Chicago Announces Architecture Biennial

Chicago Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin reports on the planned architecture exhibition, which Mayor Rahm Emanuel is announcing today as a means to boost tourism (one initiative among many to reach a target of 55 million per year by 2020) and elevating the city's status as a center of design. The Chicago Architecture Biennial, as it will be called, is receiving a lead donation of $2.5 million from BP, but officials are saying, per the Tribune article, that "at least another $1.5 million still must be raised from private benefactors."

Kamin likens the planned biennial to the Venice Architecture Biennale, though he acknowledges that the format would neither include national pavilions nor even an admission charge. Further, the timing of the exhibition would alternate with the event in Venice, with odd-numbered years in Chicago and even-numbered years in Italy. The Chicago Cultural Center is the venue for the biennial and today's press conference, though there is the possibility of installations being on display in other parts of the city during the initial 2015 exhibition.

The article names a few figures and organizations for overseeing the first biennial: Sarah Herda, director of the Graham Foundation; Joseph Grima, a curator who formerly headed the Storefront for Art and Architecture and Domus magazine; and the Chicago Architecture Foundation, which runs a number of tours, exhibitions and other events in the city.

An advisory committee has been formed, consisting of many big international names: architects David Adjaye (London), Elizabeth Diller (New York), Jeanne Gang (Chicago), Frank Gehry (Los Angeles), and Stanley Tigerman (Chicago), along with Lord Peter Palumbo (London), Chairman of the Pritzker Prize for Architecture, and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Co-Director of Exhibitions and Programs and Director of International Projects at the Serpentine Gallery, London.

The announcement comes appropriately one day before the start of the 2014 AIA National Convention, which is taking place in Chicago for the first time in ten years. The news will give architects flocking to the city another thing to talk about besides the TRUMP letters overlooking the Chicago River.