The University of Chicago Magazine: Arts & Letters

Peer Review

Commissioned in 2007 to design a new bookstore and reading area for Threewalls, a Chicago nonprofit that offers artist exhibition space and residencies, John Preus, MFA’05, was asked to “make it feel inviting and comfortable, less like a gallery and more like a lounge.” A member of Material Exchange, an artist collective that takes recycled material as its medium, Preus used items found in the basement of Threewalls’s walk-up, “which included lots of doors,” he says. “The design emerged from the doors.”