The hyper-modern single-story blue building at the corner of 16th and Sawyer gives off vibes that are one part coffee shop, one part community space—just as envisioned by the Robles siblings, who run the lead firm on the project, the nonprofit Duo Development.

The new building, named Starling—inspired by the ways large groups of the birds can generate figures when they come together—serves as a proof of concept for the firm's ideas. "We call it our album drop," Rafael 'Rafa' Robles jokes.

Persuading decision-makers of the need for a building like Starling in North Lawndale was a hard sell, according to Robles and his siblings Carlos and Karla. They credit support from the Elevated Works cohort with helping the project break through.

"The hardest part for me was whenever I felt like I had to justify to people that this was good idea," Carlos Robles-Shanahan says. "Being part of Elevated Works has been invaluable, because talk about not having to convince people! They got it from the start."

Origins and Vision

In 2021, when the idea for the building first emerged, the Robles siblings had been working in the community for several years through a pro bono project assisting North Lawndale Community Coordinating Council with a new Quality of Life plan.

The siblings – who emigrated from Mexico and wound up in Palatine before going on to college and graduate school, training and working as architects, consultants, and teachers – were developing a transformative vision through an approach they call "multicontextual design:" solutions to problems with multiple causes and consequences. "Lots of problems can't be solved by a single intervention and require thinking in different dimensions," Rafa Robles says.

Starling is exemplifying that vision in multiple ways. Applying their design vision to what they heard from residents during the quality-of-life planning and their subsequent years of engagement across North Lawndale communities led the Robles to envision Starling as a space to "replenish, gather, learn, and create." Some examples:

• Offering residents a place to meet right in the neighborhood is saving residents’ time and money -- just in the first few weeks, Carlos Robles says, many visitors have commented that they’ve shifted to meeting locally having a place to meet in the neighborhood saves them the time and expense of going downtown.
• The building is one of several developments within a few blocks along 16th Street. The Street Vendors Association of Chicago recently celebrated grand opening of their shared kitchen a block or two west, for example—which is helping to revitalize the neighborhood. 
• They are also working on plans for revenue sharing with residents to incorporate shared-ownership into the Starling model (also reported in this article by Block Club Chicago).

It was important to provide residents quality-of-life improvements – or as Carlos Robles puts it, "nice things." Residents badly needed a place to host "baby showers, parties, things like that," he says. "We knew we wanted to build something to show the whole range of what we could do," Rafa Robles adds. "[Starling] fit[s] all the things we'd heard from residents of North Lawndale, to 'make it beautiful and also a place to exist.'"