The idea of ghosts is a kind of psychological, maybe nostalgic manifestation that produces real experience out of memory. Real or imagined, an embedded memory can hand something almost tangible back — an image, a sound, a smell an effect — and we’ve built entire cultures around giving that a name: ghost, spirit, presence. This summer in Chicago, I kept running into that mechanism everywhere I looked. Not literal ghosts. Something closer to residue — meaning that was left behind after the moment that created it had passed, waiting to be rediscovered by whoever walked through next. Philosopher Jacques Derrida argued that the present is never fully self-contained; it is always haunted by the ghosts of the past and the lost, unfulfilled futures.
I should state that my primary role at NeoCon/Design Days was as an instructor. I brought Pratt interior design students to Chicago for an eight-day immersion into architecture and design — into history and mystery, objects and space. And in part, this recounts that experience.
The Fine Arts Building on Michigan Avenue still hums with this residue. Hand-operated elevators, artists’ studios stacked on artists’ studios goaing back more than a century, a building that has never really stopped being used for exactly what it was built for. You can feel the accumulation in the stairwells — decades of music practice rooms and painting studios layered on top of each other like sediment. Intimate ghosts, indeed.
At the Edith Farnsworth House the ghost is a disagreement. Mies built a glass box meant to dissolve the line between shelter and landscape, and Farnsworth lived inside that argument in a way he never had to. The house still carries both of their versions of it — his vision, her lived experience — unresolved, both still legible if you know to look for them.
The Schweikher House is quieter but the same species of haunting: a house an architect built for himself, which means it’s less a design statement than a private philosophy left behind, still standing, still telling you exactly how one person thought a life should be organized in space.
And then 860–880 Lake Shore Drive put Mies back in the frame a third time. The Farnsworth House, then our walking tour’s account of his commercial career, and finally the towers on the lake. By the third encounter it stops feeling like coincidence and starts feeling like a haunting in the literal sense: the same design mind occupying multiple rooms of our week without ever being asked back.
Even the trade show itself has a ghost story now. NeoCon used to mean the Merchandise Mart, full stop — one building, one consolidated event. Many showrooms have decamped to Fulton Market for “Design Days,” running simultaneously a mile away. THE MART is haunted by absence, by emptied showroom space and ghosts of where the companies used to reside, while a second, newer spirit of the event has stood itself up somewhere else entirely, where the ghost of the abattoir lingers around us. Same industry, same week, two branded afterlives.
Spatial intimacy, it turns out, is just the ghost idea felt through the body instead of remembered through the mind. The downtown walking tour with my students ran on that same current — the story of the skyscraper as a form, told alongside Mies’s own career, the two narratives braided together as we moved block to block. It’s a fascinating tour led by the incredibly well informed Larry Simon. The history we see and experience is filled with many stories that are the backbone of our built narrative in America.
Louis Sullivan moves through the tour too, a ghost underneath the ghost — Mies’s own haunting has an older haunting inside it, “form follows function” still audible under everything built after him. But as we winded through downtown Chicago, there was an urban spatial intimacy — tactile, then detached. Masonry to concrete, glass and steel. And of course Mies’s Chicago Federal Center and the residue of what was an honorable and formal — or even an elegant — United States Post Office space. Now merely a semi-functional apparition.
Back in THE MART at the Stylex showroom, Erika Hoek’s installation made the same argument in miniature. Her work occupies a space between furniture, sculpture, and spatial intervention — objects that only finish becoming themselves once a body moves near them. The installation was inspired by Lilly Reich’s 1927 exhibition Café Samt und Seide — Café Velvet and Silk — a piece of history nearly a hundred years old, re-embodied in a showroom in 2026, defining space through light, movement, touch and presence. If I needed one clean example of the ghosts idea working exactly as I described it, this was it. And again the ghost of Mies, as Reich’s collaborator, hovered around us.
Interpersonal connection through space kept showing up as something I noticed in hindsight — pride, mostly, recalled after the fact. Teaching the NeoCon class was the exception: connection happening live — in the room, in spaces, while it was still unfolding. But teaching is its own version of the ghost mechanism, just running forward instead of back. I’m not recalling residue here — I’m seeding it. Whatever the students absorbed during the week — a building, a space, furniture, a color, a sentence said in passing — will surface years from now in a project they won’t remember the origin of. I won’t be there when it does. That’s the haunting.
While visiting the Obama Presidential Center a week before it opened, that same feeling was everywhere on site. People were proud, and it went beyond pride in a President — it was pride in Chicago, in a sense of place, in a shared space built explicitly so people could learn and connect in it. The building hadn’t officially opened yet and the meaning was already there, fully embedded, ahead of schedule. Perhaps it was the ghosts idea running in reverse: usually the memory comes first and the residue follows; here the residue — the pride, the anticipation — arrived before the thing itself was even consummated. I felt it, my students felt it, it was a deeply emotional and moving experience.
Laura Guido-Clark’s session with my students about Project Color Corps worked the same way from a different angle: color as something closer to a shared nervous system than a design tool, a way a room full of strangers ends up feeling the same thing at the same time without discussing it. But the idea of “community” and how the organization connects with young people to create pride of place in local neighborhoods — is essentially the same idea. And perhaps in that case it’s re-framing the ghosts, the residue — and evolving it to have a new life, a new interpretation – or a renewal.
And then there’s the version of all this that’s already been edited, illuminated and scored. “The Bear” turns Chicago into a character and its kitchen into the most intimate, pressurized room in the show — blocking and camera language doing spatial-intimacy work that interior design usually does on its own. Yet it embodies design and the passion we all feel and share, and it inhabits a space that was another restaurant, and the ghosts of it linger throughout the show right until the end. Walking the same city on foot right after watching it, I couldn’t help scouting it like a location. And feeling it — all there is, all there was.
Even the trade show knows this mechanism now, mostly by accident. Showrooms are increasingly built to be photographed — Design Days as much as NeoCon — and a photograph is exactly the thing I started with: an embedded moment producing a tangible image that outlives it. Every space, every installation, is half-designed for a phone before anyone touches the actual materials. The image is the residue now, arriving on purpose instead of by accident.
Ghosts. Not superstition, just a mechanism — memory or anticipation dense enough to leave something behind that a body can still register. A building holding two people’s competing versions of it. An eighty-year-old exhibition re-embodied in a showroom. A civic building fully meaningful before it’s even open. An entire trade show splitting into two simultaneous afterlives a mile apart.
Derrida believed the present to be haunted by unfulfilled futures as much as by the past — and the Obama Presidential Center, with pride fully embedded a week before the doors opened, is that idea standing in a room, not just a sentence in a book. None of it required anything supernatural. It merely required focusing on what remained in a room, after the moment it was created had already moved on.
And without doubt – I believe in ghosts…
Editor’s Note: Jon Otis, FIIDA is a professor of interior design at Pratt Institute since 1998. As Director of the Creative Xchange research accelerator, his research has been focused on ‘Sound in Space,’ and he is in the process of developing innovative new strategies termed ‘Resonant Objects.’ Additionally, utilizing the theory of ‘Hauntology’ he is developing a new course and book that will focus on the notion of ‘Ghost Space.’ Otis has served on the IIDA Board of Directors, IIDA Foundation and IIDA Advocacy Committee. He currently serves on the DIFFA Board of Trustees, and is an Advisor for Lot21. In 2022 he co-founded the Diversity by Design Fund (dxdf) to support educational initiatives for young students of color. Otis is the founder and principal of O|A- Object Agency since 1999. O|A is a multidisciplinary design studio and strategy agency in Brooklyn, NY.