By the end of the opening weekend of the 2021 Chicago Architecture Biennial (CAB) on Sunday, September 19, I’d been prayed over by parishioners of the Rock of Ages Missionary Baptist Church at 13th Street and Pulaski Road, and thanked for sharing the Good News of the West Side of Chicago’s creative vitality, as neighbors from around the block and international designers gathered to admire rammed earth walls, a ceramic kiln, and a mechanical brick extruder at one of the show’s installations. A bit later, a local rapper took the stage at a different installation nearby, and teens settled in on moveable furniture they had designed and built. A robotic turf painter, used to apply a ground mural on asphalt that doubles as a basketball court, tooled around while kids played on bright pink play equipment called “Block Party,” riddled with nooks crannies, and lookout points, designed by architect Germane Barnes, a Chicago native. (His mom was on hand to serve food.)
Far from the Chicago Cultural Center in the Loop downtown, which housed the first three editions of the Biennial, in 2015, 2017 and 2019, this year, visitors are invited deep into community networks that don’t often get attention from architects and designers. In North Lawndale on the West Side, which has suffered decades of disinvestment, neighbors and community organizations are using local open space as canvases for design, demonstrating architecture’s potential for creating change in places that need it most–and delivering a Biennial unlike any before it.
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