Oct. 4, 2025 Ι Bloomberg CityLab
As a child, artist and designer Jason Campbell felt the powerful presence of his mother’s linen collection. It was everywhere: in a dedicated closet, but also in the attic, a separate crawl space, the basement and an armoire. Later in life, Campbell, who is Black and a Chicago resident, asked her why it was so important. She told him, “In a world that doesn’t want us to be comfortable and warm, this was my way to make sure that you were,” he says.
For the 2025 Chicago Architecture Biennial (CAB), Campbell channeled this gesture of care and embrace into an installation called “The Linen Closet,” a wooden structure with seating that hangs 50 blankets and comforters donated by friends, family and assorted loved ones from dowels. Campbell asked donors to say why these blankets were important, and edited their responses into tiny poems printed onto tags and fastened to the blankets: rhythmic fragments of memory that are near-impossible for visitors to not extrapolate into their own experiences of worlds and wombs left behind. Sitting in this closet, totally enveloped by totems of anonymous people’s most vulnerable moments, it’s hard for anyone to seem like a stranger.
“It’s a moment of pause for you to think back to those moments of childhood when you were taken care of,” says Campbell.
“The Linen Closet” will likely be one of the most popular installations at the biennial, North America’s largest architecture and design exhibition, currently in its sixth iteration. Not in the least because the city — if not the nation or indeed the entire world — is in dire need of places of comfort and repose. Chicago has only narrowly avoided the military deployment seen in Los Angeles and Washington, DC, but that hasn’t stopped the Trump administration from visiting violence on the city in the name of immigration enforcement. One week before the biennial opened on Sept. 19, ICE agents shot and killed a man during an arrest in the Chicago suburb of Franklin Park, prompting an inquiry from officials in Mexico.
“The Linen Closet” most directly articulates an underlying theme of this year’s festival, “Shift: Architecture in Times of Radical Change.” This is a soft biennial for hard times. Fabric and inflatable bubbles are the signature materials across its 70-plus installations. Amorphous masses writhe, breathe and dangle with languid ease. Defying grafity, piercing the heavens: not these projects. The installations want to be touched and held. Maybe you do, too.
Yet beneath these soft surfaces are hard questions for the biennial, its organizers and the greater practice of design.
“Shift,” which runs through Feb. 28, is led by artistic director Florencia Rodriguez, an editor, writer and architecture professor at the University of Illinois Chicago and the first Latin American to curate the exhibition. Spread across the vast and ornate Chicago Cultural Center in the Loop and a handful of other satellite venues, “Shift” makes its meaning most apparent with its treatment of materials, which are keen to upend expectations, cultivate illusion and don disguises. There are bouncy-house inflatable brick walls that heave and respirate by Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork, grand arches of synthetic fabric towering over the biennial’s tallest gallery by Spanish experimental design practice BURR, and soaked plywood panels bent into a gracefully curving pavilion by Iman Fayyad — perfect elements for a kindergarten reading circle or transcendental meditation odyssey.
Some of the most successful installations combine this material shift with cozy, tactile experiences. “Nature Made Flesh,” by Tamara Kostianovsky turns the clothing of the artist’s late father into tree limbs and logs, concentric rings of personal memory that implore the visitor to make physical contact, drawing parallels between the vulnerabilities of our bodies and the ecological degradation of resource extraction. “Soft Systems: A Partial Reconstruction from the Era of Softness,” by UIC architecture professor Aura Venckunaite, arranges tentacle-drapes made from faux fur and industrial netting in front of the Cultural Center’s windows. It’s framed as a remnant from an “era of softness” defined by abundance and ease, an artifact from a time gone by.
But the plushier quarters of the biennial itself aren’t immune from the chaos and violence of the world beyond, either. The day before the opening of the show, nearly two-dozen participants issued a letter to the biennial executive team and international advisory committee, objecting to the CAB accepting donations from Chicago-based Crown Family Philanthropies, citing the foundation’s 10% ownership stake in General Dynamics, a weapons manufacturer. General Dynamics makes the 2,000-pound MK-84 bomb used by Israel in Gaza.
The signatories offered to “collectively replace” this funding; some of them withdrew their installations from the show. CAB leadership declined to comment on the letter.
“We believe that the aforementioned sponsorship is incompatible with the values of our work as well as with the event’s stated mission of addressing ‘architecture’s role in shaping our collective future’ and pursuing ‘radical change,’” the letter reads.
Anyone frustrated by the upholstery-as-urbanism seen in parts of the biennial might benefit from its largest and most cohesive sub-exhibit, “Inhabit, Outhabit,” a sizable show-within-a-show that could fill the Cultural Center on its own. Organized by Rodriguez and CAB associate curator Igo Kommers with Alexander Eisenschmidt, Camilo Restrepo and Magdalena Tagliabue, it features 29 contemporary housing case studies, all exploring different conceptions of cooperative and communal dwelling. “Housing could be described as architecture’s main responsibility, if not today’s most crucial task, yet the pervasive models of for-profit developments have systematically eradicated affordable housing,” said Eisenschmidt at a panel discussion the opening weekend of the biennial.
“Inhabit, Outhabit” presents a triptych of short videos projected onto gallery walls with audio narration, allowing visitors to wander from case study to case study, three at a time, letting each story bleed into the next. The projection screen is flanked by a long table with seating and printed materials on the case studies, inviting close inspection. There is near-lockstep rejection of single-family homes, but a panoptic spectrum of communal experiences across culture and geography. The housing itself is wildly diverse: There are luxury condos in Brooklyn, self-built and managed co-operative apartments in Uruguay, and housing for people displaced by internal conflict in Nigeria. Each project looks to promote a sense of cooperation and collective care via very different means, whether by altering management and ownership structures, adapting traditional vernacular forms, integrating healthcare, performing new material experiments or encouraging multigenerational living.
