Next week Jonah Reynolds, Pangea Biotecture’s co-founder and CEO, travels to Chicago for Coherences, October 12 to 14, 2026. Convened by beaming, a future architecture studio, it brings together 40 to 50 doers, artists, storytellers, entrepreneurs, investors, world builders and healers to reimagine the Midwest and the future of a care economy. The tagline is simple: a more coherent Midwest is possible.
The intention, in the organizers’ words, is to step outside the current frame, be fully present, create the conditions for spontaneous cooperation, and leave with concrete, collaborative actions to carry out in 2027.
Three days in Chicago
Monday, October 12: Obama Presidential Center. A tour of the grounds of the presidential center and its vision for a more equitable tomorrow, then the evening at the Protopia Lounge in the Downtown Loop.
Tuesday, October 13: reading the river as a living system. A 90-minute chartered journey on the Chicago River, co-narrated by Friends of the Chicago River, the organization dedicated to restoring the Chicago-Calumet River system. Through story, observation and conversation, the group reads the river for what it shows about adaptation, relationship, stewardship and collective action. Hosted by Friends of the Chicago River, Mercedes Martin & Co., One Thriving Planet and SOCAP.
Wednesday, October 14: IMAGINAL, Coherences 2036. A full day of participatory future building, scenario planning and live backcasting. In the morning everyone steps into character as leaders meeting at Coherences ten years from now. By midday the group is designing cross-sector initiatives for a 2036 Council Assembly. By afternoon the work turns back to the present: real pilots, coalitions and resource commitments for 2027. Hosted by beaming Future Architecture with Tony Patrick and Bruce and Bisi Mau, and ending, as Chicago evenings should, with live blues at Buddy Guy’s.
For a design-build practice, that last move is the familiar one. Every building we make starts as a picture of how a place should work decades from now, and then gets drawn backwards into sheets, permits and a construction schedule. Backcasting is how good buildings are already made.
Three missing pieces
Running through all three days are three gaps the organizers see holding back a new economy, starting in the Midwest:
- Coordination across silos. The people who could solve a problem together rarely sit at the same table.
- Faster money for the right projects. New financial mechanisms that move resources to the projects, organizations and companies building the world we want, at the speed the work needs.
- Shared imagination. Future-facing stories and language that can build a culture wide enough to reach the mainstream.
None of these is abstract to us. They are the same three problems we meet on every site.
Why a builder belongs in that room
Silos are the first thing a regenerative building has to break. A conventional house is designed by one team, plumbed by another, powered by a utility and financed by a bank, and nobody owns how those pieces behave together. In an off-grid biotecture home the thermal mass is the heating system, the roof is the water supply, and the wastewater is treated in planters inside the house and goes back into the soil. Energy, water, food, structure and land have to be designed as one system, or they fail as separate ones. That is why Pangea works as a single design, permitting and construction practice rather than handing the job from desk to desk.
The money is built for the wrong number. Housing is usually financed on what it costs to build. Whether people can actually stay in it depends on what it costs to live in: utilities, water, maintenance and infrastructure fees, every month, for decades. A home that makes its own power, catches its own water and heats itself with the sun changes that second number. That is the case we make for integrated, regenerative development, and on projects like Chamisa Verde, seven deed-restricted affordable homes in Taos built with 3D-printed walls. Financing that recognizes lifetime cost, not just first cost, would move far more of this work out of the pilot stage.
The story still sounds fringe. To many people an Earthship is a curiosity on the mesa outside Taos. To us it is a working demonstration of building science: thermal mass, passive solar orientation and closed-loop water operating together. The more of that we can say in plain language, the faster it stops being alternative and becomes simply how good buildings are made. (If you want our version of that story, start with A Tire Wall Is a Battery.)
Who else will be there
The organizers describe a room that includes scientists and business leaders building a regional supply chain for critical materials in the Midwest, impact investors managing billions of dollars, producers of large public immersive experiences, technologists building distributed compute at a fraction of a conventional data center’s footprint, founders of venture funds investing in people of color, and people working with youth to world-build community-centered mental health care. Among the named participants:
- Atossa Soltani, Director of Global Strategy for the Amazon Sacred Headwaters Alliance and founder of Amazon Watch, who helped design a bioregional sovereign wealth fund with Indigenous leaders.
- Tim Freundlich, founder and executive director of ImpactAssets, a nonprofit impact investing firm.
- Bruce Mau, co-author with Rem Koolhaas of S,M,L,XL, author of MC24, and co-founder and CEO of the Chicago-based Massive Change Network.
- Elizabeth Thompson, who created the Buckminster Fuller Challenge as executive director of the Buckminster Fuller Institute and now leads Visions2030.
- Marcela Oliva, co-founder of AuraEngine and former Knowledge Architect for the Los Angeles Community College District’s building program.
- Ade Mabogunje of Stanford Mechanical Engineering and Neeraj Sonalkar of the Health Futures Lab at San Mateo Medical Center.
Water, finance, design, health and housing, in one room for three days. That is the kind of table we keep saying regenerative development needs.
Join us, or talk to us after
Space is very limited; the organizers call it an experiment and a prototype. Day passes are $100 for Monday and $200 each for Tuesday or Wednesday, an all-access pass for all three days is $500, and there is a pay-what-you-wish option for those able to contribute more. Venues and details go to registered guests ahead of the gathering. Register for Coherences here, and learn more at coherences.org. If you will be there, find Jonah and say hello.
If you can’t make it but you are working on any of these problems, from a single off-grid home to the financing of a whole community, we would like to hear about it. Tell us about your project, and we will share what we bring back from Chicago in the newsletter.