Everything you need to know about the 2025 Chicago Architecture Biennial

Every two years, architects, designers and likeminded aficionados descend upon Chicago, home of the world’s first skyscraper (10 stories tall and completed in 1885, for those curious), to explore the industry’s contemporary ideas about the global built environment. The Chicago Architecture Biennial is one of the biggest design events on the industry calendar—drawing on the Windy City’s history as host of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. However, unlike that event, which took place in Jackson Park on the city's South Side, the Biennial allows visitors to explore not only its program of exhibitions, performances, talks and film screenings, but requires they traverse the city itself to do so, perhaps making the pilgrimage to some of its famous historic structures along the way.

Opening in two phases this year, on 19 September and 7 November, this year’s edition is the biennial’s sixth. Following the 2023 biennial’s collective artistic director model, Argentine architect and writer Floriencia Rodriguez is heading a solo role this year, curating over 100 international participants around the theme SHIFT: Architecture in Times of Radical Change. 'The shifts we showcase point to a field that is becoming more collective, more experimental and experiential, and more deeply attuned to both crises and possibilities,' explains Rodriguez. 'Architecture not as dogma, but as a set of open tools to imagine possible futures.'

The proposals and projects will address topics including housing, ecology, material exploration and construction, as well as how architecture can engage with everyday socio-political, cultural and environmental issues.

What is the Chicago Architecture Biennial?

Established in 2015, the Chicago Architecture Biennial is the largest exhibition of contemporary architecture and design in North America. Free and open to the public, each edition of the biennial is curated by an artistic director who proposes a theme and selects contemporary projects by architects, designers and artists that explore it. These projects, presented at important venues across the city, can include physical installations, performances, lectures or even smaller exhibitions of multiple works around a single topic.

Where is the Chicago Architecture Biennial?

The 2025 biennial will be hosted at several sites in Chicago this year and open in two phases. On 19 September, the first phase launches with nearly 50 participants showing work at the Chicago Cultural Center, the Graham Foundation, the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry, the courtyard of a historic Andrew Rebori–designed apartment building on the Near North Side and the Stony Island Arts Bank, all buildings important to the city’s architectural history. The Arts Bank is a new venue to the Chicago Architecture Biennial lineup and houses artist Theaster Gates’s Rebuild Foundation, an archive, community center, gallery and library hosted inside a Neoclassical former bank designed by William Gibbons Uffendell in 1923.

On 7 November, phase two will open with 25 additional large-scale installations, some collaborations, others solo endeavors, that explore 'altered states,' says Rodriguez. The projects on view will include work by Takk and Ivan Lopez Munuera, based on Chicago’s disco culture, and a grandstand designed by former Biennial curators Johnston Marklee that will provide a platform for talks inside the iconic Hancock Tower, built in 1969.

Top things to see at the 2025 Chicago Architecture Biennial

Sunken Garden

In the courtyard of a 1922 residential building designed by the late Chicago architect Andrew Rebori, artist Alexis de Chaunac and photographer Brooke Hummer will bring together in-situ works by nine Chicago-based artists that explore the architecture and materiality of the depressed garden site as well as the future of resilient design in the face of rising sea levels.

When: 19-29 September, by appointment only
Where: 40 West Schiller Street Chicago, IL 60610

Surfaces in Flux

New York– and Athens, Greece-based design studio Objects of Common Interest / LOT Office for Architecture will experiment with inflatable architecture, creating a space for gathering that shifts and moves with lounging participants—and maybe evokes those backyard bounce houses of your youth.

When: 19 September to 28 February, 2026
Where: Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E Washington St, Chicago, IL 60602

TRACES

At the former site of the 1893 World’s Fair, architecture firms Balsa Crosetto Piazzi and Giorgis Ortiz have designed an installation of 10,000 dry-stacked bricks, putting the ambitions—and available building technologies—of this Fair on display.

When: 19 September to 28 February, 2026
Where: On the lawn outside the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry, 5700 S DuSable Lake Shore Dr, Chicago, IL 60637

Louie

This living structure by the Bittertang Farm pulls Chicago’s environmental eras—swamp, prairie and oak forest, slaughterhouses, and metropolis—into one intertwined tower of building materials, plants, bones, and more. 'Like ecosystems,' says cofounder Antonio Torres, 'buildings are better when they are a little wild.'

When: 7 November to 28 February, 2026
Where: Hancock Tower, 875 N Michigan Ave, Chicago, IL 60611

Inhabit, Outhabit

In a time of urgent housing crisis, this video installation will highlight around 30 collective living case studies with some of today’s forward-thinking architects including MASS Design Group, French 2D, and Productura.

When: 19 September 19 to 28 February, 2026
Where: Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E Washington St, Chicago, IL 60602