The show — the architecture show, that is — will go on.
After weeks of uncertainty caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, organizers of the Chicago Architecture Biennial on Wednesday announced they will hold the fourth edition of the global architecture festival next year, but with a new, neighborhood-centric format — and a gritty subject matter.
The event, titled “The Available City,” will build on a Chicago architecture professor’s long-term efforts to find creative uses for thousands of vacant city-owned lots. It will ask viewers to ponder how shared spaces, like small community gardens, affect cities’ quality of life.
The topic dovetails with Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s $750 million “Invest South/West” program to boost investment in struggling neighborhoods on the city’s South and West sides.
In a news release, the mayor said she was “thrilled” that the biennial “will be focused and grounded in our neighborhoods that can benefit from it the most.”
The decision to proceed comes as the pandemic has caused widespread disruption in the arts, forcing Broadway theaters to remain shuttered until at least May 30, 2021, and turning the large gatherings of global art and architecture fairs into potential health hazards.
In response, organizers have postponed major events like the Venice Architecture Biennale, whose start was put off twice — first, from May to August, then to May 2021.
The Chicago biennial, which bills itself as North America’s largest exhibition of contemporary architecture and design, plans to combine outdoor and online events and exhibitions with indoor events, the latter if health conditions permit.
Because of the uncertainty posed by the pandemic, fewer exhibits may be shown at the Chicago Cultural Center, the palatial former public library across Michigan Avenue from Millennium Park that has served as the event’s main venue since the biennial began in 2015.
“This is an exercise in flexibility,” the event’s chairman, Chicago lawyer Jack Guthman, told me.
The biennial’s artistic director will be David Brown, a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s architecture school.
Brown participated in the inaugural 2015 biennial with an exhibition, also called “The Available City,” which explored how 15,000 city-owned vacant lots could be transformed into usable public spaces rather than conventional reuses like urban farms.
Since then, Brown has worked with community-based organizations, connecting them with architects and designers to develop plans to turn individual lots or combinations of lots into small parks, plazas and buildings of various sizes.
In an interview, Brown said he’s been working with a community group in North Lawndale, but, to date, none of his plans have been built.
In addition to vacant lots, he said, the biennial likely will address the need to rethink other aspects of urban life. He cited how, during the pandemic, city officials have converted some roads into “shared streets” that can be used by vehicles, bikes and pedestrians.
The biennial, he said, is about the “latent possibilities for cities.”
Rather than starting from the ground up, the 2021 biennial will expand on Brown’s work — an advantage at a time when the pandemic has cut opportunities for the event’s artistic director to travel and seek out architects for the event.
“That’s one of the reasons we’re really confident we can do this,” said Sarah Herda, the co-artistic director of the 2015 biennial and a member of the organization’s board. “We feel like it’s really a good moment” to reunite with Brown and take his research forward, she said.
Previous editions of the biennial have featured models, drawings, installations and other work by more than 350 architects, designers and artists from more than 40 nations.
Stressing that the 2021 biennial will seek to retain that international flavor, Herda said the event might display projects from around the world that deal with issues like those Brown has explored in his research.
Out-of-town architects might communicate with Chicago community groups via Zoom or other online forums, she said.
The Danish Arts Foundation, which participated in the 2019 biennial, will participate with a project developed by a Danish artist or artistic team that follow’s the show’s theme and is done in collaboration with Chicago residents.
In another change from previous years, when the show began in September and ran until January, the 2021 biennial will feature advance programs that lead up to a “critical mass” of events that start in September, Herda said.
“Even before the pandemic, we’ve been working to re-imagine the biennial as a year-round organization,” she said.
The biennial’s first event, scheduled for Tuesday, will be an online conversation between Brown and California landscape architect Walter Hood, winner of a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, who participated in the 2019 biennial.
As in previous years, the nonprofit organization that runs the biennial will present the event in cooperation with the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events. A lead sponsor has yet to be named. “We’re still actively fundraising,” Herda said.
In the past, the free-to-the-public event has drawn crowds that city officials estimated at about 500,000 per year. It remains to be seen if the biennial will have the same drawing power when it is spread across different venues throughout the city.
With Thursday’s announcement, the biennial becomes the second Chicago architecture organization to shift from indoor activity to outdoor events and online platforms in response to the pandemic. Open House Chicago, which normally gives participants access to the interiors of Chicago buildings, is presenting outdoor and online tours before it closes Sunday.
Blair Kamin is a Tribune critic.
Twitter @BlairKamin
