Archival Photos from the Museum of Ethnography exhibited at the 2025 Chicago Architecture Biennial

The 2025 Chicago Architecture Biennial (CAB) has opened, featuring Paradigma Ariadné, a Budapest-based architecture studio, among its exhibitors, alongside archival photographs from the Museum of Ethnography. This year’s edition is curated by Florencia Rodriguez, a Latin American curator, editor, writer, and educator whose diverse work spans across mostfields of contemporary architecture and design. The CAB is also celebrating its 10th anniversary this year.

Over the past decade, the CAB has grown into the most important architectural event on the American continent, inviting architects, urban planners, and designers from all over the world. Representing Hungary as an independent creative team for the first time, Paradigma Ariadné takes part in this year’s edition.

The 2025 theme, “SHIFT: Architecture in Times of Radical Change,” explores how architecture can relate to the deep cultural, social, and environmental transformations shaping our world today, while presenting possible alternative and future directions.

Paradigma Ariadné is exhibiting a project that explores the history, social role, materiality, forms, and imagined future of the adobe oven. The exhibition is open to visitors until February 2026.

The adobe fireplace is more than a utilitarian object; it is a vessel of memory, touch, and community. Built by hand, without tools mediating between maker and matter, it embodies a direct connection between human body and earth. A grandchild repairing a hearth could encounter the very handprints of a long-departed ancestor, finding continuity between the living and the dead in the material roughness of adobe.

For centuries across Central Europe, the fireplace stood at the heart of domestic life. In summer, homes spilled outward into gardens and small outbuildings; in winter, life contracted inward, into the kitchen, where the fireplace radiated warmth and togetherness. Here families cooked, baked, and shared stories, while its ornamented surfaces recorded centuries of food culture, natural knowledge, and symbolic meaning.

The history of these ovens is intertwined with social change. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the shortage of fuel revived their use, even as governments promoted modernization and industrial heating technologies. Ethnographers documented their varied forms just as nostalgia began to grow, contrasting the tactile intimacy of adobe with the stark uniformity of panel housing. The fireplace became both a relic of necessity and a symbol of resistance, an anchor of warmth, memory, and critique.

One of the long-standing focuses of our architectural practice is exploring the relationship between vernacular traditions and the overly modernized built environment.