At the Chicago Architecture Biennial, Radical Times Demand Radical Change

“Beauty for All,” the giant red-orange neon sign declares in one of the Chicago Cultural Center galleries hosting the Architecture Biennial. Created by R&R Studios, the image evokes advertising, flashing roadside attractions and, of course, the ironic, elliptical neon text art sculptures of Jenny Holzer. The sign is kitschy and silly—but in the current context, it’s also poignant. Chicago today is a city under siege. President Donald Trump has repeatedly insulted the city, describing it as a “hellhole” and a “disaster.” Though crime in the city has fallen dramatically, Trump has falsely claimed the city is violent and unsafe—and has used that as an excuse to flood the city with masked, heavily armed ICE troops tasked with harassing and kidnapping immigrants and anyone they see as un-American. These troops have shot faith leaders with pepper balls, launched a brutal raid on a South Shore building and spread such terror among immigrant and Latino communities that restaurants may be forced to shut down because diners and workers are afraid to leave their homes.

The Biennial does not directly mention the federal presence in the city. But it’s hard not to think about what’s happening outside as you tour exhibits celebrating diversity, urban space and a vision of Chicago as a global cultural hub and world leader. The Biennial and the city want “Beauty for All”—but can that expansive vision survive the siege? The Chicago Architecture Biennial is an international exhibit of architectural ideas, projects and artwork held every other year in Chicago since 2014. This year’s theme is officially “SHIFT: Architecture in Times of Radical Change”—a title that gives a lot of leeway for different designers and artists to pursue a range of ideas and approaches. It’s staged at several sites around the city, but it’s focused at downtown’s Chicago Cultural Center.

A dramatic starting point for the Biennial is the room that chronicles a range of global building projects through pamphlets and short documentary films, which run three at a time against the wall. Assimilating the range of approaches and spaces is both overwhelming and exhilarating. A 3 Generation House in the Netherlands created by BETA office stacks two apartments on top of each other, creating a multigeneration household not unlike the Chicago two-flat in which my multigenerational family lives. Liu Xiaodu and Meng Ya’s Urban Tulou in Guangzhou is an affordable housing circular building design based on 300-year-old Hakka Tulou—a large, shared home. MASS Design Group’s Maternity Waiting Village attempts to address high maternal mortality rates in Malawi by building maternal care facilities featuring clusters of buildings and courtyards. The comfortable space may seem like a luxury, but in fact it’s life or death; when women are forced to go to an office environment with no amenities for families, they often find it so alienating that they simply leave, putting themselves and their babies at risk.

These designs don’t exactly emphasize “radical change.” Rather, they all are trying to use traditional elements in new settings in an effort to make public and private spaces feel welcoming for individuals, communities and families. The architects here all suggest that housing, design and—implicitly—public funds should be used in ways that address and affirm different people’s pasts, identities and needs.

Some on-site exhibits carry a similar message. “Fragments of Disability Fictions” by Ignacio G. Galán, David Gissen and Architensions, for example, uses models and a narrated video to imagine a utopian, climate-friendly, accessible, creative New York City—including retaking and remaking Rikers Island and other institutions that have housed people with disabilities. Fırat Erdim’s “Field Harp” is a series of wind-activated instruments that can be held and moved by performers—a reenvisioning of street performance that turns the environment itself into a collaboration.

Other installations seem less focused on creating new, welcoming spaces and more interested in celebrating urban architecture and life in all its messy weirdness. RADDAR’s installation “Our Second Skin, The Skin of the City” is a circular alcove made of overlapping glass panes—a tribute to the ubiquity of the semimiraculous transparent substance that we take for granted even as it covers homes, cars and offices. Jason Campbell/ellProjects’ “The Linen Closet” performs a similar alchemy for the softer aspects of our environment; the piece is a large rack of comforters, quilts and textiles, suggesting that where we live is made of folds and fabrics as well as rigid structures. Cristóbal Palma’s Lugar Común (or Common Place) is a series of photographs of odd details of Latin American cities—a shaped shrub outside an apartment building, a car partly visible through a parking structure, a pylon.

Perhaps the standout of the Biennial—and a favorite of kids if the student group I saw passing through is any indication—is Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork’s Variations in Mass Nos. 5, 6, 7. The piece is a room with three large inflatables made to look like brick walls. Viewers stand in the middle of the masses and watch them blow up and deflate, creating a constantly changing series of more or less curving, irregular and collapsing spaces. Romantic music plays in the background but is often overpowered by the hum and roar of the ambient air blowers. Watching the exhibit is like seeing a city triumphantly rise and then fall in on itself, forming its own ruins. It’s a vision of urban landscape as constantly morphing mock-heroic pratfall—a place that is lovable in both its aspirations and its inevitable failures.

You can see part of that love for cities expressed in the signage. As in most Chicago museums, the Biennial’s explanatory text is provided on plaques in both Spanish and English. That’s an acknowledgment that our city has a huge, important Latino population and it’s not something a reviewer would usually comment on or even think about. But right now, as the federal government states over and over—with guns and violence—that certain people aren’t welcome, it’s hard to ignore the small accommodations that signal to our neighbors that this is their space too.

Outside the Cultural Center, people are being terrorized, kidnapped, even murdered by the government. Inside, there is Spanish-language text; there are plans for accessible cities; there are plans for multigenerational homes and birthing centers; there is a neon sign that says, “Beauty for All.” You could see the Biennial as an act of resistance and hope; you could see it as a naïve exercise in whitewashing and erasing the current assault on the city. In truth, it probably functions as both. Chicago, like the country, is facing a bleak time. The Biennial acknowledges that only sideways, by dreaming of building a new place where we all are home.

The Chicago Architecture Biennial runs through February 28, 2026.

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