture and the visual arts since 1970. He has been professor of Modern Art at the University of Zurich (1983-2005) and is presently the Vincent Scully Visiting Professor at Yale University.

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You Can Have Your Cake and Eat It, Too
Bill Mackey
Jan 27, 2011 (6pm)
Talk

Please RSVP:

On January 27, 2011, Bill Mackey will give a graphic presentation that discusses the relationship of shoelaces, NCAA basketball, Paris, Oprah, golf carts, street signs, and sex to American perceptions of land use and transportation. The critical analysis utilizes humor and parody to question our roles as actors in society and asks audiences to dream of other possibilities for our landscape.

In 1995, Mackey created Worker, Inc. with the intention of bridging the social sciences, planning, architecture, and art. In 2007, he created the Neighborhood Residents Resources Ethnography Studies Unit, a division of Worker, Inc., to understand local physical environments with an emphasis on data. He conducts on-the-ground research and displays it in small pamphlet publications that combine language, humor, pen and ink drawing, ethnographic research, and graphic arts into a concise and finely executed document that offers a fresh, and often surprising, perspective on human environments. Mackey received a 2010 grant from the Graham Foundation for his Field Guides and Checklists series.

Since 1969, Mackey has had 19 different addresses, 23 bedrooms, 10 pets, 15 jobs, played 25 different sports, ingested 20 types of drugs, had 9 surgeries, been to 2 counselors, visited 16 countries, enjoyed listening to 7 genres of music, tried to play 4 musical instruments, received 3 college degrees, owned 7 bicycles, 4 automobiles and 3 golf carts.

Mackey is an architect and was lead designer for a variety of public and private projects in the southern Arizona region. His architectural design work is recognized in national publications and earns regional design awards. Mackey is a co-founder of the design co*op and was Architect-in-Residence at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tucson, Arizona in 2009.

Related Links
Worker, Inc.
http://www.workerincorporated.com/

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Unless otherwise noted,
all events take place at:

Madlener House
4 West Burton Place, Chicago

GALLERY AND BOOKSHOP HOURS

2025 Chicago Architecture Biennial
SHIFT: Architecture in Times of Radical Change
Sep 19, 2025–Feb 28, 2026

Wed–Sat, 12–5 p.m.

HOLIDAY HOURS: the galleries and bookshop are closed Dec 24, 2025 through Jan 3, 2026
Regular hours resume on Jan 7, 2026


CONTACT

312.787.4071
info@grahamfoundation.org



Accessibility

Events are held in the ballroom on the third floor which is only accessible by stairs.
The first floor of the Madlener House is accessible via an outdoor lift. Please call 312.787.4071 to make arrangements.