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 a Rehearsal.” Introductory wall text explains that the concept of rehearsal is a “feedback loop” meant to enable “uncertainty, progress, failure, and redemption.” The biennial itself is “a process of production.”
Installations that offer commentary on materials are framed self-referentially. One massive gallery places us within a field of “models within models,” according to Faheem Majeed, one of the show’s four artistic directors. An elevated installation that uses construction scaffolding as its primary material serves as “an object of the exhibition that holds the objects of the exhibition,” says fellow artistic director Andrew Schachman.
Just what are these rehearsals working toward? During a moment of uncertainty on the value and form of the design festival, the Chicago Architecture Biennial has turned its gaze inward, snared in an obsessive compulsion to get it right.
Helmed by Floating Museum, a Chicago-based collective of artists and architects that focus on public art installations, this biennial is the first to return to the Cultural Center since 2019, after being dispatched to outdoor satellites across the city’s South and West sides for the commendable 2021 edition. “Rehearsal” is not quite an about-face: Similar off-site installations that pair designers with local community organizations to address the needs of Chicago’s most vulnerable return this year, alongside a handful of installations at the Graham Foundation and large-scale works at the arch-Postmodernist Thompson Center. The real pivot by Floating Museum is the focus on iterative process, not product — an approach that amplifies the problems the curators hope to resolve.
The most overt invocation of “rehearsal” comes in “The Gray Veil,” a shimmering, partially transparent double silk shroud hung from a high gallery ceiling by Cambridge, Massachusetts-based designers WOJR. The veil forms a large square within an outer circle, offering varying levels of opacity and transparency depending on where you stand. Four slits in the outer circle admit visitors into the gaps between the two geometries. It’s a place to “watch people watching a rehearsal,” says Schachman: a view backstage as participants prep for biennial programming and more.
A project in the gallery next door suggests more punitive motives. For “100 Links: Architecture and Land, in and out of the Americas,” Columbia University’s Buell Centerand New York-based architecture practice AD-WO suspend a net of Gunter’s chain, a British device used to measure and divide the American frontier into the relentless Jeffersonian grid. These simple surveyor’s tools were used to turn land into property and eventually real estate (and finally architecture), a process that meant expulsion or death for native residents. In contrast to the gossamer threads of “The Gray Veil,” this industrial-lace spider web seems to make a gory promise of bloodshed on the gallery walls — a stunning highlight of the show.
If “100 Links” points to what architects are complicit in, then “The Gray Veil” comes across more like a paranoid insistence that we get a look in on what they’re preparing. But a populist panopticon surveilling architecture’s role in the development and extraction economy has to be made of something stronger than draped gossamer. It can’t match the phantasmagoric power of “100 Links.”
“Ecotone,” by Chicago architect Leticia Pardo, is plenty sturdy, consisting of scaffolding used to repair building facades (or to mount art installations). This piece also get trapped in self-referential loops, piled high toward the ceiling with ladders and platforms stacked and replicating for their own sake. Here and elsewhere, the materials used to make architecture — and a biennial itself — are deployed as art objects. The experience is crowded, labored and not quite labyrinthian enough, as the scaffolds never take total control of the space.
Chicago landscape architecture firm site design group dominates its gallery with “Beneath Our Feet,” which Schachman describes as “a walk-in architecture model.” Ziggurat-like stacks of Geofoam (a type of ultra-lightweight subterranean filler that landscape architects often use to build topography on urban park sites) spread across the room, a framing device for other sculptures and architectural models that are this gallery’s theme. The Geofoam blocks are messily marked up with their dimensions, as if they’ll be carted off to a job site soon. (Eventually, they will be.).
“What if a biennial had no new things?” says Jeremiah Hulsebos-Spofford of Floating Museum. “We’re thinking about materials that are already out circulating, and trying, for a moment, to bring them into the building, stop them on their way, and then they’ll continue on their way.”
Detritus in design takes on a literal note in a layered installation by Chicago artist Jeff Carter. Called “Urban Fill,” it’s a 1:2 scale roller dumpster, with digitally fabricated 3D scans of actual construction debris modeled and reassembled into topographic mounds on top. Carter is essentially siphoning junk through an exhaustive and technologically complex form-making filter. Borrowing the T-shaped plan of the beleaguered and shuttered Singer Pavilion — the last remaining building of late 1940s medical campus on the South Side that was designed by local architects under the supervision of Modernist titan Walter Gropius — Carter’s dumpster is a critique of Modernist social philosophy, and legacies of disinvestment. His artist statement describes architecture as “a discipline of continuous rehearsal, modeling ideas rather than objects.”
