Early one morning I stood on what might be the last undeveloped piece of land in the Loop’s radius. The site of the forthcoming DuSable Park is, currently, a soil mound bursting with prairie life located where the Chicago River punctures Lake Michigan’s mouth. This, says architect Ryan Gann, who is working with Ross Barney Architects on the upcoming park’s design, is where Jean Baptiste Point Du Sable’s property, composed of nine buildings, would have once stood. The mound now hosts nine informal structures—eight red-fenced enclosures and one large, four-sided billboard that reads “Who was DuSable?” and “Who found Chicago” on either side—symbolizing Du Sable’s past presence here. The installation, by Gann and Carol Ross Barney, is titled Parallel Histories. It was created as part of the fifth edition of the Chicago Architecture Biennial (CAB 5) which opened in early November. Parallel Histories is a monument to Du Sable, obviously, but also a means to orient ourselves within the land’s layered past.
Chicago Architecture Biennial
Through 2/11/24, various locations throughout the city. Visit chicagoarchitecturebiennial.org for more info.
The enclosures remind us that what exists now once was not—cities are land, buildings, and stories heaped onto one another, where one history gets (often physically) flattened and paved over for another. CAB 5 is an extensive exhibition dedicated to showcasing this “infill” layering of histories—what we choose to remember, and the evidence or traces of those past urban selves that still hold tight amidst endless transformations. These layers—as asserted by biennial curators from the Floating Museum and the theme “This Is A Rehearsal”—are iterations of the city-yet-to-be, signifying not only history but all the ways we currently build and negotiate urban life.
Rehearsal comes through clearly throughout parts of the exhibition, though at times it feels like a hodgepodge of attempts at squeezing rehearsal into the contours of an overstuffed show. There is, in some ways, too much work: with 51 works at the Chicago Cultural Center, several at the Thompson Center, more at the Graham Foundation, and off-site outdoor installations on the north, south, and west sides—there might be something for every Chicago resident, but perhaps it comes at the cost of legibility. At the Cultural Center, some work is more comprehensible than others, with some pieces feeling unfinished or haphazardly installed. Remnants of hot glue and peeling surfaces were difficult to ignore. I overheard one visitor joking that the rehearsal theme might be a cop-out—if it’s only a rehearsal, maybe it’s supposed to be unfinished? A bad-faith comment, certainly, but the quantity of work exhibited could be the culprit.
Credit: Cory Dewald
There are, however, some highlights: On the Cultural Center’s second floor, 100 Links is a massive web of interlinking Gunter’s chains spanning the gallery’s entire height and width. Designed by architecture and art practice AD-WO and the Buell Center in New York, the chains are devices that historically marked territory for property ownership, enclosing “private” land and ultimately dispossessing Indigenous peoples. Visitors can walk amongst the draped chains as a way to challenge or unsettle the historic meaning behind them.
The fourth floor includes a hectic assemblage of smaller-scale works. Packed to the brim, visitors encounter dozens of individual works and installations, but a few stand out. Along the floor’s east wall are paintings by Puerto Rican artist Gamaliel Rodríguez, which depict hazy drawings of anonymous modern structures being consumed by jungle flora. Titled Figures, the series portrays angular airport traffic control towers and military base-like megaliths enmeshed by palm leaves and shrouded in ghostly bushes. Close by, Monumental Returns, a new work by anthropologist Vyjayanthi Rao and filmmaker Kush Badhwar addresses the effects of a mega-dam built in Telangana, South India. A video depicting the dam plays, soundtracked by a prayerlike song that tells the story of corruption and social and ecological loss related to the dam’s construction—notably, that nearby sacred temples had to be dismantled and rebuilt multiple times to accommodate this modern, ultradestructive infrastructure.
Also included on the fourth floor is a “monument park,” where landscape architecture firm Site crafted a sprawling series of plinths composed of Geofoam blocks, material typically used to shape the earth underneath parks and playgrounds. The blocks are smartly sloppy, with Sharpie markings and blemishes from use—all signs of their past lives outside the gallery. On these plinths sit a new series of 14 “monuments” by various contributors; however, the foam landscape is most compelling as literal manifestations of a terraforming recipe that uses artificial ingredients.
Credit: Cory Dewald
While the Cultural Center’s exhibition feels so full that it becomes difficult to comprehend how all 51 pieces fit together, CAB’s installations on the south side offer respite and meaning. An installation by local artist Edra Soto, located at 75th and Ellis Avenue, is a small concrete shelter; its modern design hearkens back to decorative architecture from Soto’s native Puerto Rico. Titled La Distancia, the structure speaks to diasporic traditions but also importantly functions as a much-needed bus shelter for the 4 and 79 buses. Just north of this site, in Bronzeville, artist Norman Teague worked with architect Mejay Gula to construct a full-scale plywood model of a monument to abolitionists Frederick and Anna Douglass. Called Tetisi = Listen, it’s a prototype that precedes a planned monument to be built at an unknown date in Douglass Park. Four plywood tunnels surround a dome pavilion; the tunnel facades provide a chalkboard for visitors to manifest community futures while quotes from Douglass are displayed on the tunnels’ interiors.
These works complicate the belief that cities and landscapes are static places that only evolve through “natural order.” In her 2019 essay “Towards an Urban Attention Ecology,” curator Cecilie Sachs Olsen wrote, “The current urban regime of attention alienates us from the urban spaces that we inhabit by promoting an understanding of the built environment as a form of ‘natural order’ with inherent meanings and predetermined functions that exercise control over the people who use it.” Those predetermined functions often also yield predetermined futures. Soto and Teague instead create other possible uses and futures: Soto, through a guerrilla act, disrupts formal mechanisms of providing critical infrastructure; Teague collapses design and abolition histories that invite visitors to literally write out their hopes for their communities.
While overwhelming, CAB 5 makes an exciting proposition: Though we might imagine urban timelines as straight lines, artists, and architects can fracture that line to let histories, uses, stories, and new meanings leak out. Through these fractures, city residents can also imagine new ways of challenging prescribed uses, to retell or remember those lost stories—to become closer to our city’s past and develop agency over its future.
Returning to the soil mound on the lake’s edge, Gann reminds me that Parallel Histories should, technically, be located over at the Michigan Avenue Apple store, which is where the river used to reach the lake before humans landfilled the original coastline. The Apple store is just another layer of Chicago’s fabric, as are the skateboarders I’ve seen doing tricks on its plaza, or the commuters taking shelter from the rain under the building’s roof overhang. These unsanctioned uses might seem like tiny blips in the city’s long timeline; however, CAB 5 seems to want us to see, encourage, and celebrate them as monumental.
related stories
Biennial as experimentation
In 2017, a barge drifted along the Chicago River. It wasn’t carrying the usual Ozinga concrete or gravel; instead it floated a museum. Produced by the Floating Museum, an interdisciplinary collective comprised of architect Andrew Schachman, artists Faheem Majeed and Jeremiah Hulsebos-Spofford, and poet avery r. young, the museum barge showcased artwork from dozens of…
A more local Chicago Architecture Biennial
The Chicago Architecture Biennial focuses on a “deeper engagement with the local community” in “The Available City.”
Power, violence, and the Chicago Architecture Biennial
This year may end the unstoppable homage to dead white men and narratives that neglect how architecture has victimized communities of color.