Back for its second year, Framed Views presents 60 curated photographs from the Open House Chicago 2025 competition at the CAC, revealing diverse perspectives on the city’s architecture, culture and character.
Date
November 22, 2025 - February 24, 2026
Location
Chicago Architecture Center Usher Lambe Gallery
Edgewater Beach Apartments. Photo byJohn Sanford.
Open House Chicago (OHC) is the Chicago Architecture Center’s biggest event of the year, in which visitors gain access to places of architectural, historical and cultural significance throughout the city. For OHC 2025, we hosted over 200 sites, and for the second consecutive year held a photography competition open to people of all ages and abilities, encouraging visitors to capture their unique perspectives of the festival weekend.
This year we received over 1200 submissions to one of five categories: Interior, Black & White, Exterior, People & Buildings, and Detail. Our curators selected 60 photographs that represent a wide range of experiences and interpretations, and collectively point to the incredibly rich tapestry of Chicago’s architecture and built environment. Also featured in the exhibition will be the best in each of the four categories of the 2024 OHC photography competition.
We invited four professional photographers to view and judge the photographs in the exhibition, and to select a winner and an honorable mention in each of the five categories. The winners were chosen from the highest-ranked aggregate from all the judges.
Interior Winner: "Endless Knowledge" by Adrian Diaz.
Interior Honorable Mention: "Inner Moss" by Emily Thompson.
Exterior Winner: "Faded Industrial Glory of Pullman Erecting Shops" by Chip Miller.
Exterior Honorable Mention: "Chevron" by Scott Anselmo.
Black & White Winner: "Suspended Honor" by Aleksandra Ciprijanovic.
Black & White Honorable Mention: "Nature’s Reclaim" by Ka Lam Nguyen.
Detail Winner: "Glimpses of New Ideas" by Ellen Gibbon.
Detail Honorable Mention: "Ceiling Spring" by Julian Badillo.
People & Buildings Winner: "Woman in the Red Leggings" by Ashton F.
People & Buildings Honorable Mention: "A Quiet Moment in Graceland" by Jessica Nguyen.
Ellen Harvey is a British-born, Brooklyn-based conceptual artist whose work ranges from guerrilla street interventions such as her iconic New York Beautification Project for which she painted miniature landscapes over New York’s graffiti sites to immersive institutional installations and large-scale public artworks. Her work is often painting-based but utilizes a wide variety of media and participatory strategies to explore several recurring themes such as the social and ecological implications of the picturesque, the revolutionary potential of nostalgia, the conflict between advertising and ornament in public space and the relationship between art and tourism. Her work frequently centers the viewer and involves direct participation by the public.
