The Chicago Architecture Biennial Imagines What Comes Next
With architect Florencia Rodriguez at the helm, the biennial’s tenth-anniversary edition unfolds across the city with installations that rethink materials and permanence
The subtitle of Shift, the Chicago Architectural Biennial’s tenth-anniversary show, is “Architecture in Times of Radical Change.” Indeed, the show—which opens in two sections as it runs throughout the city until the end of February, the first now on view and the second arriving in November—arrives at a moment of major change for the biennial itself. This spring, the organization announced a new executive director and board members. It also named Argentine architect Florencia Rodriguez, the former director of the University of Illinois Chicago School of Architecture and founding principal of the architectural platform -Ness, as the biennial’s artistic director. Rodriguez, who is based in Buenos Aires, brings a solid grounding in the contemporary architecture of the Americas and the Global South.
“I really believe in the ways in which you can make things public,” Rodriguez said at the biennial’s opening event, held under the stunning stained glass domes of George Foster Shepley’s 1897 Chicago Cultural Center. “But also,” she continued, “understanding that we are not all the same, and that there is a kind of wonder in that, and a huge possibility when we start learning from others and looking for different responses.”
There are huge possibilities tucked within the dozens of projects and installations Rodriguez has assembled in the Cultural Center. Many of them offer glimpses at the beauty of creation itself. In “Variations in Mass, Nos. 5,6,7,” a room by American artist Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork, great masses of brick-printed material swell and collapse to the piped-in sounds of a symphony. Upstairs, a screen floats in a distant corner, showing Dutch artist Berndnaut Smilde’s mysterious slow-motion video of handmade clouds dissipating into ether. Both projects capture moments which blur the lines between an object’s origin and its end; their beauty might argue for the benefits to a circular logic of creation.
Other participants created temporary environments to make some lasting changes in how we view materials. Object of Common Interest/LOT Office for Architecture installed a groovy circular meeting space and chill out zone in which stools gathered in a circle to create a platform for viewing an enormous orb looming overhead. If the arrangement brought to mind Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable brand of happenings, every bit of this iteration was fashioned from the designers’ own biodegradable material, and thus far less inevitably clogging up landfills after the party is over.
At the top of the center’s grand staircase, meanwhile, Iman S. Fayyad constructed useful poetry from quotidian plywood and backpack straps in the form of an undulating shelter with intimate nooks within the folds and more formal seating around its exteriors. Plywood has rarely seemed more fluid. Back in the main space, La Dallman offers one of the most stirring cases for adaptive reuse in recent memory, documenting its reimagining of a 1901 granary in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, into a potential community center. In a sense, it transforms a storage for seeds into an incubator for the seeds of change.
Optimism abounds in the biennial’s capsule collections at the nearby Graham Foundation, whose highlights include a vote of confidence in journalism via a reading library devoted to new publications of Stan Allen’s drawings of buildings and writings about them; and also at Galerie Creative Mind artist Theaster Gates’ Stony Island Arts Bank, where “Yvyra,” an ersatz tower of soil and fabric rising from a tree-shaped structure, hovers like an earthy retort to the cynical monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.
On the grounds of the Griffin Museum of Science and Library, however, ghosts seem to fill the air. The studios Balsa Crosetto Piazzi and Giorgis Ortiz traced the foundations of buildings raised and destroyed for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in some 10,000 dry-stacked bricks, leaving all that 19th-century ambition and decadence to blow in the wind. The site was activated by Firat Erdim, who constructed a series of wind-played harps to be performed as one collective instrument by students from UIC and the Illinois Institute of Technology, as if not only the brick walls could speak, but the wind could, too.
It’s left to be seen whether the future slate of CAB projects tackle the “radical changes” currently darkening horizons across the world, including oncoming climate disasters. At the opening, Rodriguez noted that “Shift is specifically about how architecture and design can be, and are, tools to rethink, to plan, to project possible futures.” Perhaps more specificity will come as the biennial progresses. After all, she continued, “those possibilities depend on us.”