Part of the reason the very “idea” of architecture is getting worked over here is because even the artistic directors themselves aren’t sold on the spectacle and crowd-work of a contemporary architecture biennial: the jet-setting, carbon-huffing whirl of people and materials ultimately meant to generate design images and media happenings. An architecture exhibition spread over an entire city, contemporary biennials balance celebrations of traditional form-making and city-building with deeper-seated revisionist critiques of the culture and political economy of architecture. Floating Museum leans toward the latter; Hulsebos-Spofford cites the need for designers to build long-term relationships with the communities they partner with as reason for caution. “We approach the biennial with a fair amount of skepticism,” he says.
This biennial’s artistic directors — Majeed, Schachman, Hulsebos-Spofford as well as poet avery r. young — have tasked themselves with an exceedingly difficult job. The 2021 fair, under artistic director David Brown, cracked the code for what an architecture exposition can do within the framework of critical inquiry to ameliorate urban conditions of deprivation that the discipline has been complicit in creating. To their credit, Floating Museum have continued this, forging deeper and broader connections to communities that get too little access to basic amenities and infrastructure, much less design from national and international luminaries. Projects like Could Be Design’s event pavilion and teaching station for a free tool library on Chicago’s West Side democratize design without any condescension or dumbing-down.
But by authentically and honestly identifying the deficiencies of the biennial format — its pompous disconnection from how architecture meets and often disappoints people’s everyday lives, its sizzle-reel timescale warped to a process that requires slow nurturing and engagement — Floating Museum foregrounds biennial rather than architecture. It’s a worthy topic for a conference or symposium, and noble from a material sustainability point of view, but perhaps not what design fans are looking for when they stroll the galleries. Given Floating Museum’s critique of the biennial, they deserve some credit for showcasing mismatched gears and messy details therein.
To this end, the curators printed out and hung a lengthy email detailing construction delays for a water tower installation in the South Side neighborhood of Englewood by Feda Wardack. Perhaps inadvertently, the French-Afghan artist and architect winds up leaning into the foregrounding of process hammered home by the rest of the show. “I’d like to point out that I’m not at all frustrated by the situation; it’s part of the process and tells a lot of stories,” he writes. Dated less than a month before the show opened, his email is accompanied by renderings of the water tower, but this glancing look at the process behind the process — Hulsebos-Spofford says the team ran into permitting issues — can’t bridge the gap between biennial vision and reality.
Considering the material benefit the community installations will offer as well as the bureaucratic hurdles that grassroots organizations from disadvantaged Black and Brown neighborhoods often face, it’s unfair to judge them by the timescale for a typical biennial. That was the case with the event and artist-in-residence space that Urban Growers Collective is building with Columbia’s David Benjamin, which wasn’t finished when a gaggle of reporters came through. Last year the garden produced nearly eight tons of produce in a sector of Chicago where fresh fruits and vegetables can be hard to come by; having this kind of permanent infrastructure on hand (once finished) will allow the collective to host events and programming that will connect them to new audiences. A public forum amid acres of greenhouses and bleating goats translates into a genuine asset for the South Side. But in the exhibition hall, where designers have a bit more autonomy, the emphasis on process and rehearsal — including the display of an email with more than a dozen CCs — reads as indecision and paralysis.
Not so with Paa Joe, one of Ghana’s most celebrated coffin artists. His model of Mies Van der Rohe’s SR Crown Hall, painted in pan-African heraldry, remakes this Modernist icon as a casket prop for a dancing Ghanaian funeral procession. The sense of rowdy material handcraft invested in a building revered for its technocratic implacability is refreshing and subversive. The installation comes from outside the curatorial gaze of the architecture world, but it’s hard not to read it as a riff on Postmodernist firebrand Stanley Tigerman’s photo collage of Crown Hall as a capsizing tanker sinking into Lake Michigan. That was a seditious reminder of the inevitable sunsetting of aesthetic empires. Paa Joe’s coffin model seems to entice the decolonial twilight of political and economic empires. Thankfully, curators of the CAB remain on notice to keep pure object-fetishism out and have done so.
The biennial is certainly the appropriate forum to ask deep, structural questions about the nature of architecture, urbanism and biennials themselves. But unlike the previous iteration, this biennial isn’t an assured, muscular statement on what architecture can do in the world today. When Wardak’s water tower was foiled by bureaucratic hurdles, he voiced support for new rounds of community engagement with the Englewood neighborhood, offering a relationship in lieu of a design object. The problem with many of the exhibitions here is their insularity, their adherence to the underlying means and methods of architecture, which somehow still does not consistently add up to an effective presentation of architecture itself. Most often, parochialism in architecture is born out of ego. At least here, the insularity arrives through honest and anxious critique, turning inward before it can face the world again.