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This article is part of our series profiling the Architectural League of New York’s 2024 Emerging Voices laureates and appears in the March/April issue of The Architectural League of New York. one. The full list of winners can be found here.
Katherine Darnstadt founded Latent Design in Chicago in 2009 after a dramatic series of events: becoming a licensed architect, getting promoted, getting married, finding out she had a baby, and then getting fired. .
“It was in those moments of panic that I had to make every life and career decision immediately that I ended up starting this company because it was all I knew,” she told one.
Darnstadt slowly built his company while continuing to look for work. The first projects, she recalls, were anything but glamorous — mostly code corrections or small residential jobs. But through these projects and in collaboration with like-minded design professionals, Darnstadt began to design impactful, community-based buildings.
The name Latent refers to the idea of ”making the invisible visible,” a trait that rings loud and clear in the company’s work in underserved communities. Several projects have been realized along Chicago Avenue, spanning neighborhood boundaries and typologies. Many have achieved and achieved the goals set out in the Quality of Life Plan (QLP) – a review of community planning efforts every ten years. Darnstadt explained that a community might ask for more grocery stores or affordable housing, or adaptive reuse projects—projects she didn’t expect to receive as a young professional. “Now I can see the value in thinking about where these impacts will ultimately lead,” she said.
Latent recently built the Rusu-McCartin Club on an old brownfield site for the Boys & Girls Clubs of Chicago. A smaller but equally impactful project is the Boombox: a humble information kiosk that an artist or small business owner can rent. Boombox tenants have become customers: Two of them commissioned the firm to design a grocery store and art gallery.
“As a company,” Darnstadt concludes, “we are interested in working at the scale of the bench, the building, and the block.”
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