Photographer Sandra Steinbrecher: Reimagining The Salt Shed
Documentary photographer Sandra Steinbrecher presents her two-year photographic chronicle of the Morton Salt Warehouse's transformation into The Salt Shed music venue.
Why we picked this
The Salt Shed transformation is one of the more interesting architectural stories in Chicago right now—what it means to preserve industrial memory while making space for a different kind of gathering.
The former Morton Salt Warehouse along the Chicago River sat for years as one of those industrial buildings whose fate feels genuinely uncertain—too significant to demolish easily, too specific to repurpose simply. Its conversion into The Salt Shed, a 4,500-capacity music venue that opened in 2023, became one of the more discussed adaptive reuse projects in the city’s recent history.
Sandra Steinbrecher, a documentary photographer and master silver gelatin printer based in Chicago, spent two years photographing the transformation from the inside—the deconstruction, the construction, the people involved, the way the building changed character and purpose. Her book gathers that documentation into a record of a building becoming something new.
She’s in conversation with architectural historian and preservation specialist Elizabeth Blasius at Co-Prosperity, as part of the Chicago Humanities Festival’s Bridgeport festival day.