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Story Time

A first look inside the 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennial

By Matthew Messner • September 18, 2019 • Architecture, Art, Midwest, On View

The Museum of Oil by Territorial Agency proposes making oil use a thing of the past. (Matthew Messner/AN)
Decolonizing the Chicago Cultural Center by the Settler Colonial City Project and the American Indian Center takes on the task of annotating the Chicago Cultural Center with texts on the building's history as it pertains to the indigenous people that once lived on the land. (Matthew Messner/AN)
Chicago's Sweet water Foundation riffs on Hudson Yards Shed and the classic Chicago workers cottage with its large heavy timber installation. (Matthew Messner/AN)
The City of Detroit Planning and Development Department looks into the possibilities of its vast amount of publicly owned vacant land. (Matthew Messner/AN)
Instead of the typical title text for the exhibition, a Land Acknowledgment greets guest entering the Chicago Cultural Center. (Matthew Messner/AN)
RIWAQ documents the 50 Palestinian villages it is currently working to restore in the Secrets of a Digital Garden. (Matthew Messner/AN)
(Matthew Messner/AN)
The crowd-funded FICA works to ensure affordable, permanent, housing to the residents of São Paulo, Brazil. (Matthew Messner/AN)

Now in its third iteration, the Chicago Architecture Biennial will open to the general public on Thursday, September 19. The show’s main venue, the Chicago Cultural Center, has once again been filled with large installations, multimedia displays, and extensive texts. What you will not see, diverging from the last two installments, are the extensive architectural models, renderings, and full-scale mock-ups. This year’s show, curated by Yesomi Umolu, Sepake Angiama, and Paulo Tavares has a distinctly different feel than most architectural shows. Entitled “…and Other Such Stories,” the curatorial team opted for research-heavy content focusing on social justice, equality, and civic activism. Most of the 80+ contributors come from urban studies and activism fields, with only a handful calling themselves architects.

The exhibition will be on show from September 19th through January 5th at the Chicago Cultural Center and a number of other sites around the city.

Photo of a wooden cafe for the Chicago Architecture Biennial — Indigenous geometries by Tanya Lukin Linklater and Tiffany Shaw-Collinge will host a series of performances throughout the Biennial. (Matthew Messner/AN)

Akinbode Akinbiyi’s Easy Like Sunday Morning is a result of the artist’s month-long residency in Chicago’s Westside North Lawndale neighborhood. (Matthew Messner/AN)

Two people looking at monitors as part of the Chicago Architecture Biennial — Chicago’s own Theaster Gates digs into his archive to display the complex history of his efforts to restore and preserve buildings on Chicago’s South Side. (Matthew Messner/AN)

A panel of flashing lights at the Chicago Architecture Biennial — The Columbia Center for Spatial Research used a historic algorithm to index the way in which we self segregate and gather as communities. (Matthew Messner/AN)

White "houses" installed inside a Beaux Arts interior for the 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennial — The Gun Violence Memorial Project by Mass Design Group and Hank Willis Thomas brings together personal objects of victims of gun violence. (Matthew Messner/AN)

Chicago Chicago Architecture Biennial

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