Understanding the City Available at the Chicago Architecture Biennale

In Metropolis this week, author Annie Howard explores the Chicago Architecture Biennale, which opened to the public on September 17, featuring a series of 15 site-specific interventions. Claiming that “a tour of the Damen Silos and a celebration of the Respect Wall shows a biennial struggling to achieve long-term engagement with the city it inhabits,” the publisher questions the amount of work involved to make the city fully usable by its inhabitants.

What makes a city accessible to its inhabitants? Echoing the “Right to the City” framework first proposed by Henri Lefebvre, the theme of this year’s Chicago Architecture Biennale, “The Available City,” proposes that the city becomes usable for its inhabitants when its past, present and future seem changeable, accessible, capable of deep engagement and contemplation for those seeking new ways of understanding the place they call home.

Through several events affiliated with the Biennale in its first few weeks, various facets of this issue have come to life. Some events, such as a walking tour of the Damen Silos, a former grain storage site first built in 1832 and closed since an explosion in 1977, examined the means by which public infrastructure, even if it is not not essential to the current functioning of the city. , can become a rich engagement site with the place. At another event celebrating the living legacy of the Wall of Respect, a 1967 mural painted in the Bronzeville district, the goal was to capture the ephemeral quality of a memorial to black excellence that has never survived only about five years, recognizing the inherently fragile nature of the built environment and its impact on our imaginations. In different ways, the two events evoked key themes of the Biennale as expressed in a virtual discussion on the theme, where its chief curator, architect and professor David Brown, made the case for the city. available as a useful framework to make the city more sensitive to its inhabitants.

“It actually challenges designers to see the city as a participant, as the place where your work lasts and has an impact. “- Craig Wilkins, architect and critic

“We work with organizations that already express an interest [in a given site]”Brown said.” If they’re ready in this regard, we incorporate the potential of their continued presence, which can also help continue to stimulate thinking about other types of spaces. “

This year’s Biennale, the city’s fourth, takes a different form from the previous ones. Where previous editions were more closely tied to existing cultural institutions across the city, such as the Chicago Cultural Center, this year seeks to engage with more corners of the city through projects that can reinvigorate unused land with community development and transformation projects that are destined to continue in one way or another beyond this fall. Projects such as a closed public school turned into a community incubator, a bicycle repair and loan facility, and a permaculture food forest create new opportunities on disused sites, hopefully creating a lasting legacy every time. place.

“It actually challenges designers to see the city as a participant, as a place where your work lasts and has an impact,” said architect and scholar Craig Wilkins, who also spoke with Brown. during the main event. “It’s not just the photo on the wall or the prize that you could win. It’s five years later, going back to a place and seeing people enjoying it, recognizing that it wasn’t just a [short-term] installation.”

Yet the Available City still faces enduring barriers that it cannot entirely eclipse, in many ways a commentary on all the work that needs to be done to make the entire city fully usable for its inhabitants. The Damen Siloes event, led by a group of artists called Open sheds used for what ?, used a makeshift structure as a temporary installation to examine the ways the earth is used and reused over time. They were unable to let guests into the state-owned site, with security guards creating a “soft barrier” that prevented further access that was only tentatively available to performers during the time they were in. had used and explored the site. The site, which would require major remediation work to be officially reallocated, has become a refuge for rewilding plants in recent decades; botanists even found certain varieties of plants that had been buried and forgotten for many years, itself a powerful metaphor for the city available as something spanning time, space, and the world. natural.

This same sense of absent presence also permeated the event on the Wall of Respect. Romi Crawford, professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, read an excerpt from her book Ephemeral monuments for the Wall of Respect, arguing that African-American imprints on the built environment rarely acquire any lasting power that other memorials have found. She asked, “How could such non-monumental stories be recognized and in a decidedly non-monumental way? Recognizing the fleeting but real impact that the Respect Wall still has, the event’s fleeting tributes included a COVID mask design exercise with Robert E. Paige, an artist and textile designer who has been involved in the arts movement. Blackburns, and a dance workshop by Darlene Blackburn, herself commemorated on the Wall of Respect for her role in the study of African dance practices.

In its many different forms, The Available City hopes to activate areas of the city that are all too easily dismissed by events like architecture biennials, and the more ingrained violence of redlining, divestment and environmental distress. While the future fate of the biennial facilities remains uncertain, besieged by the same institutional barriers that led to their neglect in the first place, these early events still suggest a way of approaching the built environment in a more flexible and engaged manner, prepared for even more changes to come.

This article originally appeared in Metropolis.