Save this picture! Themed The Available City, this year’s Chicago Architecture Biennial was a radical departure from previous ones.
Bastions like the Chicago Cultural Center, where previous biennials were held. Thus the architecture included in any biennial is considered by association, if not by definition, as an art object, the type displayed in the bastions of the culturally elite: galleries, institutions, and museums.
The point here is not about biennials per se, but to point out that they are primarily concerned with the art object. While more recent biennials include a category for architecture, the Tallinn, Lisbon, Shenzhen, Rotterdam, Oslo, New York, and Chicago biennials focus exclusively on it. In 1980, the Venice Biennale added an architectural component. By comparison, the first biennial in America was organized by Washington, D.C.’s Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1907, followed by New York’s Whitney Museum in 1932. Of the more than 300 biennials now staged worldwide, the first, and perhaps the most prestigious is La Biennale di Venezia, a preeminent art event first staged in 1895. As such, biennials bestow significant, if not outsized, cultural and economic capital on the selected artists and their work. Curated primarily to showcase new trends, they are exceedingly influential in determining who and what are vital to follow in the art world. So … biennials, right? Staged every two years, these events ostensibly perform as premier high-end art exhibitions. Instead, I’m offering a trip through this edition of the CAB, which concluded a successful and significant run on Saturday, down a road less traveled. There have been several well-written, insightful essays about the CAB by Zach Mortice, Anjulie Rao, Marianela D’Aprile, and others, so it would be foolish to travel the landscape they have so expertly traversed. Such is the case with the 2021 Chicago Architecture Biennial (CAB): The Available City. The problem with being a deliberative writer is that pretty much everything has already been penned by the time you’re ready to write about something. This article was originally published on Common Edge. Sustainability and Performance in Architecture The Future of Architectural Visualization
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