Future Firm
Cover: Future Firm, Revolution Workshop | Revolution Workshop, Chicago, IL, 2025. Image credit: Daniel Kelleghan. Video editor: Darlena Chiem
The Architectural League’s biennial Emerging Voices program spotlights North American architects, landscape architects, and urban designers who have significant bodies of realized work and the potential to influence their field.
Ann Lui, Craig Reschke, and Linda Chávez Baca of Future Firm are 2026 Emerging Voices winners.
Ann Lui and Craig Reschke founded Future Firm in Chicago in 2015, and Linda Chávez Baca joined the firm as a principal in 2023. Working closely with mission-driven non-profits, community residents, and small-business owners, the firm’s portfolio includes residential projects, arts and culture venues, public installations, and makerspaces. Believing that, in the firm’s own words, “architecture is both a tool for imagining and a means for building the world we want to live in,” Future Firm’s work seeks to expand the traditional scope of architectural practices, from raising capital and political will to proposing zoning amendments.
Projects include:
Revolution Workshop, a renovation of two existing warehouses to create the headquarters for a workforce development organization with flexible shop spaces, offices, and classrooms, achieving over 95% Minority and Women-owned subcontractors in alignment with the client’s mission
South Side Community Arts Center, a renovation of the famed Chicago Black visual arts and culture institution that introduced sustainable features, new archives, classrooms, and museum-grade art exhibition and storage spaces
Hem House, a two-story single-family home designed as a compact, replicable model for Chicago’s vacant lots, clad with black metal and featuring creative interpretations of building code to reduce construction cost and improve livability
Future Firm received a 2025 Best of Practice award from The Architect’s Newspaper. The firm’s work has been featured in New Middles and Exhibit Columbus 2021, where they received the J. Irwin and Xenia Miller Prize.
Ann Lui is the incoming director of Undergraduate Architecture Studies and an associate professor of practice at the University of Chicago, beginning fall 2026. She holds a master’s of science in architecture studies from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a bachelor’s of architecture from Cornell University.
Craig Reschke holds a master’s in landscape architecture from Harvard University Graduate School of Design and a bachelor’s of architecture from the University of Tennessee.
Linda Chávez Baca received a master’s of science degree in project management from Northwestern University and a bachelor’s of architecture from Tecnológico de Monterrey.
