The Chicago Architecture Biennial Is Stuck in a Loop

Dec. 9, 2023 Ι Bloomberg CityLab The Chicago Architecture Biennial, the largest architecture exposition in North America, is prone to repeating itself. The fifth and latest iteration of the festival, which opened in November at the ornate Chicago Cultural Center, charts its meta-turn as clearly as it can, starting with the event’s title: “This Is… Continue reading The Chicago Architecture Biennial Is Stuck in a Loop

With a Full Opening Still Ahead, the Chicago Architecture Biennial’s Fifth Edition Commences at Select Sites

Oct. 2, 2023 Ι Architectural Record  Themed “This is a Rehearsal” and organized by art and design collective Floating Museum, the fifth Chicago Architecture Biennial (CAB 5) sees the biennial as a city-wide collaborative and spontaneous cultural happening; a reflection of the simultaneously banal and grand ambitions that create urbanism every day. “For us, the… Continue reading With a Full Opening Still Ahead, the Chicago Architecture Biennial’s Fifth Edition Commences at Select Sites

Chicago Biennial Returns to Michigan Avenue Cultural Center with New Exhibition Space

April 26, 2022 Ι Architectural Record  From its permaculture food gardens to neighborhood brick-making workshops, to robot-traced empty lot block party takeovers, the 2021 Chicago Architecture Biennial (CAB)— under the direction of artistic director David Brown—was very much at home far from the downtown space that hosted previous biennials. But this spring, the Biennial is… Continue reading Chicago Biennial Returns to Michigan Avenue Cultural Center with New Exhibition Space

Re-Shaped by Crisis, an “Anti-Biennial” Reimagines Chicago

Oct. 2, 2021 Ι Bloomberg CityLab  The 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennial was held, like its two predecessors, in the Chicago Cultural Center, a sumptuous late-19th-century meeting hall in the downtown Loop. Two years later, rocked by Covid-19 and local protests against police violence, North America’s largest architecture and design show finds itself in very different surroundings.… Continue reading Re-Shaped by Crisis, an “Anti-Biennial” Reimagines Chicago

A Radical Idea in Chicago: A Biennial that Listens and Builds

Sept. 22, 2021 Ι Architectural Record  By the end of the opening weekend of the 2021 Chicago Architecture Biennial(CAB) on Sunday, September 19, I’d been prayed over by parishioners of the Rock of Ages Missionary Baptist Church at 13th Street and Pulaski Road, and thanked for sharing the Good News of the West Side of… Continue reading A Radical Idea in Chicago: A Biennial that Listens and Builds

Design Trust Chicago seeks to address systems beyond structures

Architect’s Newspaper Ι December 30, 2020 The recently unveiled Design Trust Chicago will coordinate the work of Chicago’s activist designers, placing community, racial equity, and social justice ahead of for-profit, developer-led agendas. Publicly announced in November, the Design Trust was founded by Katherine Darnstadt of Latent Design, and Elle Ramel and Paola Aguirre of City… Continue reading Design Trust Chicago seeks to address systems beyond structures

An Activist Architecture Stirs in Chicago

The Atlantic’s CityLab Ι Oct. 9. 2019 Perhaps the most compelling installation in this year’s Chicago Architecture Biennial doesn’t feature a single architectural model, rendering, or image of buildings (or of anything else). It’s a series of short blocks of text, probing the Chicago police’s killing of Harith Augustus on the city’s South Side in July of last… Continue reading An Activist Architecture Stirs in Chicago

With Haus Gables, Architect Jennifer Bonner Celebrates and Critiques the American Single-Family House

Photo by Tim Hursley.

Metropolis Magazine Ι March 2019  There’s an irresistible meta-critique at the heart of architect Jennifer Bonner’s Haus Gables in Atlanta, asking: What if you blurred the lines between real architecture and the media and methods used to simulate it, namely drawings and models? A professor at Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) with a practice of… Continue reading With Haus Gables, Architect Jennifer Bonner Celebrates and Critiques the American Single-Family House

Interview with Yesomi Umolu

Yesomi Umolu, Logan Exhibitions Curator, March 5, 2018. (Photo by Jean Lachat)

Architectural Record Ι March 19, 2018 Yesomi Umolu is interested in applying her multi-disciplinary expertise (with stops in architecture school, practice, and the elite contemporary art curatorial class) and globe-trotting personal and professional background to a biennial that speaks to an equally wide range of public audiences. “The biennial is for and of the city of… Continue reading Interview with Yesomi Umolu

Marshall Brown is Putting the Pieces Together

November 2017 Ι Architect Magazine  The studio of Marshall Brown is located on the South Side of Chicago in the Overton Hygienic Building, built in 1922. One of Chicago’s many early-20th-century brick and terra-cotta modest masterpieces, it has survived the tides of development and disinvestment that have washed over this part of the city. It was a… Continue reading Marshall Brown is Putting the Pieces Together