...And other such stories, the third edition of the Chicago Architecture Biennial (CAB) kicks off this week in the Windy City, where over 80 contributors, including Theaster Gates, MASS Design Group, Forensic Architecture, Walter J. Hood, and others, are presenting a bevy of provocative and thoughtfully considered works that aim to re-situate architectural discourse firmly at the center of larger social justice-driven conversations that surround the built environment today.
The biennial, sponsored by British fossil fuel corporation BP and curated by CAB artistic director Yesomi Umolu, aims to present an “expansive and multi-faceted exploration of the field of architecture and the built environment globally,” according to a press release. The effort, developed by Umolu and co-curators Sepake Angiama and Paulo Tavares, centers on four realms of “research-led” critical discourse that address “the potency of space, architecture, and the natural world.”
Those four topic areas include: No Land Beyond, “which draws inspiration from indigenous approaches to nature, ecology, and landscape that transcend property ownership,” Appearances and Erasures, “which explores both shared and contested memories in consideration of monuments, memorials, and social histories,” Rights and Reclamations, which “interprets space as a site of advocacy and civic participation,” and Common Ground, “which foregrounds aspects of rights, advocacy, and civic purpose in architectural practice, including affordable and equitable housing.”
Though CAB has just opened to the public, the show has already begun to create news of its own. In September, Chicago Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin touched off discussion over the ethics of paid press trips to the event, while Anjulie Rao of Chicago Reader provided one of the first critical perspectives on the 2019 CAB run. The recent opening of ArchiteXX’s Now What?! Advocacy, Activism & Alliances in American Architecture since 1968 exhibition at the Co-Prosperity Sphere in Chicago is also turning heads, as the group has rejected affiliation with CAB due to the biennial’s sponsorship by BP.
Below are a few highlighted exhibitions and programs taking place within the CAB framework that encapsulate the curatorial goals of the event's organizers. There are many public events and other forms of programming being implemented alongside the exhibitions, information on those events can be found here.
Forensic Architecture & Invisible Institute
London-based Forensic Architecture and Chicago’s Invisible Institute have partnered to investigate The Killing of Harith Augustus, a 2018 police killing of a Chicago barber. The collaboration ses forensic techniques and on-the-ground investigations to create a narrative that runs counter to the one offered by police officers regarding the incident. The project reexamines the shooting death “cross six distinct time scales—from milliseconds to years” in an effort to contest the claim that the victim had engaged in “aggravated assault on a police officer,” as police investigators contend.
The project represents an extension of Invisible Institute’s journalistic and open-database initiatives that help to bring documented police interactions with the public to light. The Invisible Institute has created a digital tool called the Citizens Police Data Project that publishes formal complaints filed against police officers as part of an effort to build a more accurate public record. The tool, for example, can help find patterns showing spatialized disparities in the application of justice across the city, and has helped to quantify a subsect of the police force that is most frequently reported for engaging in misconduct.
Settler Colonial City Project and American Indian Center
The Settler Colonial City Project and American Indian Center are co-presenting research that delves into the concept of “settler colonialism,” a recently coined term that, according to a project website, describes “a distinctive form of colonialism that develops in places where settlers permanently reside and assert sovereignty.” Settler Colonialism is a violent, extractive form of habitation that can be found across a variety of historical and social phenomena, including European colonialism, and closer to today, the gentrification of America’s inner-city neighborhoods.
Architectural historians Ana María León and Andrew Herscher of the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Planning lead a research team that has partnered with AIC, the country’s oldest Native community center, to annotate both the Chicago Cultural Center and the American Indian Center complex in a way that highlights each building’s complicated and inconvenient histories. Placards in each space highlight the provenance of the land, finishes, fixtures, and symbolic elements specific to each building. The “decolonizing” process serves, according to the exhibitors, to acknowledge “settler colonialism as an unmarked structure for the distribution of land, possibilities of life, and imagination of those futures.”
MASS Design Group
MASS Design Group, in partnership with artist Hank Willis Thomas and the "gun safety advocacy groups" Everytown for Gun Safety and Purpose Over Pain, has created a memorial to the victims of America’s gun violence epidemic. The Gun Violence Memorial Project installation consists of a grouping of four house-shaped glass block sculptures that hold a collection of “remembrance objects” that each represents something meaningful to a person who has died from gun violence. The objects include small toys, jewelry, journals, and other objects. Each of the four gabled structures is built using 700 glass blocks, one block for each of the lives lost to gun violence every week in America. Each keepsake is held in its own hollow glass block marked with the name, year of birth, and year of death of the person being honored. The installation organizers will be collecting remembrance objects throughout the run of the exhibition in Chicago to add to the memorial.
