Stakes — and payoff — for Chicago’s architecture biennial are sky-high

“The city's image as an architect-maker isn’t just a bit of local lore. It gives Chicago-based architecture firms a marginal advantage when they compete for work overseas. In an international real estate marketplace, being a Chicago firm is shorthand for something important. It instantly conjures images of muscular skyscrapers and bridges, of men who smoke cigarettes late into the night, of women who break all the rules, of young people cloaked in adhesive fumes as they build models in windowless rooms. Architecture firms know this. Each time they prepare sales decks for client meetings, they stack a skyline slide near the top. Each time they unfurl big plans on distant conference tables, they invoke a legacy. And when they win projects, the victories accrue to the city's competitiveness.”

My commentary on the stakes of the Chicago Architecture Biennial appeared in Crain’s on the eve of the inaugural event.

As the first-ever Chicago Architecture Biennial — touted as North America’s largest exhibition of architectural ideas — prepared to get underway, I was steadily covering its development. I wrote a number of pieces for Newcity magazine, where I was serving as editor of its design section, and elsewhere. I had interviewed key players and had amassed substantial insights. At the same time, I was in touch with architecture firms in Chicago, some of whom had expressed reservations about the Biennial. These could be summed up as: “is this for me?”

Crain’s Chicago Business, the city’s business and policy publication of record, invited me to contribute an oped to its pages on the eve of the Bicentennial. In it, I offered a hopeful perspective on the event; if done right, it could update Chicago’s reputation as a global creative incubator. But to have a lasting impact, I wrote, the Biennial ought to be as inclusive as possible — an occasion to engage broader audiences rather than lock design behind museum displays.

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The last time that architects and city fathers concocted a plan to show off Chicago's magnificent avenues, impressive edifices, and cultural jewels, the city first earned a reputation for being "windy," the fast talk of its boosters blowin' like a gale. Back then, barely two decades after it burnt to the ground, the city had plenty of gusto. What it didn’t have were avenues, edifices, and jewels.

Until it did. We Chicagoans hustled to put on a show for the World’s Columbian Exposition. In a remarkably short time, we'd built not only a dream city out of plaster and horsehair in Jackson Park, but added a reputation for delivering on promises.

The 2015 Chicago Architecture Biennial has all of the makings of this kind of effort, a communal barn-raising animated by local ambition, with a global audience looking on. The Biennial, which will launch in October, is being touted by its organizers as the largest showcase of contemporary design in North America. With design — in architecture, landscape, objects — enjoying a moment of tremendous popular interest, this is no small claim. At stake is our self-image. We are accustomed to thinking of ourselves as architecture nerds, eagerly engaged in or unwittingly enveloped by a pervasive design culture. As proof, folks allude to cab drivers who interpret architectural landmarks as they deliver tourists to downtown hotels — a wheeled brigade of Citizen Docents. A successful Biennial, and especially one that finds a way to connect with homegrown enthusiasm, will shore up the image and update the old cab story for the new generation: Uber drivers touring their passengers around tech incubators en route to Logan Square.

But the stakes are greater than that. The city's image as an architect-maker isn’t just a bit of local lore. It gives Chicago-based architecture firms a marginal advantage when they compete for work overseas. In an international real estate marketplace, being a Chicago firm is shorthand for something important. It instantly conjures images of muscular skyscrapers and bridges, of men who smoke cigarettes late into the night, of women who break all the rules, of young people cloaked in adhesive fumes as they build models in windowless rooms. Architecture firms know this. Each time they prepare sales decks for client meetings, they stack a skyline slide near the top. Each time they unfurl big plans on distant conference tables, they invoke a legacy. And when they win projects, the victories accrue to the city's competitiveness.

Those are high stakes, which is why practitioners of architecture are anxious and hopeful about the Biennial. But the reason the rest of us should be looking forward to the Chicago Architecture Biennial isn’t about high stakes, nor about windy rhetoric. What we should be looking forward to — demanding, even — is big fun.

In 1893, the World’s Fair was as populist as it was ambitious. It espoused high-minded ideas about urban design for public good while delighting that public with rodeo shows. Its neoclassical palaces and formal gardens held a joyous mess of experiences, as tangled and inconsistent as the people who flocked to the Fair. In that tradition, a Biennial we look forward to isn’t one that captures the spirit of design but one that spreads it.