Chicago Architecture Biennial: Make New History
Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee, Artistic Directors

Chicago Cultural Center, Sept. 16, 2017–Jan. 7, 2018

Stop press: Lofty tower models expose majestic elegance of Cultural Center’s upper hall; low, flat interior models offset floral carpet from ornate ceiling; 1:1 interventions synthesize banal, back-of-house corridors. These were the distinctive contributions to the second installment of the CAB—site-specific exhibits that engaged the building at its full scale, providing more than just an arrangement of objects. This collapse of exhibition format with existing building also changed the visitor’s experience of the Chicago’s Cultural Center’s interior. It demonstrated how architectural thinking can provide three-dimensional thematic coherence to disparate artifacts within rooms. And, significantly, it revealed that exhibition design—as generalist George Nelson referred to it in the 1950s—has increasingly been eclipsed by exhibition curation, the managerial selection activity now carried out by professional and academic specialists. The differences between design and curation are significant, and as Johnston and Lee didactically showed us, it was design, not curation, that transported the biennial format to a new level of architectural specificity. Note to future CABs: more design again, please.