Located at 6100 South Blackstone in the Woodlawn neighborhood of Chicago’s South Side, The Experimental Station is a laboratory of ideas dedicated to community change and environmental sustainability. Once called simply “The Building”, the trapezoidal structure is a site of exploration where social and cultural innovation is actually visibly at work within its own four brick walls.

Artist Dan Peterman acquired the building from Ken Dunn, founder of the Resource Center—a local recycling operation (see other site descriptions) that had operated out of the Building since the late 1960’s until it outgrew the space and Dunn handed it over to
Peterman in 1996.
After a devastating fire that left only its structure skeletal and roofless in the spring of 2001, reconstruction of the space is currently under way after years of relentless negotiation and deliberating. Before the catastrophe, the Building was the site of the cultural criticism journal The Baffler, Blackstone Bicycle Works, Wong Lee's auto repair in addition to several artists’ spaces, as well as temporary projects, exhibitions and a community garden. While bikes, cars and cultural critique may seem like the most unlikely fusion of ventures, this novel intersection of activity and exchange is the ultimate embodiment of the kind of foundational thinking on which the Building grounds itself—seeing and creating new relationships, and thus possibilities, among that which is in front of you.

In its reincarnated state, The Experimental Station is now an official not-for-profit and therefore an institutional ally for the myriad projects and small-scale enterprises it houses. In promoting the free flow of ideas and relationships of informal exchange, TheExperimental Station has created the potential for all sorts of collaboration and continual reinvention.

See www.temporaryservices.org/2004.html#downtime for more information and Dan Wang’s interview with Dan Peterman.

Kasia Houlihan