Six of CAC’s favorite 2017 Biennial installations

The Chicago Architecture Biennial has brought dozens of stunning installations to the Chicago Cultural Center. We’ve chosen six must-see projects.

by Jen Masengarb, Director of Interpretation and Research

As North America’s largest international exhibition of contemporary architecture, the 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial is a snapshot of the ways in which architects, designers, and planners from around the world are confronting both the history and future of design. They’re doing it all around one central theme: Make New History.

An incredibly wide variety of projects is on display until Jan. 7, 2018, ranging from the theoretical to the pragmatic. Artistic Directors Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee of the LA-based firm Johnston Marklee describe the Biennial as a “laboratory that fosters dialogues on an evolutionary way of thinking about our buildings and our cities.” Here’s a look at six of our favorite installations:

1. (Not) Another Tower

Tatiana Bilbao Estudio
Yates Gallery, fourth floor, east side

The Sidney Yates Gallery on the fourth floor of the Cultural Center holds “Vertical City,” an eye-catching collection of towers, each measuring approximately 18 feet tall. For this exhibit, the Biennial’s artistic directors commissioned 16 architects to reinterpret tall buildings through the lens of the 1922 Tribune Tower Competition.

Architects have been designing skyscrapers for more than 130 years. While innovative structural systems have continued improving tall buildings, their function has remained remarkably similar. Even today’s so-called “mixed-use” skyscrapers typically only have a handful of uses—residential, hotel and office—stacked in identical floors.

Architect Tatiana Bilbao of Mexico City is arguing for vertical neighborhoods, not just vertical structures. True neighborhoods, she explains, are built over time, with opportunities for self-expression and with the possibility to collaborate with neighbors. In creating her (Not) Another Tower, she collaborated with 15 other studios, divided a tower into 192 plots and challenged them to rethink the social fabric of communities within it. They have brought the vibrant, sometimes messy, life of the horizontal city into the sky. With more than 2/3 of the world’s population expected to live in cities by 2050, Bilbao’s delightful tower tackles important questions.

2. Heliomorphic Chicago

Charles Waldheim with Office for Urbanization Harvard Graduate School of Design and Siena Scarff Design
Yates Gallery, fourth floor, west side

At first glance, these bright red-pink slender structures look fantastical and futuristic, reminiscent of towers in The Metropolis of Tomorrow, Hugh Ferriss’ 1929 science fiction publication. But with closer inspection, the shapes of familiar Chicago skyscrapers begin to emerge: the setbacks of the Willis Tower, the petal-like balconies of Marina City, the Gothic Revival crown of the Tribune Tower.

Heliomorphic (sun shape) Chicago revives the conversation about the solar performance of buildings in terms of both energy efficiency and human comfort. Waldheim and a team from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design have accentuated angles and stretched forms on familiar Chicago skyscrapers. Their speculative project imagines a Loop with buildings that maximize the amount of sunlight for both the occupants and nearby pedestrians.

3. From Mixed Use to Different Use

Adamo-Faiden
Grand Army of the Republic Hall, second floor, north side

The Grand Army of the Republic Hall on the second floor of the Cultural Center is home to a collection of Biennial models named “Horizontal City” by the artistic directors. Each model reinterprets a famous historic image into a new, 3D representation.

Many of the well-known images we have in our mind of Mid-Century Modern architecture are captured in the work of photographer Erza Stoller. His black and white photographs of structures like Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum and Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building have become iconic.

Argentinian architects Sebastián Adamo and Marcelo Faiden examined Stoller’s photographs of the 875 N. Michigan Ave (John Hancock Center). They saw one type of space: a central core, interior columns and walls of glass, endlessly repeated throughout the 90+ floors. Interested in how this conventional building might someday hold unconventional uses, they created a three-floor model of the 875 N. Michigan Ave (located within “Horizontal City”) that is filled with delightful surprises and uses, like camping, parks, food trucks and classrooms. By obliterating the typical categories of uses in the building, their model invites important questions about adaptive reuse.

4. Material Connections

Studio Gang
Chicago Galleries, second floor, east side

Chicago-based Studio Gang architects have a long history of celebrating common, everyday building materials and using them in surprising and beautiful ways. From the undulating raw concrete balconies on Aqua to the saw-tooth roof of the WMS Clark Park boat house, their work is often finely detailed.

This giant, full-scale model of the wooden lattice that surrounds The Writers Theater in Glencoe is no exception. Thin 2 x 3 inch wooden strips reach at crisscrossing angles. They slice into a horizontal beam above and notch into a laminated beam below—held together without any bolts, screws or glue. The hinges, which architect Jeanne Gang has called a “cat’s paw” shape, appear to rotate inside their carved wooden sockets. In a Biennial filled with many thought experiments, Studio Gang’s intricate model of an existing building is a different perspective on the curator’s charge to “make new history.”

5. Paris Hausmann

LAN with Franck Boutté Consultants and produced by Pavillon de l’Arsenal Paris
Michigan Avenue Galleries, first floor, east side

Today, Paris is known for its wide diagonal boulevards, blocks of uniform-height apartment buildings and urban vistas that end in monuments—all the result of a grand urban redesign carried out 150 years ago. Emperor Napoléon III charged Baron Haussmann with the task of modernizing and beautifying Paris. Haussmann carried through one of the most radical and comprehensive urban plans ever undertaken, creating new open space and connecting different parts of the city. If Chicago had carried out the full scope of Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennett’s vision in the 1909 Plan of Chicago, our city would have looked very similar.

This Biennial installation by LAN and Boutté is a detailed, data-driven 21st century dissection of Hausmann’s Plan. It was originally curated for the Pavillon de l’Arsenal, Paris’ architecture center. Using detailed street elevations, as well as maps, charts, and diagrams that compare Paris with other cities (including Chicago), the team of designers is investigating the relevance and performance of Hausmann’s Plan today. Knowing what Burnham and Bennett proposed here in their plan, the exhibit provides an interesting glimpse into Chicago’s imagined future.

6. Randolph Square

Frida Escobedo
Randolph Street entrance, through the lobby

We often take Chicago’s unrelenting Cartesian grid of north/south and east/west streets and the ability to look down a broad, straight street as far as the eye can see for granted. But what happens in those few places in the fabric of the city where the grid shifts? Does it change our perceptions and jar us to attention?

Architect Frida Escobedo has transformed the Cultural Center’s Randolph Street gathering room into a dynamic space by shifting both the grid of the room and the plane of the floor by covering it in smooth, square maple panels that are regularly changing. She invites us to enter, move around, watch, use and see the space from a new perspective.