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“A bevy of provocative and thoughtfully considered works that aim to re-situate architectural discourse firmly at the center of larger social justice-driven conversations that surround the built environment today.”
“If you want to know what a range of professionals—not just architects but planners, preservationists, historians, writers, philosophers, activists, and artists—are thinking and doing to solve real problems, like how to make clean water and toilets available to people who’ve never had them, you’ll learn a lot.”
“This new pulse sees architecture as a practice that expands to include issues of harm, connection, trauma, and access—all ideas and experiences that combine to create, subvert, take, or co-opt power. This new biennial might have a pulse that beats within us all.”
"Powerful, provocative exhibition—New Chicago Architecture Biennial opens, and wants to upset the way you see the city. That’s why you should see it."
“As North America's largest contemporary art, design and architecture survey, the Chicago Architecture Biennial, now in its third run, has become a platform for discussing some of today's most pressing issues."
"This biennial is less about buildings and more about the changes and challenges that the human occupation of the world has created — land rights, ecological issues, contested memories."
"Chicago Architecture Biennial reveals the city’s true foundations. Inspired by its black mayor and a curator from the UK, Chicago is reviving the social narratives that shaped the city."
The Chicago Architecture Biennial Encourages a New View of the City — "The 2019 Architecture Biennial encourages visitors to seek out buildings and installations that tell a story of the city beyond the well-known sights."
"The show looks at the bigger, often invisible systems — economic policy, development forces, occupation, environment — that give cities their shape... It also looks at architecture not just as buildings, but as a process that all citizens can engage. Throughout, issues of equity and inequity loom large."
“For many Chicagoans, pride in local architecture is as natural as rooting for the Cubs or White Sox. But at the Biennial, you won’t find much in the way of Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Sullivan. Instead, exhibits and installations from around the world hope to reframe – and sometimes challenge – the very idea of what architecture is in the first place.”

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