"Make it New" Maybe

http://touch.latimes.com

Passage
SO-IL for the Chicago Architecture Biennial
designboom.com

Hello Everyone:

Technical difficulties seem to be an ongoing issue, be that as it may, your resourceful blogger has found a way to get around the problems and carry on with the work.  The work before us is the recently opened inaugural Chicago Architecture Biennial.  

The Chicago Architecture Biennial is a series of gallery installations, performances, lectures, and tours spread out across the city.  The artistic directors of the Biennial, Joseph Grima and Sarah Herda,  intentionally decided not to have a theme to the event in order to keep the event as eclectic or in the words of Christopher Hawthorne, in his review Los Angeles Times "In Chicago, an ambitious biennial for architecture banishes the stars and anoints a new generation,"...or maybe the skittish uncertainty, of the current moment in architecture."  Mr. Grima and Ms. Herda describe the biennial as an experiment in what is possible...a round table at which people of all ages, backgrounds and origins are invited to present their outlook on the field.  

Chicago Cultural Center, interior
Chicago, Illinois
chicagotaveler.com

Like any exhibition, the specific priorities, agendas, and preferences are in plain sight.  "So is the Oedipal struggle at its core," observes Mr. Hawthorne.  Three floors of the Chcago Cultural Center, built in 1897 as the city's first public library, serve as the base for the Biennial.  The event is anxious to announce a generational shift in architecture.  Younger architects, all born in he seventies, are given prominence over the more established older generation. The young guns include: Spain's Andres Jaque, Mexico's Tatiana Bilbao, Denmark's Bjarke Ingeks, Japan's Junya Ishigami and Sou Fujimoto.  Mr. Hawthorne notes, "The prominent members of an older generation-especially the small group of design celebrities who have dominated the international architecture circuit in recent years-are nowhere to be found."  He is specifically referring to Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, Renzo Piano, Norman Foster, Jean Nouvel, and Kazuyo Sejima.

What is equally fascinating to our critic is the event's relationship to the more established Venice Biennale. Joseph Grima, independent curator and former editor of Italian design journal Domus, and Sarah Herda, director of the Graham Foundation, have organized the Chicago event as a dialogue and in opposition to the Venice event.  The Venice Biennale runs on even numbered years and is organized around groups of national pavilions, which exude a slight colonial structure.  The Chicago Biennial will run on odd numbered years.

David Adjaye
adjure.com

The Chicago show is subtitled "The State of the Art of Architecture," is a reference to the symposium organized by Chicago architect Stanley Tigerman organized in 1977 at the Graham Foundation.  The Chicago event also has the bonus of being a tabla rasa,"...the first in a new series of every-other-year architecture celebrations."  The event highlights the increasingly fluid and transnational nature of contemporary architecture.  According to Mr. Hawthorne, the show's "patrons saint, it's hip and still-young godfather, is...the architect David Adjaye,..., who is not in the biennial itself but hovers above it as a kind of glimmering presence."  Mr. Adjaye was born in Tanzania, to Ghanaian parent, lives in London and works around the globe.  Some of his major projects include the National Museum of African-American History and Culture, slated to open on the Washing D.C. Mall next year.  Christopher Hawthorne cynically describes him as, "he is a new turbo-charged kind of starchitect."  Mr. Adajye's mid-career work is on exhibit at the Art Institute in Chicago.  Perhaps, this is a timely exhibit because Mr. Adjaye is rumored to be the prime contender for the Obama Presidential Library on Chicago's South Side.

Rural Urban Framework
Winner of the Curry Stone Design Prize
dozen.com

Another effort by the Chicago Biennial at to alter the entrenched architectural power structure came in the second day of media previews when the organizers of the Curry Stone Design Prize took over the auditorium of the Chicago Cultural Center to announce the 2015 winner.  This year's prize went to Hong Kong-based firm Rural Urban Framework, "...which re-imagines villages in mainland China drained by urbanization-is dedicated to a socially and politically engaged set of priorities that matches much of the work in the biennial."  More to the point, the ceremony was held in the heart of Chicago, where the staid Pritzker Prize was founded in 1979 and where it's sponsor, the Hyatt Foundation is located.

Christopher Hawthorne writes, "In significant ways, though, this biennial lacks the courage of its patricidal impulses. It can't quite decided if it wants to smash the idea of an architecture establishment into bits or simply announce that a new one is ascendant."  This skittishness is very acute inside the Cuktural Center, where the bulk of the biennial is taking place.  He continues, "There is a careful and very effective balance in these galleries among photography, video, architectural models and full-scale prototypes..."  He cites the example of small residential schemes on the top floor by  Tatiana Bilbao, the New York-based firm MOS, et al.  Sejima Fujimoto displays tiny models on black pedestals, like "...kind if architectural tasting menu."  Even the studies on technology and digital culture are presented in neatly measured doses.  Joseph Grima and Sarah Herda hold off the eccentric, demanding architecture of the Cultural Center by installing work in the courtyard, stairwells, and across the front elevation. It seems as if the biennial cannot decided whether it wants, in words of Ezra Pound, to "Make it new," or be punk rock in all its smash the establishment glory.

Regardless, there are indications in the biennial of the engine driving contemporary architecture; emphasized by the event as "...ad hoc, the resourceful, the collaborative, the open-ended,mother temporary, the socially and environmentally conscious and the formally subtle.  Housing is a strong point."  Strangely, while form-making for the sake of form-making is exiled, Mr. Grima and Ms. Herda gently nudge along the field's renewed interest in history.  If there is anything that remotely resembles a theme, it is the legacy of German modern architect Ludwig Mies van dear Rohe, who lived and work in Chicago from 1938 until his death in 1969.

Stony Island Arts Bank
Theater Gates
Chicago Architecture Biennial
curbed.com

The format of the biennial is taken directly from its Venice parent and similar international shows: each firm is allotted small portion of wall of floor space to present a single project or idea.  The names might be new and the approach less formal but the structure is the same.  Mr. Hawthorne writes, "It is only once it gets beyond the Cultural Center that the exhibition really finds its voice."  An example, a collaboration with African-American artist Theaster Gates, whose installation Stony Island Arts Bank debuted on the opening weekend, yielded a constructive way for Mr. Grima and Ms. Herda "...step outside architecture's hothouse of generational and territorial rivalries."  The biennial also held a competition for a series of small pavilions lining Lake Michigan.  Of the entries, the most daring was the one by the Rhode Island firm Ultramodern.  Their pavilions were built from a combination of cross-laminated timber and chain link, echoing Mies and the L.A. School.

The Is How We Order
Bryony Roberts and the South Side Drill Team
Chicago Architecture Biennial
youtube.com

Christopher Hawthorne writes, "A bigger blast of fresh air was provided by performance pieces organized by the architects Jaque and Bryony Roberts and the artist Santiago Borja.  Jaque (pronounced HA-Kay) mounted a funny, charmingly low-tech and in the end sharply political tribute to "Powers of Ten," the famous 1977 film about perspective and scale by Charles and Ray Eames."  Ms. Roberts worked with the South Side's Drill Team to fill the Federal Plaza, a public space soberly watched by Miesian buildings, with "...three-dimensional essay on various approaches to symmetry and precision."

The Chicago Architecture Biennial is a portrait of a profession facing a generational divide.  While there is a sense of continuity, the question before the young generation is how will it distance itself from the older generation and blaze its own path?

The Chicago Architecture Biennial will continue until January 3, 2016.  For more information please go to http://www.chicagoarchitecturebiennial.org