“These are buildings that one can not only inhabit, but they also give back to the city; in other words, they also outhabit,” Eisenschmidt said.
The urgency of architecture’s failure to effectively mitigate social inequalities is expressed most stridently at the Stony Island Arts Bank, a former neoclassical bank building on the South Side of Chicago that’s been adaptively reused into an art space by the artist Theaster Gates. If much of the show signals a retreat from direct political engagement, the sculptural collage at the Arts Bank by Cruz Garcia and Nathalie Frankowski (whose practice is called WAI Think Tank) is a bullhorn marshalling revolution. As de-colonial and anti-racist architecture’s most prolific and effective propagandists, WAI Think Tank has assembled a loose meditation on subversive texts, violence, oppression and colonialism, implicitly foregrounding Cruz’s identity as a Puerto Rican. There’s the fractured hand of Lenin, cast down from monumental sculpture; a keffiyeh; avant-garde Soviet Art; tropical plants; stacks of banned books; and paper mâché fruit riffing on the traditional of colonial-era still-life painting. On the walls are real and fictionalized newspapers published by the Young Lords, 1960s-era Puerto Rican radical civil rights militants, and a black banner reading “Down with Colonialism and Imperialism.”
There are direct architectural references here if you look for them. But another installation at the Cultural Center, “Fragments of Disability Fictions,” draws from the same cultural milieu to generate a nuanced synthesis of more direct disciplinary engagement with the politics of liberatory self-determination for the marginalized. The installation consists of four building models and a map, created with the input of disabled scholars, policymakers and activists, and led by Ignacio Galan and David Gissen, as well as Nick Roseboro and Alessandro Orsini of the design duo Architensions. These models imagine how disabled people could renovate and repair their environment into places of universal accessibility and communal solidarity.
The project began with fictional stories by disabled scholars: oral histories that are given audio narration and sign language recitation on a media screen. The subsequent models have a handmade, rough-hewn quality to them; a warm intimacy that favors bits of wood, globs of glue and exposed seams over the pure, white geometric perfection of model foam.
A model of John Portman’s Marriott Marquis Hotel in New York sees its towering atrium become a node in a fictional “StillSpace” network: a haven for relaxation in Times Square with sleeping pods, bean bag chairs, a hydration station and an inverse ziggurat as a wheelchair-accessible ramp. The models show the same sense of tactile affection seen in Campbell’s wooden dowels and blankets, and it’s hard to imagine his linen closet being anything other than perfectly at home here.
The Interdependent Tenements model is a 5 ½ story brick tenement on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, a conceit inspired by the Young Lords’ legacy of housing and healthcare advocacy. It’s wrapped in wheelchair accessible ramps and terraces, served by external elevators hoisted from rooftop cranes that sit next to windmills and raised planter beds. A Puerto Rican flag and a banner reading “Not for Sale—This Land is Ours” hang from a window. This model is messy and lived-in, with a spare wheelchair and potted plant, a bathroom curtain left flung open around a stall-less shower, and a laptop on the floor next to a pile of pillows. “We wanted to show remnants of life,” says Roseboro.
“Fragments of Disability Fictions” is not a utopian project. Roseboro calls it an example of “new pasts;” histories our timeline diverged from, turning away from improvisational “hacks” to the existing built environment. There’s a persistent downcast aura of future-primitivism, an absence created by widespread contraction of material resources that has allowed those on the periphery to find their center. While there is architecture in the oral history, there are no architects identified as such. These disabled citizen-builders seem largely on their own.
The arduous labor of “Fragments of Disability Fictions” isn’t helped by R&R Studios’ pink neon “Beauty for All” sign, which dominates the Cultural Center’s largest gallery. It’s pitched as a populist provocation, but reads more like an anguished plea than a strident command. Next to the richly narrated and modeled progression from alienation to community in “Fragments,” it seems superficial.
In “Shift,” the ethos of care can blend into passivity at times. But a significant portion of the exhibitions rush into the fray, presenting new political and social realities and their architectural antecedents as direct responses to a dangerous, reactionary moment. Still, in the installations that favor confrontation over rest and retreat, there’s ambiguity in their presentation or in their use of fictionalized narratives.
Since it became a formalized profession, architecture has vacillated between bouts of social and political engagement and inward-facing disciplinary soul-searching. The activist energy of the event four years ago, which powered the most successful CAB so far, was polarized by the Black Lives Matter movement and included searing critiques of how racism and classism have been a guiding force in the design and construction of American cities. But this brief consensus wavered into complacency during the center-left restoration of the Biden years, with a 2023 exhibit focused on process. Trump’s reelection and his hostility toward American urban centers are forcing new choices — namely, fight or flight.
This is, unavoidably, a biennial of shaken confidence and empathetic awareness. Pitched between a new round of engagement with a wounded and devolving public realm and withdrawal into an atomized experiential domain, there’s an ethos of care in both places, but the appetite to challenge power only in one. It’s not architecture’s job to save the world, but it is architecture’s job to envision the future.
In this way, “Fragments of Disability Fictions” is the biennial’s most hopeful note, and in its messy informality and implicit occlusion of the architecture profession, it’s also the most realistic. The fact that the biennial’s most polemic project fits together with its most inward-facing one, Campbell’s “Linen Closet,” is a testament to this biennial’s carefully curated plurality. “Shift” modulates itself nimbly enough to capture something endlessly ephemeral: the moment before an intractable choice is made.