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...

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