Birthplace of the elevator, cradle of the skyscraper and home to more Frank Lloyd Wright buildings than you could ever want to visit, Chicago has long been America’s mecca for architecture nerds. The city’s architecture foundation offers no less than 85 tours for visitors to marvel at the heroic skyline of neo-gothic buttresses and gilded art deco spires from the comfort of boats, buses, bikes and trains. The rich history of groundbreaking buildings remains the chief reason why the city lures over 50m tourists every year.
But that’s not enough for the city’s energetic mayor, Obama’s former chief-of-staff Rahm Emanuel. He wants 55m by 2020. This week, he opened the inaugural Chicago Architecture Biennial as a step on the way, a $6.5m privately funded extravaganza (primarily sponsored by BP) aimed at ensuring the city “will continue to be seen worldwide as an epicentre of modern architecture”. It’s a no-brainer, he says; the question is why the city wasn’t doing this before.
The range of work is dazzlingly catholic, stretching from a Berlin-based architect who “collaborates with spiders”, training his eight-legged friends to weave sculptural webs, their silky cocoons shown here in spotlit vitrines, to teams working on radical solutions for low-cost social housing in developing countries, to the heady sci-fi future of robot-aided construction. It makes for a lively romp through the gamut of the many different things the word “architecture” is now applied to, but the sheer breadth of approaches, combined with a distinct lack of any central idea, can make it a frustrating experience. After visiting several times over the course of three days, I still left with indigestion.
“We didn’t want to constrain the work with a theme,” says Herda. “We went out into the world and asked architects to tell us what they think matters.” She describes the exhibition as a “site of experimentation – not a place to look at pictures of buildings, but to figure out the future of making buildings.”
As Grima puts it, the Biennial is “a platform through which theory and practice can converge”, adding that they were keen “not to make disciplinary distinctions”. Gnomic tableaux of abstract furniture-like sculptures are presented on equal terms with speculative masterplans for the future of Chicago. It is an architectural pick’n’mix, with visitors encouraged to roam through the kaleidoscope of contemporary practice, free from a guiding hand.
Highlights for me include a full-scale prototype of a $9,000 house developed by Mexican architect Tatiana Bilbao, designed to let residents extend a basic shell, with a solid central core that can be expanded in phases with lighter-weight materials. Aimed at tackling the country’s shortage of 9m homes, the model provides a compelling alternative to pokey state-built housing, built for the same budget, and it’s already being trialled across three different cities.