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.

Sculptural spider’s web ... Cosmic Jive by Tomas Saraceno
Sculptural spider’s web ... Cosmic Jive by Tomas Saraceno - Tomás Saraceno has spent several years developing a scale 1:16 installation of the web of the comb-footed spider species Latrodectus mactans (Black Widow). Through combining stereophotogrammetry and the use of a highly coherent sheet laser, a new tomographic method (a procedure of imaging based on sectioning), was applied by Tomás Saraceno and developed in collaboration with TU Darmstadt, thereby making this previously impossible web project possible. The analogies between the structural visualizations of the origin of the universe and the structure of a three-dimensional spider web have been used to describe elements of the work of Tomás Saraceno’s net structures. This has been a starting point to analyze the real topology of a spider’s web. Speaking with several arachnologists it came to light that no one has done an exact measuring from a three-dimensional spider web due to technical and optical difficulties. A large research study has shown that most of the common three-dimensional scanning machines have enormous difficulties in doing this because of the non-plane attributes of the spider threads, combined with its thin diameter near the nanometer area. Common three-dimensional scanners digitalize mainly plain surfaces but they have difficulties with analyzing edges  and threads of spider silk only consists of edges if you think optically. In modern times there has been a great interest in spider’s webs, for example by engineer Frei Otto for the Cyrtophora, which has led to nature-inspired buildings such as the Olympic Stadium in Munich. Access to such data could be of help not only for arachnologists but also in various scientific fields such as engineering, nanoengineering, architecture, physiology, ecology, evolutionary biology, ethnology and chemistry. “Spiders are known to use many astronomical cues for navigation. Some use the position of the moon to know what direction they are walking, some use the patterns formed by polarization of light in the sky and some may even use the bright band across the sky formed by the milky way (this is not yet proven for spiders). And since these cues change position in the sky relative to the spider over time, the spider must have an internal idea of how this change occurs over time i.e. an internal clock (not sure if the clock part of the story is important to you or just clouds the issue). In web building spiders the direction of gravity is also important. If you look at orb webs of e.g. the garden cross spider (araneus diadematus) they are never completely round.” Dr. Thomas Norgaard,University of Lund, Department of Cell and Organism Biology © Guardian / Nuvola Ravera

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.