Left to right: Clínica Veterinaria Guayaquil, Adamo-Faiden (photo illustration); Granville 1500, Lorcan O’Herlihy. Photo: Paul Vu; Urban Tulou by Liu Xiaodu and Meng Yan, Urbanus Architecture & Design Inc. Photo: Chaoying Yang; bottom: Nine Dwellings Oosterwold, SLA Bureau drawing
Things are moving fast.
If the pandemic brought the world to a halt, the years since have moved our world into hyperspeed. Things move so fast, and in so many directions, that it’s difficult to give shape or definition to our era.
The theme of this fifth Chicago Architecture Biennial is Shift, a gesture to both the speed of change and the need for it. It’s a container for new ideas to imprint upon our built world, rather than a singular vision.
A few shifts you’ll find in these pages:
Design luminary Dirk Denison and CAB6 artistic director Florencia Rodriguez discuss the cross-pollination of architectural ideas between Latin American and Chicago institutions. As our country measures the hurdles of housing production, and young architecture talent searches for their first built projects, the “architecture of agency” they describe feels particularly instructive.
As YouTube becomes the new television, Stewart Hicks is the city’s next architecture star—not so much for what he’s designed or built as for what he’s uploaded. Mary Wisniewski has a profile on the multihyphenate Chicago architecture figure.
Gregory Maher documents Clare Lyster’s projects documenting the infrastructure and systems that keep our city functioning. It’s a fascinating look at a city where logistics, technology and agriculture have always intersected, and feels like William Cronon’s seminal “Nature’s Metropolis” carried far into the future.
Ben Schulman considers the legacy of the Chicago Architecture Biennial through its first decade, and its potential for permanence in the city’s timeline.
Theodore Anderson, Nick Knowlton and Gregory Maher highlight notable projects featured at this biennial, from a dormitory expansion for novice monks to a giant creature constructed of Totora reeds.
The Biennial is an unlikely platform for the art of the built world, where miniature cities are assembled within sites throughout the metropolis, then deconstructed months later.
But this city was put on the map by a World’s Fair whose structures mostly vanished without a trace. We understand that ideas, like buildings, can have long lives.
Florencia Rodriguez describes the concept of “discrete revolutions”—moments of serendipity or inspiration that happen in places like panels or exhibitions and seed much bigger projects, or even movements, that shape our experience of the world. Some take shape right away, while others may take years to realize.
Chicago is a city built from layers of discrete revolutions, but is in search of its next transformation. May the memory of this Biennial last a lifetime.
—Todd Hieggelke
The Early Shift
Newcity takes on the Chicago Architecture Biennial 2025
(Get a copy of the issue here.)
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CAB at Ten: What is the Chicago Architecture Biennial Legacy?
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Thirteen projects in profile (see below).
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The Unexpected Video Stardom of Architect Stewart Hicks
Coming Soon:
Clare Lyster on Mapping the Systems of the City
