The top 20 exhibits at the second Chicago Architecture Biennial

Architecture | 18 Oct 2017

Instead of a house, office or gallery, Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee – from Los Angeles-based practice Johnston Marklee – have designed a sturdy curatorial framework for the second Chicago Architectural Biennial, of which they are artistic directors. Using concepts as materials, and a strong international cohort of pensive architects to assist with construction, Johnston and Lee have completed an architecture exhibition that taps into contemporary thought and traces deconstructivist routes through history in the hope of rediscovery. For the duration of the Biennial, which runs until January 2018, the Chicago Cultural Center is a place where ideas are the main economy and the participating architects take a refreshing break from the physical limitations of actuality.

The Vertical City

Wandering around this vertical city of 16ft high models will leave you entertained for hours. The curators commissioned contemporary architects – including Barbas Lopes, Go Hasegawa, Kere Architecture, Sam Jacob Studio, MOS and Tatiana Bilbao Estudio amongst others – to respond to a historic brief first proposed in 1922 for the design of the Chicago Tribune Tower. The architectural competition was revisited in 1980, when architect Stanley Tigerman of the Chicago Seven curated an exhibition of new proposals designed to address 21st century issues. Now, here in 2017, architects have gathered in Chicago once again to interrogate the high rise critically and conceptually.

Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E Washington Street

Photography: Steve Hall

Rooms for Books, MG&Co

Celebrating the material presence of the book and its importance to the field and study of architecture, Houston-based MG&Co has created a ‘platform’ for books based on a cross-shaped plan which opens up space at each corner for discussion, display and exhibition. A curated wall of printed archive material from Stanley and Margaret Tigerman’s library is a highlight, as well as a programme of talks and book-signings rolling out in the space during the Biennial.

Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E Washington Street

Photography: Kendall Mccaugherty

Modern Living, Gerard and Kelly at Farnsworth House

At the Mies van der Rohe-designed Farnsworth House in Plano, Illinois, choreographers Gerard and Kelly unfolded a narrative of conversation through dance, exploring gender roles in the home. Conceived in a series of chapters, two compelling characters navigate the rigid grid of the house, struggling with communication and intimacy inside the modernist creation that was commissioned for Edith Farnsworth in 1945. While live performances were limited to the opening weekend, the first two instalments of Gerard and Kelly’s drama, choreographed for Schindler House in West Hollywood, California, and Phillip Johnson’s Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut can be watched at the City Gallery in the Historic Water Tower, located in Downtown Chicago for the duration of the Biennial.

City Gallery in the Historic Water Tower, 806 Michigan Avenue

Entrance Installation, Ania Jaworska

Welcoming visitors into the main venue of the Biennial, this bright, brash yellow installation has consumed a smaller, much less interesting Chicago Cultural Centre reception desk. Architect Ania Jaworska interrogates traditional architectural classification by subverting the physical and historic forms of the arch and the column until they are almost unrecognisable – her column provides no support and her arch creates a physical boundary instead of an entranceway. The abstract, yet functional work is a structural hybrid that challenges and almost overrides its environment in the impressively ornate Chicago Cultural Centre entranceway.

Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E Washington Street

Photography: Tom Harris

Metropolitana, Piovene Fabi and Giovanna Silva

Italian practice Piovene Fabi has designed a suite of furniture that samples surfaces, colours and shapes from the first Milan subway line that opened in 1964 – when everything seemed possible. It was a time when transport was the carrier of modernity, and the customised tiles, fabrics and typography symbolised technological progression, as well as defining a new method to move across the city. Influenced by the designs of architects Franco Albini and Franca Helg, and graphic designer Bob Noorda who were involved in the first subway project, Piovene Fabi revisited materials such as Silipol, a colourfully stained concrete, and Pirelli black rubber flooring.

Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E Washington Street

Constructions and References, Caruso St John with Thomas Demand and Hélène Binet

A stately tabletop city of five Caruso St John building models is surrounded by a curtain that is in fact a Thomas Demand-designed wallpaper. The geometric and voluminous models, that might remind you of three-dimensional computer renders, communicate a simplicity of form, similar to how buildings can be flattened by a photograph, freed of extra context by a frame. Works by architectural photographer Hélène Binet hang on the wallpaper, capturing recently completed Caruso St John buildings in London, Zurich, St Gallen, Bremen and Lille.

Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E Washington Street

Prima Materia, Studio Mumbai

There’s something almost spiritual about Studio Mumbai’s work ‘Prima Materia’. The slim almost skeletal structures are delicately constructed architectural totems, and while they appear to be weightless, they are heavy with conceptual layers inquiring into the ‘rudimentary and elemental’.

Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E Washington Street

(Study for) Chapel for Scenes of Public Life – the Meeting of Enrico Mattei and the Queen of Sheba, Baukuh and Stefano Graziani

A scaled down version of Giotto’s Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, Italy, has been constructed at the Chicago Cultural Centre in a contemporary form where, instead of a Christian mural, a fictional encounter plays out between Italian politician and entrepreneur, Enrico Mattei and the Queen of Sheba. Stepping into the stage set structure, instead of ornate paintings, thin line drawings of the scenes reveal a minimalist cartoon telling the story.

Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E Washington Street

Photography: Steve Hall

Mood, Matter, Manner, Mode, curated by Robert Somol

Robert Somol, director of the school of architecture at University of Illinois, Chicago, was asked by Johnston Marklee to curate source images submitted by the Biennial participants. Analysing, looking and absorbing his material, he divided and sorted the images into four fields: mood, matter, manner and mode. Beneath the stately stairway the images are displayed in a visual map with further reference groupings including ‘Virtual’, ‘Geologic’, ‘Nostalgic’ and ‘Incongruent’. In the foreground, The Wallderful by Dellekamp Arquitectos, a model of a wall that hopes to ‘reclaim the rhetoric of the wall’.

Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E Washington Street

Tropical Canonical: The Order of Ambiguity, AGENdA with Camilo Echavarria and Camilo Echeverri

Translating Mies van der Rohe’s modernism out of its northern European context and into a tropical South American one, the team behind the installation ‘Tropical Canonical: The Order of Ambiguity’ switch glazing for velvet curtains, which hang in formation along a corridor gallery space at the Chicago Cultural Centre. The project examines how modernism can be interpreted to local contexts – the curtains shape five small niches for viewing photographs of the coffee growing region of Suroeste located 100km west of Medellin taken by photographer Camilo Echeverri.

Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E Washington Street

Photography: Steve Hall

Finite Format 04, Pezo Von Ellrichshausen

This display of multiple outcomes of cubic architectural arrangements – in small, medium and large – with sides coloured in 81 different watercolour hues on rectangular-sized pieces of paper is a process of distillation aimed at tracing ideas back to their origination. The exercise came about when Chilean architects Mauricio Pezo and Sofia von Ellrichshausen were looking back over sketchbooks to try and understand the motivations behind their own works, and why the resulting projects look like they do.

Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E Washington Street

L’air pour l’air, SO–IL and Ana Prvački, Garfield Park Conservatory

A strange yet beautiful happening unfolds among the pines, the cacti and the ferns at Garfield Park Conservatory, a luscious greenhouse surrounded by gardens in west Chicago. SO-IL and artist Ana Prvački have devised a sad performance that laments the increasing levels of pollution in our atmosphere. Musicians from the Chicago Sinfonietta, clad in structured clouds play a soulful ballad composed by Veronika Krausas, inhaling filtered air through their costumes. Also installed at Garfield Park Conservatory are hanging sculptures by Francois Perrin and colourful installations by Philippe Rahm architectes.

Garfield Park Conservatory, 300 N Central Park Avenue

Photography: Iwan Baan

Randolph Square, Frida Escobedo

Mexico City-based architect Frida Escobedo has built a timber platform in the central ‘square’ of the Chicago Cultural Centre. Reflecting on the decorative gridded ceilings, and the formation of the grid that lies at the heart of modern urban planning, Escobedo has disrupted the form, pulling out sloping planes that contradict the rational nature of public space and echo what Sarah Whiting describes at ‘Chicago’s elastic grid’.

Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E Washington Street

Photography: Kendall Mccaugherty

Chicago, James Welling

The Biennial’s photographic offering, ‘A Love of the World’, is curated by architect and writer Jesus Vassallo, and includes the work of James Welling who photographed and then colourised images of Mies van der Rohe’s Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) campus and the Lake Shore Drive Apartments in Chicago. Described by Vassallo as ‘psychedelic Mies’, the photographs juxtapose architectural design with photographic technique, resulting in a new reading of the buildings through a new lens.

City Gallery in the Historic Water Tower, 806 Michigan Avenue

Photography: Kendall Mccaugherty

Here Hear, Nick Cave and Jeanne Gang

Fantastically carnivalesque ‘soundsuits’ designed by Nick Cave and layered with objects designed by Jeanne Gang erupted into dance, when performers animated the stage on opening night of the Chicago Architecture Biennial. The site-specific performances will be taking place periodically throughout the biennial at Navy Pier, and upcoming performances will be accompanied by Chicago-based musicians such as jazz artist Kahil El Zabar and the Chicago Children’s Choir.

Navy Pier, 600 E Grand Avenue

Horizontal City

A collective exhibit of models by 24 architects come together onto plinths arranged in the footprint of Mies van der Rohe’s IIT Campus in Chicago. Instead of education buildings, the models shelter surreal and layered interiors, designed according to the curators’ brief to select an image of an architectural interior to use as a starting point. London-based DRDH Architects chose Thomas Struth’s photograph of the Pantheon in Rome, which is revised into a three-dimensional stage set. Casting a gaze into the 20th century, Karamuk Kuo Architekten visualise a kaleidoscopic version of Adolf Loos’ American Bar in Vienna, and Meyer-Grohbrügge & Chermayeff recreate Édouard Manet’s work A Bar at the Folies-Bergère Bar. LADG visits the ornate, Baroque-era Asam Basilica in Osterhofen, Germany, and Diego Arraigada Arquitectos the pure brick form of Jorn Utzon’s Can Lis in Mallorca. Each architect’s response is a densely fascinating window into their world.

Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E Washington Street

Photography: Kendall McCaugherty

A Purloined Argument, Keith Krumwiede

Along a connecting corridor at the Chicago Cultural Centre a scenic wallpaper unrolls into a picturesque microcosm of 19th century Paris. Based on The Monuments of Paris motif created by Joseph Dufour with engraver Xavier Mader for manufacture in 1814, Keith Krumwiede’s wallpaper opposes framed images that replace romantic monuments with fictional developer homes. Krumwiede also displays ‘Atlas of Another America’ – a gridded masterplan of fictional suburb, ‘Freedomland’.

Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E Washington Street

Photography: Tom Harris

Make Big Plans, Monadnock

Statement billboard-style signs designed by Monadnock read ‘Make Big Plans’ and ‘Make No Little Plans’ referring to a quote by Chicago Planner Daniel H Burnham in 1907, which reads: ‘Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realised. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-throwing insistency... Think big.’ The segmented slogans reference advertising culture, yet also politics and corporate language, and also remind us of the theme title of the Biennial itself, a quote from an Ed Ruscha work: ‘Make New History’.

Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E Washington Street

Photography: Tom Harris

Supermodels, Sylvia Lavin with Erin Besler, Jessica Colangelo and Norman Kelley

Examining the changing status of the architectural model, which, during the 1980s, evolved from a working object into a collectible item, this display titled ‘Supermodels’ exhibits 12 replicas of a group of models collected by the German architecture Museum (DAM). Exploring the contemporary practice of model making, as well as the question of authorship and sculptural value of models, the display hosts a live video feed connecting the replicas to an exhibition titled ‘Exhibition Models’, on display at Princeton School of Architecture.

Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E Washington Street

Photography: Steve Hall

Bless No 60 Lobby Conquerors, Bless in dialog with Artek furniture classics

Celebrating the jetztzeit or ‘restless present’, product and ‘situation’ firm Bless has designed a lobby area at the top of a stairway landing in the Chicago Cultural Centre, where visitors can recline on ‘architurniture’ units. Rendered in furry hides and soft leather, the furniture pieces personify architectural details such as a marble slabs or stone steps.

Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E Washington Street

Photography: Steve Hall

The top 20 exhibits at the second Chicago Architecture Biennial

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