Architecture Fringe on Tour: Chicago Architecture Biennial

I recently arrived in Cambridge, Massachusetts as a Loeb Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. The Loeb Fellowship is for exceptional practitioners whose work is advancing positive social outcomes through the shaping of the built and natural environment in the US and around the world, and I’m the first person based in Scotland to join the Loeb Fellowship.

Part of my focus here for the year at Harvard is to explore how the 300-odd art, design, and architecture annual, biennial and triennial festivals across the world can be better oriented towards public benefit and the common good, by creating connections between them through alliances and programming to further enhance impact and positive social outcomes.

In this short reflection, for research purposes, I recently travelled to Chicago to visit the sixth edition of the Chicago Architecture Biennial (CAB), and talk to a number of curators, exhibitors and other folks within the city about the biennial, its evolution, and its contribution to public discourse.

The current theme for the biennial is SHIFT: Architecture in Times of Radical Change, curated by current CAB Artistic Director and 2014 Loeb Fellow Florencia Rodriguez. In discussing this theme in conversation with Florencia, the central premise positions architecture as an agile living practice, realised through an evolving set of tools, ideas and experiments that help us contextualise and make sense of ongoing change, to imagine worlds not yet here. Important to this is also the ongoing lineage of the biennial itself, where Florencia seeks to complete an archive of all projects and activities undertaken across the previous editions of CAB to act as a centralised reference depository, to help build on past activities and to inform future directions.

To talk about previous editions of CAB, I met with the interdisciplinary arts collective the Floating Museum who curated the fifth edition of the biennial under the title of The is a Rehearsal. Chatting in their studio in the south side of Chicago, co-directors Andrew Schachman, Faheem Majeed and Jeremiah Hulsebos-Spofford reflected on the challenges and opportunities of taking on a particular edition of an ongoing festival, touching on onboarding, navigating institutional structures, relationship-building, fundraising and timeframes. Positioning the fifth edition of CAB as research (a rehearsal), the Floating Museum appeared to successfully frame the biennial as a place to test ideas and explore conversations for municipal, commercial and community outlook, rather than engagement, where power and agency were transferred out from the centre.

Whilst in the city, I also met with Tim Samuelson, emeritus (and first) Cultural Historian of Chicago who still maintains an office at the Chicago Cultural Centre. He’s also a Loeb Fellow from the class of 1990. His office is filled with artefacts, drawings, books and bits of buildings, and we discuss the architectural culture of the city, and the position of the biennial within it. Tim reflected on the use of the Cultural Centre as the principal exhibition venue and the varying engagement that the biennial had, through all its editions, with communities and the established architecture sector within the city.

The Chicago Architecture Biennial focuses principally on the city itself. In Scotland, the Architecture Fringe is a national festival, rare in the world of biennials which are mostly focussed on a particular urban centre. Whilst different in geographic scope and spread, what emerged was a common awareness of trying to establish ongoing, longer lasting relationships and frameworks through different editions of the festival - to build and maintain a more regular structure - where more attention can be then directed towards investing in people, supporting neighbourhoods and contributing to ongoing initiatives and activities that help realise social change.

-Andy Summers