2025 Exhibition Field Guide
Interview with Adaptive Operations

In his work at Adaptive Operations in Chicago—as well as in the classes he teaches about adaptive reuse at the Illinois Institute of Technology—Charlie Vinz pulls inspiration from the work of New York’s Center for Urban Pedagogy, where projects involve looking into the workings of complex processes and systems. That being the case, it seems only logical that Accessing Nostalgia peels back the history—both literally and figuratively—of The Crump Theater, going back to the past as a way to find a way forward.

To that end, Vinz identified four possible “portals” as new ways to explore the old building: Reviving a covered window on the theater’s façade, making use of a long-unused opera box, opening an outer wall to create a gathering space, and celebrating the building’s intrinsic materials.

To represent the window in the structure’s original façade, Vinz created a modular system of mirrors made up of the silhouettes of local people that make it seem as if a buried layer has been extracted out onto the wall.

“There’s a vast community of people who have worked to save The Crump and restore it and to get it to its next phase,” he said. “So those are the people whose silhouettes I want to capture—the community that has been there for The Crump. Those are the people I want to enshrine in this way.” 

The second portal is in one of the six boxes that served opera-goers in the past but have been sealed off for years, an intimate space that accommodates just a few people.

The Crump’s other issues interested Vinz, too. Since it is a 750-seat movie theater that employs obsolete technology, he hopes people will imagine what it would be like to totally reprogram it. And because the theater also has a history of racial segregation, he has outfitted the former opera box with materials from where the second-class seating had been to raise awareness and charge the space with material history. The box also contains a resource bookshelf with materials on a variety of topics related to preservation and adaptive reuse, especially as they relate to racism and segregation relevant to  The Crump’s history.

“It’s flipping the values,” he said. “Now that both the segregated seating and opera boxes are both obsolete as symbols of race and status, we’re imagining what it might be like to flatten that hierarchy and reorient it.”

Vinz hopes visitors will sit in those good seats to reflect on these types of spaces all around small-town America, but he expects them to have fun while they’re here, too. He calls the booth the equivalent of a selfie station, where companions can draw or photograph silhouettes of one another or to share memories both good and bad.

“I think it’s really important that we don’t edit out the parts of a place’s history we don’t like,” Vinz said. “That’s important to the story. The trouble I’ve had in researching that part of the building is that most people don’t want to talk about it. I want to make it OK to include it in the spectrum of memories and histories of the building.”

The third portal is on the east side of the building, where Vinz has peeled up a side of the wall to create a gathering space. The roof then becomes a very simple elevation—a flat surface with one cut and folded up that creates a dynamic, complicated form. 

“We’re putting one move into it, and that one move makes it much more nuanced,” Vinz said. “It feels like a good gesture toward the future. We have to imagine that where that sits is where there is going to be a future addition to the building, a future accessible entry, a future accessible vertical circulation path.”

Again dipping into the past to envision the future, this is a space where there had been a building attached to the theater until it burned in 1978. The installation occupies that space but in a completely different form with the idea that it can help people reimagine how The Crump can become viable in its next phase. The roof is made of the corrugated steel from the side of the building with a wood truss system underneath it to hold it up and pull it off the building. 

A fourth portal involves thinking about the legacy of the components of the building and having a deeper understanding with inanimate objects. The lumber used in The Crump’s trusses, for example, is local hardwood that would have been growing since the 15th or 16th century. Similarly, the small brick yards that once operated around Columbus manufactured bricks from local clay.

Vinz did some excavating to find these vintage materials and to illustrate that when we talk about a historic building we’re talking about a different stack of relationships to the material of locality. He said he hopes that both locals and visitors see a building they have seen before in a new way. 

Any work with adaptive reuse, he said, is a Yes And project. “I hope they are able to rediscover The Crump building,” he said. “The point of these portals is to say that there are many ways of seeing it, and here are just a few.”