The Chicago Architecture Biennial on Friday announced its sixth-edition event, planned for next year. As in past Biennials, it will have a central exhibition in the Chicago Cultural Center, which will open on Sept. 12, 2025, and run through Feb. 28, 2026, as well as projects, installations and events elsewhere around the city.
Every biennial, held in Chicago every two years since 2015, has had a theme and the title for this one will be “CAB 6: Shift: Architecture in Times of Radical Change.” Projects from some 50 countries “will address the most pressing issues of our time,” according to the announcement, “and in doing so chart a new agenda for contemporary design.” The previous CAB 5 in 2023 was titled “This is a Rehearsal.”
Also in the announcement, CAB6 will be led by Florencia Rodriguez, the biennial’s first Latina artistic director. Rodriguez is the director of the University of Illinois Chicago’s School of Architecture. She’s also an editor and writer and is the editor of the school’s yearly publication, Pollen. Before UIC, she was a lecturer in architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
As an event, the nonprofit Chicago Architecture Biennial is a gathering of architects, designers and design ideas and its displays can have little obvious referent in anything like constructing a building or city park. As described by then-Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin, the inaugural event in 2015 was “by turns, surprisingly streetwise, maddeningly megalomaniacal, deeply humanistic, playfully forward-looking and head-scratchingly intellectual.”
Work at previous biennials has ranged from practical ideas on how to address housing shortages to abstract experiments related to ecology and social justice. Chicago’s event, which is free and open to the public, is described as the largest such exhibition of contemporary architecture in North America. (Since a schedule change for the larger international Venice Architectural Biennale during the pandemic, Chicago’s has overlapped with Venice’s, slated for May 10 to Nov. 23, 2025.)
More information about CAB 6 participants, projects and programs are to come; chicagoarchitecturebiennial.org
dgeorge@chicagotribune.com