Leave the Seat Empty
Leave the Seat Empty was a five-year project consisting of photos taken of buildings in Chicago in between the time a demolition permit was issued and the time the wrecking crews came.
The vast majority of the city's demolitions are
vernacular residential buildings in areas that are either seeing immense
new investment or immense ongoing disinvestment. In most cases, the
doomed buildings are not deemed architecturally or culturally notable
enough for proactive preservation efforts to succeed, where such efforts
exist. They are most frequently replaced by new single family homes, or
by empty land. These patterns aren't universal among demolitions, but
are common outcomes of Chicago's current legal and market environment
around land use, building vacancy, and new construction.
Despite
its international reputation as a destination for architecture tourism,
Chicago's policies around building demolitions often fail to protect
historic structures. There are no easy answers to the question of which
buildings should remain standing under which circumstances, but
residents lack easy access to information about upcoming demolitions,
leaving them unable to campaign effectively against demolitions they
might oppose. And in many cases, no opposition would come regardless of
the policy environment - it's easy to assign negative emotional weight
to demolition, but demolition is not a universally negative phenomenon. Leave the Seat Empty sought to document many of Chicago's doomed buildings in
their final days, often with green worksite fencing already up, and be
present to acknowledge their disappearance.
In real time, Leave the Seat Empty was documented via posts on my now-stagnant Instagram profile, providing specific background information about each subject site. When I stopped using Instagram, a handful of further updates in the series were posted to my blog instead.
Leave the Seat Empty formally concluded in 2025, after half a decade of documentation. Before drawing the project to a close, I spoke to WBEZ Reset and Chi Hack Night about the overall intentions and findings of the photo series.