The memorial is designed as “the first step to recognizing the great need for a national, permanent memorial to gun violence victims,” according to the designers, and will be moved to Washington, D.C.when CAB comes to a close in 2020.
Center for Spatial Research
Directed by Professor Laura Kurgan of Columbia University’s GSAPP, the Center for Spatial Research focuses on urban research that brings together design and the humanities, most notably through the group’s recent Conflict Urbanism project, which was exhibited at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale. For their CAB installation, the group looks at the peculiar concept of “homophily,” or the idea that “birds of a feather flock together.” The research examines the history of the phrase and unpacks its roots in a 1954 sociological study that found that close friendships happen not only due to shared physical characteristics but also as a result of shared belief systems.
The group’s installation, Homophily: The Urban History of an Algorithm examines the role algorithms play in shaping social dynamics today in digital space, “driving everything from targeted advertising to movie recommendations to predictive policing on Chicago’s streets,” according to a press release.
Walter J Hood
Oakland-based landscape architect Walter J. Hood’s Three Trees: Jackson, Obama, Washington engages with the ongoing debate over the construction of the Obama Presidential Library in Chicago’s Jackson Park. For the installation, Hood has transplanted trees from Chicago’s South Side to the Chicago Cultural Center in an effort to draw connections between today’s political urban design battles and their historical legacies as embodied by the works of Frederick Law Olmsted’s Jackson and Washington Parks.
I was at the opening last night. A few quick observations:
1. BP as a company and industry are problematic, yes. But, I was totally filled with joy as I looked around the hundreds of people at the party last night: old white men were in the VAST minority at the event. The rooms were filled with people of every color, orientation, gender, age...it was fantastic. In 30 years of being an architect I have never, ever been in an architecture event that was even close to the diversity of this party. Bravo to the organizers for making an event for everyone. I was literally smiling the whole time.
2. The Settler Colonial City Project and American Indian Center project is SO wonderful. Anjulie Rao's article about it is excellent. It's subtle, and beautifully made, and yet shockingly displacing: simple signs that remind you that the stone of the wall next to you was, for example, quarried and transported by captive people. The very subtle undercurrent of "Enjoy the visual beauty but remember its provenance is ugly" is profound and connects you deeply to the history of how civilization is built.
3. I was expecting to find the MASS Design Group project to be overly sentimental but oh man is it effective! Again, they use a very simple material presentation - traditional brick and home forms, rebuilt with white and transparency - to deliver a punch in the gut that connects you to humans.
4. Territorial Agency's extractive maps are beautiful. Painfully so!
5. My husband's company, Ignition Arts, built the Walter Hood Studio pieces shown above.
All 9 Comments
I was at the opening last night. A few quick observations:
1. BP as a company and industry are problematic, yes. But, I was totally filled with joy as I looked around the hundreds of people at the party last night: old white men were in the VAST minority at the event. The rooms were filled with people of every color, orientation, gender, age...it was fantastic. In 30 years of being an architect I have never, ever been in an architecture event that was even close to the diversity of this party. Bravo to the organizers for making an event for everyone. I was literally smiling the whole time.
2. The Settler Colonial City Project and American Indian Center project is SO wonderful. Anjulie Rao's article about it is excellent. It's subtle, and beautifully made, and yet shockingly displacing: simple signs that remind you that the stone of the wall next to you was, for example, quarried and transported by captive people. The very subtle undercurrent of "Enjoy the visual beauty but remember its provenance is ugly" is profound and connects you deeply to the history of how civilization is built.
3. I was expecting to find the MASS Design Group project to be overly sentimental but oh man is it effective! Again, they use a very simple material presentation - traditional brick and home forms, rebuilt with white and transparency - to deliver a punch in the gut that connects you to humans.
4. Territorial Agency's extractive maps are beautiful. Painfully so!
5. My husband's company, Ignition Arts, built the Walter Hood Studio pieces shown above.
MASS created a columbarium?
