A truism made the rounds a few years ago: Utopia is not a place, it’s a direction. It’s a portmanteau of the translation of utopia as “no place” and a memeable quote about happiness, circulated in the early years of the Obama administration when hope and change carried an optimistic currency. The phrase popped into my head during opening remarks for the Chicago Architecture Biennial (CAB) in early November. Now in its fifth cycle, the biennial was pushed back from the usual September date for a number of reasons, but most evident was that the exhibition, This is a Rehearsal, just wasn’t ready.
Chicago leadership took the podium (or in the case of Rahm Emanuel, former Chicago mayor and CAB father figure, a video from Tokyo), followed by the artistic directors. Each hanging on the transformative properties of the word rehearsal, until I stopped counting the number of times it was mentioned that the city could, would, should transform. Avery R. Young, of the four-man arts collective Floating Museum and the inaugural poet laureate for the city of Chicago, was the last to speak. Actually, he broke into song, and as his full-throated voice drifted up toward the Tiffany glass dome of the cultural center, lyrics caught my ear: “If you ask me where this rehearsal is going, I don’t know.”
This biennial is not a place, it’s a direction. I don’t know where it’s going, either. The theme, vague and all-encompassing, makes excuses for unfinished or uninstalled work while failing to provide a structure to guide visitors through wildly divergent works by eighty-six architects, artists, community groups, landscape architects, and cultural organizations.
Inside the Chicago Cultural Center, which anchors a constellation of affiliate sites around the city, the “rehearsal” motif manifests literally and liberally. Scaffolding on the top floor acts as both armature for the exhibition and as a project of its own—Ecotone by Leticia Pardo, creative director of exhibition design at the Art Institute of Chicago. A similar provisional aesthetic accompanies filmmaker Jennifer Reeder and Adri Siriwatt’s I WON’T SAY IT OUT LOUD: set for internal monologue, and in the ground-floor lobby, Theater for One (a partnership between artistic director Christine Jones and the New York architecture firm Lo-TEK) created a mobile stage for an intimate poetry performance. One actor and one audience member inside a small chamber that resembles the kind of black box roadies use to store gear.
The history of process- or theater-based approaches to art, architecture, landscape architecture, and performance is deep, with boards well-trod for much of the twentieth century. Less esoteric examples include John Cage’s chance operations, Cedric Price and Joan Littlewood’s Fun Palace, Anna and Lawrence Halprin’s RSVP cycles, and Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed. But curators Andrew Schachman, Faheem Majeed, Jeremiah Hulsebos-Spofford, and Young don’t evoke such precedents, choosing instead to ground their vision in Floating Museum’s ongoing practice and network of community-based organizations in Chicago. While well intended, the effort comes off as parochial rather than reflecting the contemporary field.
So, when individual projects do stand out—and there are many beautiful pieces—they do so in spite of the theme, not because of it. Of particular note is 100 Links: Architecture and Land in and out of the Americas by the Buell Center at Columbia University and architecture studio AD–WO. Combining research and design, it is a lesson in how to create work for a biennial. The ephemeral installation, a meditation on the Gunter’s chains, corner mounds, and other tools that were used to measure and mark land as North America was colonized, fills a second-floor gallery in the cultural center. Light from the large, arched windows glints off the chains that are hung to form the profile mound within a square that seems to reference the Jeffersonian section grid. Troughs of earthen-colored books published by the Buell Center are free for those interested in digging into the history. In short, 100 Links has the capacity to resonate with many audiences: It’s physically evocative, politically timely, and well-researched. A viewer can meet the work at any or all of those levels.
The theme, vague and all-encompassing, makes excuses for unfinished or uninstalled work while failing to provide a structure to guide visitors through wildly divergent works by eighty-six architects, artists, community groups, landscape architects, and cultural organizations.
100 Links occupies the middle of an enfilade of three galleries that Schachman calls the “horror” sequence. It begins with a re-creation of the front porch of the ranch house from Jordan Peele’s 2022 genre film Nope by production designer Ruth De Jong, which speaks to the alienation, extraction, and racism of the American West and ends with WOJR’s The Grey Veil, a ghostly arrangement of curtains that’s supposedly for “rehearsing” something (anything), but is actually a benign exercise in abstraction—more Casper than Candyman.
I’d argue that the more terrifying work is elsewhere in This is a Rehearsal. CAB commissioned Ghanian artist Paa Joe to create an artwork based on Chicago’s architecture. Joe, who is known for crafting figurative fantasy coffins, or abebu adekai, chose to recast Mies van der Rohe’s Crown Hall in sarcophagal form. Schachman suggested that the piece, Restoring Old Houses (which is shown with almost no didactic information), alludes to Titanic (1978), Stanley Tigerman’s famous collage critique in which Crown Hall sinks into Lake Michigan. A more gutting reading goes unexpressed: the 1952 demolition of the Mecca Flats apartment building and the erasure of a center of the Chicago Black Renaissance in order to make way for the glassy architecture building and the wider Illinois Institute of Technology campus.
