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The Chicago Architecture Biennial prepares for round two in 2017

2016-01-07T19:33:00-05:00

Met with "unequivocal success", as described by Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, the Chicago Architecture Biennial will be back in fall 2017. The Chicago Cultural Center had a bustling three months serving as the venue of the inaugural Chicago Architecture Biennial, "The State of the Art of Architecture", which ran from October 3-January 3.

While the content of the Biennial itself is up for debate, the event attracted over 500,000 attendees. Students, educators, architects, and the general public got to check out exhibitions, full-scale installations like those from the Lakefront Kiosk Competition, and a slew of public programs.

There isn't much about the 2017 event just yet, but official dates, leadership, and the Biennial's theme will be revealed in the coming months. Stay tuned.

In case you missed it, here's plenty of CAB coverage from Archinect:

Cutting across the Chicago Architecture Biennial

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Cutting across the Chicago Architecture Biennial: the Architecture Lobby's uninvited installation takes aim at the field's labor issues

2015-10-22T13:53:00-04:00

Join us for an uninvited Chicago Biennial installation consisting of scenarios depicting the absurdities of architectural practice/labor/work. We seek to expand the current conversation about architecture to include an actionable critique of the real, often tragic circumstances that precarious creative workers face on a daily basis.

Alongside the official installations and programmed events, a host of uninvited and unofficial events have coalesced around the Chicago Architecture Biennial, the first major architecture biennial in the United States. One of the most promising comes from the Architecture Lobby, "an organization of architectural workers advocating for the value of architecture in the general public and for architectural work within the discipline."

After a reception from 6 to 11 pm next Friday, October 30, the Architecture Lobby will put on the installation (re)Working Architectur e, including a series of performances aimed at generating "new perspectives and possibilities for action on topics ranging from unpaid internships, the mystification of the role of the architect, and how we conceive of the value of our work."

The event also will include an architecture-themed "Beaux-Arts Ball" starting at 8 pm. Architecture Lobby encourages you to bring your dancing shows and a costume. The next morning, join...

Cutting across the Chicago Architecture Biennial: Tatiana Bilbao's solution to Mexico's housing shortage

2015-10-20T19:56:00-04:00

Housing – its affordability, accessibility, and form – is a key preoccupation of the Chicago Architecture Biennial. While not necessarily the core concern for most of the Biennial's participants, housing gets a significant share of the exhibition's floorspace.

Several participants' considerations of contemporary housing issues are exhibited in full-scale, benefitting the visitor with an easily relatable (and, at least by size, literally inhabitable) form. As one of these life-sized installations, Tatiana Bilbao Estudio's sustainable housing project stands out for already being realized outside of the Biennial's walls.

Designed in response to Mexico's housing shortage, referencing the country's overall deficit of 9 million homes, Bilbao's Sustainable Housing project aims to provide a prototype for affordable, adaptable, single-family social housing. After researching with potential users and observing concurrent trends in local social housing design, the firm produced a modified vision...

Cutting across the Chicago Architecture Biennial: the Myth-Making of New-Territories / M4

2015-10-19T21:11:00-04:00

Despite its economy of presentation – just text and video, nothing flashy or interactive – the installation #mythomaniaS at the Chicago Architecture Biennial offers a density of thought at once alluring and abstruse. In this, it well conveys the concerns and formal strategies of its slippery authors, the Bangkok-based French-born collective currently known as New-Territories, but also M4 (MindMachineMakingMyths), formerly R&Sie (a near homophone of heresy in French), and occasionally François Roche and Camille Lacadée.

A set of monitors plays several of their mesmerizing and visually-lush videos that were made in collaboration with some of the most influential artists of the day, including Pierre Huyghe and Carsten Holler. Filmed across the world, from Bangkok and its environs to the snow-covered Swiss Alps, they should be read as “architectural scenarios,” something like provocations or insinuations of possible ways of relating to a context. “Environments and paranoia as symptoms o...

Cutting across the Chicago Architecture Biennial: Re-ordering Mies in "We Know How to Order"

2015-10-15T19:23:00-04:00

For a highly-limited run during the Chicago Architecture Biennial's opening weekend, Mies van der Rohe's federal plaza became the stage for a performance foreign to most central business districts: a drill team exercise. Conceived by Bryony Roberts (of the Oslo and Los Angeles-based Bryony Roberts Studio) and choreographed by Asher Waldron (of the South Shore Drill Team in Chicago), the drill team's performance is an extension of Roberts' practice in the emerging architecture discipline of experimental preservation.

Titled "We Know How to Order," the performance elaborates and re-contextualizes the idea of "ordered" space within the public realm, showing how the concept of rigid structures – including both the imposing facades of Mies' plaza buildings and the tight coordination of the drill team's movements – may become elastic within a given space. Scored by a mixture of Philip Glass and House music, and followed by the undeniable intoxication of watching impressive displays of pre...

