Under the Influence

“We almost called this lecture ‘Enjoy Architecture,’” Lap Chi Kwongremarked, as he and Alison Von Glinow, co-principals of Chicago design office Kwong Von Glinow, introduced their presentation at the Rice Design Alliance on the occasion of their receiving the organization’s 2023 Spotlight Award. They eventually settled on “Some of This, Some of That,” a phrase Kwong said reflects the office’s freewheeling approach to design. Sprinting through slides of their work, the pair dropped words like “accessible,” “legible,” and “understandable.” Highlights included the Ardmore House and Swiss Consulate; both are in Chicago and feature loving, intelligently resolved details. But these largely private spaces, with trendy contemporary materials and finishes, felt strangely familiar.

Kwong and Von Glinow made repeated mention of “the vernacular,” a subject they had previously explored in an exhibition about the morphology of single-family homes. But the vernacular influences also seeped in surreptitiously. The Table Top Apartments, a speculative system of housing based on “bori…