It seems weird to build a memorial to gun violence as a temporary museum piece -- perhaps that it on purpose? I usually find MASS group work to be literal and cheesy, but would be interesting to see in person.
Since I can't see the exhibit, my perspective only comes from the different reviews coming out thus far. Defiantly seeing a social-justice narrative emerging, which makes it seem like lefty propaganda. Am sure the exhibit is much better to see in person as all architecture or art transcends the narratives imposed on it. Unless the work itself is only speaking on an artistic / prop level -- ie like MASS's cheesy memorials.
I like the Kamin review, criticizing previous Biennalles for not focusing on Chicago. Other reviews seem like the standard leftist fetishizing of violence and sort of scorn for 'models and drawings.' and slogans about Native American land... patronizing our common knowledge of history.
what would be truly revolutionary is, instead of the CAB being hijacked by sociology students and artists, would harness Chicago architects and architecture to respond to these same themes. Otherwise its just reinforcing negative stereotypes of left politics as backward looking nihilists rather than forward looking designers that offer alternatives to far left or far right thinking. Or a strong vision that posits that there are some futures that are better than others. Seems like yet another missed opportunity to use architecture to link the good and bad together simultaneously.
Chemex I was going to respond flippantly and angrily to your post until I got to this: ...forward looking designers that offer alternatives to far left or far right thinking. Or a strong vision that posits that there are some futures that are better than others
And I think that if I pause for a moment we might have an opportunity to actually discuss this well, rather than the normal (we all do it) Archinect bitchfest.
So, let me say this. I agree with you that the Biennial does not showcase any forward-looking proposals. There is a lot of analysis, and a LOT of sorrow over how shitty things are, and a lot of it is likely preaching to the choir.
Which isn't to say the work isn't important and meaningful. I think the Settler Colonial City project should be expanded to every building, every modern-day interaction with any material item. You buy deodorant and the package says "This 3 oz of product is encased in 4 oz of plastic which won't degrade ever." You go to open you car door and get a little popup that says "Your commute to work today will contribute (x) pounds of VOCs to the air above (your city)"
But as for how architects can *improve* all of the terrible things about the way we inhabit the earth and function as a society? Maybe that's what the next iteration should be. They will have to be visionary proposals that tackle super difficult challenges, because that is where we are right now.
this issue is not necessarily the lack of visionary proposals but any ideas at all. It’s not really architecture but journalism. Which is fine if it where the Chicago Journalism Biennalle. Journalism is the practice of not having any ideas but the ability to express them. It abuses and twists the power and meaning of the architecture to heighten the narratives it is highlighting.
Hope more critical reviews shine a better light on what is happening here. Maybe they just don’t like the idea of architecture — or modernism — or humanity in general. Then again, even beavers build dens
to push back against one critic I heard—architecture isn’t downstream from politics or culture, but the reverse. It is a way of thinking that uses your hands instead of your mouth
I got to check it out today and was- sadly- disappointed :( The past biennials were dense with projects, proposal, and installations and in comparison this one felt empty.
It was obviously very thoughtful in regards to diversity, labor, social issues, etc.(I I found myself really engrossed by some of these stories)- just wish these issues got some better architecture.
In this week's Archinect Sessions podcast Alejandro Aravena - who is doing all kinds of work - quotes Italo Calvino saying "An expert is someone who can tell you exactly what *not* to do." Seems relevant to what's happening right now - we are in a phase of bringing the social issues around architecture to light, and all of the people in the exhibit are pointing out what *not* to do, how not to go forward, how not to keep doing what we've always done.
Aravena is one who is upending a lot of "the way things are done", who else is?
Interesting after listening to the above podcast that the above quote was followed by Aravena’s own counterpoint... “so what do we do” and his philosophy as an architect to have a “ do lab” instead of a “think tank” and occupying the center between the nihilistic and cynical people who would do nothing and a rosy romantic idealist.
Obviously it seems we are in the first extreme as a moment, where certain groups are trying to project a cynical narrative
“I don’t understand why anybody goes to all the trouble ... just to talk about what we really can’t do and shouldn’t fight for.” - Elizabeth Warren
You're damned if you do
And you're damned if you don't
So you might as well just do
Whatever you want - Kacey Musgraves
At the end of the day, giving up the space to socialist artists is going to lead to disappointment, nihilism and corruption -- I think architecture is the solution not the problem
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