It’s no insult to Chicago’s fledgling architecture biennial to say that the event remains an upstart compared to the bigger, older and more prestigious Venice Architecture Biennale. So it’s a big deal that Chicago’s architecture community is poised to make a mark on the Italian city of lagoons, canals and exotic buildings washed by the Adriatic mist.
For the first time, a spokeswoman confirmed, Chicago institutions are organizing architecture biennale’s U.S. pavilion, traditionally a showcase for top American talent. In addition, Chicagoans are designing two of the pavilion’s seven installations, including one by the firm of architect Jeanne Gang that will transport hundreds of cobblestones from a Memphis riverfront to Venice.
Chicago was well-represented Monday at a New York City news conference that trumpeted the overall theme of the biennale (“Freespace”) and introduced its chief curators, Irish architects Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara. In addition, the event revealed some details of projects inside the U.S. pavilion, which the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Chicago are shaping on the theme of “Dimensions of Citizenship.”
You are undoubtedly wondering what “Freespace” means. The biennale’s publicity material defines it this way: “a generosity of spirit and a sense of humanity at the core of architecture’s agenda.” Bringing that noble, yet lofty, theme down to earth, the U.S. pavilion will explore the fraught topic of how the built environment defines, and is defined by, disparate notions of what it means to be a citizen. Think of the bitter debates sparked by President Donald Trump’s proposed border wall and the removal of Confederate statues and monuments.
“We think citizenship is an urgent question,” Ann Lui, assistant professor at the School of the Art Institute, said in an interview last week. “It’s about the ways we come together, by law and by choice.” Her co-curators are Niall Atkinson, associate professor at the U. of C., and independent curator Mimi Zeiger, who is based in Los Angeles. Chicago’s Iker Gil, a lecturer at the School of the Art Institute, is serving as the U.S. pavilion’s associate curator.
Unlike the Chicago Architecture Biennial, which made its debut in 2015 and is largely focused on exhibits in the Chicago Cultural Center, the palatial Beaux Arts edifice across from Millennium Park, its Venice counterpart takes place in two chief venues: the Giardini, a swath of parkland that is home to many of the event’s national pavilions, including the U.S. venue, and the Arsenale, a historic shipyard and armory complex.
The U.S. pavilion, a 1930 exercise in neo-classicism, has been described as a mini-Monticello, complete with a rotunda and a column-fronted brick facade that wraps around an outdoor courtyard. It suggests an old-fashioned, civics textbook understanding of citizenship: earnest, hand-over-your-heart, Pledge of Allegiance kind of stuff.
The exhibits commissioned by the Chicago curators are likely to exist in tension with this decorous container.
Inspired by the 1977 Charles and Ray Eames short film, “Powers of 10,” which begins with a picnic on the Chicago lakefront and gradually zooms out to outer space, the exhibits will explore the interplay between design and citizenship at scales ranging from the human body to the cosmos. With its array of cobblestones shipped in from Memphis, Gang’s exhibit promises to be a stirring example.
The stones, which were quarried in Illinois and are said to weigh 15 to 30 pounds each, will come from Memphis’ Cobblestone Landing, a historic site along the Mississippi River where cotton was shipped to British mills and slaves were traded. As Gang and her eponymous firm worked up a riverfront revitalization plan for Memphis, the landing provoked dramatically different reactions from the locals.
“Some think it should be restored to its original state,” Gang said. “Other people have a negative reaction because it was where their great-grandfather was traded as a slave.” Other people described the stones themselves as harsh and uninviting.
To make the landing more welcoming and inclusive, Gang and a principal at her firm, Gia Biagi, suggested that trees be planted amid the stones to provide a shade canopy and that people throughout the city plant a “twin” version of the new trees in their neighborhood. Their plan, which has yet to be constructed, took on added resonance in December when Memphis tore down two Confederate statues in advance of April 4, which will mark the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in the city.
“In the context of a time when these monuments are being taken down, it brings up the idea: What is a marker? What is a memorial? What could it be in the future?” Gang said. “Could this be more of a horizontal marker that is a kind of inclusive civic marker, not a guy sitting on a horse?”
The project, which represents urban scale in the pavilion’s hierarchy, will be displayed in the first gallery of the American pavilion that visitors enter. It’s a good bet that the cobblestones will be on the floor, perhaps accompanied by videos that put them in context. The architects, who were instructed not to reveal too much too soon, declined to comment on specifics. A firm spokeswoman said only that visitors will be able to interact with the cobblestones.
Before visitors experience Gang’s display, they’ll encounter another project by Chicagoans in the prime location of the pavilion’s courtyard.
Designed by artists Amanda Williams and Andres Hernandez, in concert with artist Shani Crowe, this exhibit will consist of a steel structure interwoven with a braided parachute chord, Williams and Hernandez said. The subject is how African-Americans experience public space: Are they affirmed or unwelcome, free to move as they wish or controlled?
The work will be “rooted in the history of certain groups having to be fugitive, on the run,” Hernandez said, evoking the history of slaves escaping on the Underground Railroad.
But, like Gang’s exhibit, it will suggest a positive model — not accommodating mere survival, but encouraging a combination of survival and thriving that the artists call “Thrival.”
The other projects for the U.S. pavilion sound equally intriguing. The New York firm SCAPE, for example, will look at the Venetian Lagoon as a ecologically threatened tidal region. Architect Teddy Cruz and political theorist Fonna Forman, both of San Diego, will explore watersheds shared by Mexico and the U.S. in a project called “MEXUS: A Geography of Interdependence.” As the title suggests, their take on the U.S.-Mexico border is very different from Trump’s.
“In the current political discourse, the U.S.-Mexico border is a site of criminalization,” Cruz said in an interview published last year on the CityLab website. “But we have been trying to elevate it as a site of creativity.”
Officially known as the 16th International Architecture Exhibition, the biennale runs from May 26 through Nov. 25. The architecture event is held in even-numbered years while the art biennale, which began in 1895, occurs in odd-numbered years. In 2001, the Art Institute of Chicago organized the U.S. pavilion for the art biennale in partnership with the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, of Washington, D.C.
Blair Kamin is a Tribune critic.
bkamin@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @BlairKamin