Cutting across the Chicago Architecture Biennial: Pedro y Juana's living room

2015-10-13T19:11:00-04:00

Mexico City-based designers Ana Paula Ruiz Galindo and Mecky Reuss, professionally identified as Pedro y Juana, have perhaps one of the most visited exhibitions in the entire Chicago Architecture Biennial. Their installation – a network of hanging paper lanterns on pulleys, accompanied by custom-designed tables and chairs – strategically furnishes the entirety of the Chicago Cultural Center’s Randolph Square, also known as “the living room of the city.”

Randolph Square is the main entrance foyer of the Cultural Center, where people come to linger regardless of exhibitions happening inside. As such, Pedro y Juana’s installation had to be ready for use, relatively hardy, and manage traffic flowing in and out of the Center. Their coordinated wire-mesh rocking chairs, sofas and tables became an easy complement to the heavily marbled Beaux-Arts interior, providing a much needed space for reflection, resting and discussion throughout the Biennial.

The lighting system serves more of a soc...

Cutting across the Chicago Architecture Biennial: Andrés Jaque's "Superpowers of Ten" performance

2015-10-12T18:45:00-04:00

A sausage as tall as you are. A skin cell the size of a dinner plate. The universe, in a glittery fan. These are a few of the props used by Andrés Jaque, founding architect of the Office for Political Innovation, in his "Superpowers of Ten" performance – a play staged on the ground floor of the Chicago Athletic Association during the opening weekend of the Chicago Architecture Biennial. Inspired by the Eames’ 1977 “Powers of Ten” film (the same year the Biennial’s namesake conference was held), the under-an-hour performance investigates the power of design to scale up, or down, into historic social and cultural sea changes.

Initially developed for the Lisbon Architecture Triennial in 2013, “Superpowers” is staged like a super-polemical elementary school play: a narrator guides actors, dressed in cartoonish cardboard or papier-mâché costumes, through stories of 20th century design history. The opening act plays direct homage to the Eames’ film, recreating the zooming in and out on the...

Cutting across the Chicago Architecture Biennial: Sou Fujimoto's potato chips and other found architectures

2015-10-11T12:00:00-04:00

There’s a difficulty inherent to any presentation of architecture in an exhibition context: architecture (it is commonly thought) operates in the physical world, so how do you do architecture inside a gallery space? Hence, it’s pretty inevitable that a survey like the Chicago Architecture Biennial will be met with lots of questions marks and even defiant denouncements: “This is not architecture!” In general, such accusations tend to fall flat: architecture is hardly an immutable object moving through space-time.

But then again, when an exhibit is explicitly tailored to professional, academic, and lay audiences, it’s also difficult to ignore the murmurs of an exiting tourist, “I just don’t get what that has to do with architecture…” For some, the Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto’s installation Architecture is Everywhere, comprising a collection of “found architectures” – a pile of potato chips, a cardboard box, an upturned ashtray – left them scratching their heads.

There’s a whole lot...

Cutting across the Chicago Architecture Biennial: "Rock Print" from ETH Zürich and MIT

2015-10-08T17:49:00-04:00

Rock Print, one of the most technologically-impressive installations at the Chicago Architecture Biennial, is the collaborative project of Gramazio Kohler Research of ETH Zürich and MIT’s Self-Assembly Lab. A towering stone assemblage put together by robots and secured with nothing more than thread, the installation is a reminder that feats of technical ingenuity can also be poetic.

According to the catalogue description, Rock Print “brings forward a new category of potentially random-packed, poly-disperse structures that can be automatically fabricated in nonstandard shapes.”

The project differs from existing jammed materials in that it operates on the macroscale, giving it potential architectural applications. And looking at its alien form, well-framed by a doorway into its room in the Chicago Cultural Center, the mind begins to run wild with the formal possibilities.

Perhaps most remarkable is that with the snip of a knife, the assemblage would fall to pieces (and it will, come clos...

Cutting across the Chicago Architecture Biennial: Tomás Saraceno's spiders

2015-10-07T13:10:00-04:00

For the first few seconds you’re blind in the darkness. Then a reflex forces your pupils wider and your photoreceptor rod cells become more sensitive, sending a neural signal that alerts you to four glowing cubes that seem to be floating in mid-air in front of your body. It takes another few seconds for the glow to connect to its source, illuminate the supports of the plexiglass boxes, and finally render their content legible: a series of startlingly-complex and impossibly-delicate spiderwebs.

Here drawing back the curtain doesn’t destroy the magic. Quite to the contrary, Tomás Saraceno’s collaboration with various arachnids for the first Chicago Architecture Biennial has a power that extends beyond some mere trick of the light and runs deeper than a one-liner about non-human construction. It's a reprise of a project he's exhibited before, notably at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, but within an architectural context it conjures a particular significance.

The Argentine-born, Berlin-based Sara...