BREAKTHROUGH: Housing Futures

This immersive exhibition creates an experimental living room and learning space for conversations about affordable housing futures, past and present.

BREAKTHROUGH blends historical documentation of ambitious HUD demonstration projects from the 1970s with new prototypes from The Housing Futures Initiative, led by Alexander Eisenschmidt. This work aims to challenge the social, cultural, and economic conventions of housing by rethinking the design, material, and construction of urban living.

In 1969, HUD initiated “Operation Breakthrough,” a wildly ambitious project that challenged the building industry to develop alternative ways to design and construct millions of housing units. Housing Secretary George Romney described Operation Breakthrough as “not a program designed to see just how cheaply we can build a house, but is a way to break through to total new systems of housing production, financing, marketing, management, and land use.”

This historical effort by the US government to produce “quality housing for all income groups” through experimentation inspires a new exhibition, program series, and demonstration project at the National Public Housing Museum. Learning from, responding to, and expanding on the lessons of the program, BREAKTHROUGH: Housing Futures presents an immersive living and learning environment created by The Housing Futures Initiative and aims to question the social, cultural, and economic conventions of housing by rethinking the design, material, and construction of urban living.

BREAKTHROUGH is both an exhibition and an invitation to the visiting public, housing advocates, scholars, and architects to learn together and generate new insights into the future of affordable housing. It opens against the backdrop of a persistent housing crisis: there is not a single county in the US where a full-time minimum wage worker can afford to rent a modest apartment. Chicago, for example, has a shortage of 120,000 units, and Illinois has a deficit of some 300,000 units for extremely low-income renters. One result of this is rising homelessness.

Presented in alignment with the sixth Chicago Architecture Biennial, BREAKTHROUGH challenges visitors to reconsider how we live with one another. It juxtaposes historical documentation of Operation Breakthrough housing projects with newly designed prototypes to create a living room and learning space for exploration and conversation about affordable housing futures, past and present.

BREAKTHROUGH offers a space and opportunity to question established norms of living, address different models of homeownership, and explore innovative policies, with the goal of generating new knowledge that can confront the current housing crisis and speak to the potential of housing as a human right.

During its six-month run, BREAKTHROUGH will serve as a site for programs, a gathering space, and a classroom for exploration and conversation about housing affordability and design. In conjunction with the exhibition, the National Public Housing Museum will also host a robust series of free public programs, including a housing summit produced in collaboration with the Chicago Architecture Biennial. Other events will explore the history of Operation Breakthrough, its connections to a brain trust of former NASA scientists like Harold Finger, and the ways in which adjacent disciplines can work together to produce new knowledge around building materials and address construction challenges for affordable housing.

Highlighting new unit prototypes designed by the Housing Futures Initiative, the installation explores new spatial layouts and features transformable furniture—such as a rotating shelf wall, a sofa-bed-chair, and a curtain column—that adapt to changing needs and alternative family structures that depart from the nuclear family. All are built with materials that are both sustainable and afford speed and ease of construction. The design is not only economical but aims to be scalable (from house to housing), communal (from single to collective), adaptive (from bachelor to granny), and beautiful (from “existence minimum” to quality of life).

BREAKTHROUGH culminates with the construction of a full-scale demonstration project designed by the Housing Futures Initiative, led by Eisenschmidt, with architect Kelly Bair, lawyer Allison Bethel, and planner April Jackson, who all teach at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In Spring 2026, the project plans to migrate the exhibition’s furniture to the prototype that will have a future home in one of Chicago’s neighborhoods. There, it will be utilized as a demonstration project and home for a residency program for the study of the advancement of housing.