A real Grand Guignol is Accoutrorama: Rehearsing Racial Violence in America by Bartlett School of Architecture director Amy Kulper and design outfit Props Supply. The Wunderkammeresque installation combines dioramas of the US Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021, with replicas of artifacts from that shocking day: a shamanic headdress, the Senate lectern, articles from Nancy Pelosi’s office. “Objects so real they could appear on ‘fake news,’” write Kulper and Props Supply, recognizing that in an age of AI, deep fakes, and polarized media we are losing our grasp of what is true or real. As if this weren’t disturbing enough, the project title places the event within the context of rehearsal, meaning that the insurrection wasn’t a finale, but still in previews, still perfecting choreographed terror.
The 2020 election and Trump’s past-present-future specter also haunt the Graham Foundation, where a more tightly curated body of work is on view. Detailed drawings of the town of Manchester, New Hampshire, by Berlin-based artist Larissa Fassler, made in 2019–20, capture a deteriorating public sphere. Like a score for a performance we have already seen, her line work and notations capture MAGA protests, homelessness, and a drug epidemic in an eviscerated urban fabric. Eerily timely is the installation Antum Al-Saūt; Wa Nahnu Sadāh (You Are the Voice; We Are Its Echo) by Interim Studio and collaborators in an adjacent room that explores the territory of the Golan Heights and the erasures and displacements wrought upon people and land by decades of Israeli occupation. Photographs by Daniel Ruiz document the site of a former Syrian village, now overtaken by weedy grasses and a military training camp. Here, there are ghosts.
The idea that rehearsing might bring about a better Chicago, a better architecture, a better biennial is fraught and even undermined by many of the works on view, which ask us to process that which is painful and difficult.
Dream the Combine’s contribution, Afterimages III, fills the domestic, ground-floor galleries at the Graham Foundation. The site-specific installation combines an abstract, illusionary space (manifested in line drawings on the walls and steel poles angled in the rooms) with photographs by Jennifer Newsom and Tom Carruthers of protests that erupted in Minneapolis in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd. The pair note that the wall drawings are meant to be a counterpoint to the images of political struggle—the infinity of a suggested horizon is captured within and on the gallery walls.
It’s not enough anymore to believe that an event horizon will somehow solve whatever fresh terror arises. That utopia has sailed. Indeed, the idea that rehearsing might bring about a better Chicago, a better architecture, a better biennial is fraught and even undermined by many of the works on view, which ask us to process that which is painful and difficult. The fact that there are very few architectural projects on offer (there’s a lack of housing or cultural buildings and few parks or urban plans) only underscores a disassociation from mechanisms of development, construction, and policy.
Novelist and scholar Tananarive Due is an expert on horror, especially Black horror. She sees it as a medium to validate and visualize racial trauma. “There’s something about trauma that horror can soothe very specifically because it relies so much on dread and survival behaviors,” she said in a recent interview with Novel Suspects. Is an architecture biennial the best place to process trauma? Certainly, healing exceeds the temporal boundaries of the two-year cycle (as well as the financial capacity of a cultural arts organization), as demonstrated by a pavilion on seven-acre South Chicago Farm.
The project, saddled with the awkward title Art on the Farm—South Chicago: Artist in Residence, is a collaboration between artist Erika Allen, the Urban Growers Collective, and New York City–based design office The Living. Intended as a structure for the organization’s programs, it’s an installation that few exhibition goers will experience during the course of the biennial: as of early November, construction was still in the early stages. Members of the press were bused in to see a job site, where a nascent timber framework rose from a cleared spot of ground. It gave an impression of time and resources stretched thin. Allen shared that her team received $40,000 for the anticipated shelter—designed for visiting artists and workshops—and fundraised an additional $40,000. An experimental cladding, perhaps made out of mycelium or other plant material, is being developed by The Living, presumably pro bono.
The farm provides fresh produce to communities in need, and Allen hinted that urban agriculture is a kind of survival behavior—an exercise in self-sufficiency. If things take a bad turn (she gestured toward Chicago’s Loop and northern, whiter neighborhoods) they will still have food and a refuge.
“It’s not just repetitive, it’s generative,” says Carmani Edwards, musician and member of the Urban Growers Collective, giving her own interpretation of rehearsal. Farming, like the Chicago Architecture Biennial, is a trial run for a more ominous future, even as it labors toward a brighter one.