Contributed by: Chicago Architecture Center
Organization: Chicago Architecture Center
Dated Posted: April 15, 2026
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The Chicago Architecture Center Celebrates 60 Years in April 2026

Anniversary commemorations include a birthday toast on Tuesday, April 21 and a retrospective exhibition tracking the CAC’s evolution from grassroots activists to a world-class cultural center.

This month, the Chicago Architecture Center (CAC), the leading organization devoted to celebrating Chicago as a center of architectural innovation, celebrates its 60th birthday. For the occasion, an anniversary exhibition titled Currents: 60 Years of the Chicago Architecture Center will be unveiled April 13, 2026 in the Center’s first floor Orientation Gallery. The exhibition celebrates the spirit that defines the organization, charting the evolution from its grassroots efforts to save the historic Glessner House in 1966 to becoming a standard-bearing world class architecture center renowned for establishing Chicago as “the city of architecture.”

On the evening of Tuesday April 21 at the Center, CAC President and CEO Eleanor Esser Gorski, AIA, will honor the people and personalities who make CAC a cherished institution. At 5:30pm, Esser Gorski will lead CAC founders, volunteer docents, staff, CAC members and the general public in a celebratory birthday toast. Esser Gorski will then invite guests to the lecture hall where she will moderate a panel discussion with some of the people involved in the establishment and long-term stewardship of the CAC. Panelists are expected to include original founder and inaugural trustee Wayne Benjamin, historian and early staff member Susan Benjamin, architect and early volunteer Cynthia Weese and Glessner House executive director and curator William Tyre. (Today, CAC and Glessner House operate as two independent organizations that maintain close ties). The public can register for free to attend CAC’s April 21 60th Anniversary Celebration here.