Biennials: The Latest Architecture and News

Inaugurated on September 21st, 2023, The Chicago Architecture Biennial is a city-wide festival that will continue until the end of the year. Titled “This is a Rehearsal,” the event is set up as a love letter to Chicago, activating ongoing dialogue around and in the city. One month after the biennial started, events are still ongoing, with open houses, theater performances, and virtual conferences happening throughout this week.

The Chicago Architecture Biennial (CAB 5) has announced the participation of the James R Thompson Center as both a cultural partner and city site for the 5th edition of the exhibition. CAB 5: This is A Rehearsal is curated by the Chicago-based artist collective Floating Museum. The Thompson Center has long been referred to as one of Chicago’s postmodern architectural marvels, designed by Helmut Jahn. At this year’s biennial, which starts on the 21st of September, 2023, the center will host five exhibitions and site-specific installations.

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Panama presented its pavilion on "Stories Beneath the Water" at the 18th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. Curated by Aimée Lam Tunon and Jasper Zehetgruber, the exhibition explored themes of division and integration, with a focus on three different areas within the former Panama Canal Zone. It is an analysis that addresses issues of division and integration: Divisive architectural structures and systems; erased identities of submerged communities; and Barro Colorado Island, critically examining and questioning the overlaps between notions of protection and control.

The fourth edition of the Timișoara Architecture Biennial, or Beta, is focusing on the theme of “the City as Common Good”. Through a wide range of events, Beta aims to address topics that are relevant and urgent globally and explore their impact on the local built environment and its response to the needs of the communities. Taking place at various locations in the city of Timișoara, Romania, this year’s festival begins on September 23rd and ends one month later, on October 23rd.

In September 2022, Istanbul highlights the best names in contemporary art and architecture from Turkey and the world at the 17th Istanbul Biennial organized by the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts and at the Contemporary Istanbul art fair. From September 17 to 22, 2022 The Contemporary Istanbul will gather sixty-five galleries, and art initiatives from 22 countries in Tersane Istanbul, a 600-years historic landmark renovated by the award-winning firm Tabanlioglu Architects. Opening the same day until November 20, the Istanbul Biennial will be held in multiple venues around the historic city. For this edition, the visitors will experience the “sense of our times” by contemplating present-day life and the richly layered past.

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The Ministry of Culture, Art, and Heritage, and the College of Architects of Chile have announced the results of the open call for two exhibitions that will house the 2022 Chile Architecture Biennial.

The Chicago Architecture Biennial (CAB) and the Danish Arts Foundation (DAF) have selected Soil Lab as the winning project of a DAF Open Call for a major new commission in the North Lawndale neighborhood of Chicago. Responding to the biennial’s 2021 edition theme The Available City, led by Artistic Director David Brown, the proposal, chosen to represent Denmark at the 2021 Chicago Architecture Biennial, was imagined by an international design team that includes Eibhlín Ní Chathasaigh (Dublin), James Albert Martin (Dublin), Anne Dorthe Vester (Copenhagen), Maria Bruun (Copenhagen) and Chicago residents.

On November 20, the 2020 Panamerican Architecture Biennial of Quito (BAQ 2020) announced the winners of the present edition. Every other year, the BAQ "invites to discuss contemporary production of the built environment, aiming to improve the practice of our profession" in the Americas.

The 5th Istanbul Design Biennial has opened to the public, both digitally and physically. Curated by Mariana Pestana with Sumitra Upham and Billie Muraben, the Biennial brings together different formats of display under the theme Empathy Revisited. The biennial launches with interventions in a range of exhibition venues, outdoor spaces in Istanbul and digital platforms.

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Videos

This article is based on a lecture given by Chilean artist and architect Alfredo Jaar at the 20th Architecture and Urbanism Biennale in Valparaiso, Chile, on October 26, 2017.

It's June of 1980. Alfredo Jaar, a recent dropout of the University of Chile's architecture program, walks through the center of Santiago carrying two large signs. He grabs a spot in the shade next to a kiosk and intercepts passers-by to ask them his questions. In the midst of a military dictatorship, Jaar wants the people to vote, but not for the constitutional plebiscite or in the democratic elections. He doesn't even have paper or pencil for them to vote with. There's no line to mark on. His campaign centers on a mint--white and round--like a casino raffle ball.

Jaar's questions are loaded ones. "Are you happy?" (¿Es usted feliz?) he asks. "How many people in Chile do you think are happy?" "How many people in the world?"

Power Station of Art (PSA) has announced the curatorial team and theme for the 13th Shanghai Biennale, proposed by its Chief Curator, the architect and writer Andrés Jaque (Office for Political Innovation).

What happens when the sensor-imbued city acquires the ability to see – almost as if it had eyes? Ahead of the 2019 Shenzhen Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture (UABB), titled "Urban Interactions," ArchDaily is working with the curators of the "Eyes of the City" section at the Biennial to stimulate a discussion on how new technologies – and Artificial Intelligence in particular – might impact architecture and urban life. Here you can read the “Eyes of the City” curatorial statement by Carlo Ratti, the Politecnico di Torino and SCUT.

The recent ‘Greater Bay Area’ (GBA) initiative has led to a renewed interest in the supra-urban and regional or territorial planning scale by the spatial planning professions, urbanists and strategic spatial planners globally. The emergence of ‘mega’ urban-scapes and their regional agglomeration into urbanised areas of over 70 million – at least an order of magnitude larger than has ever been planned before - has reframed many conventional challenges of the spatial planning agenda. With the mega region in formation, a new necessity emerges, that being the investigation of the dynamic, morphogenetic and ecosystemic properties specific to specific regional conditions. Simply, the integration of eleven significantly sized cities and their corresponding metropolitan hinterlands, three special economic or administrative regions, three currencies, and three (or more) different cultural groups into one urban regional entity is a massive undertaking. At present aside from the governance and policy intentions this has primarily resulted in an infrastructural planning approach, one that utilizes a systemic top-down approach that seeks to provide the connective tissues and reticules, as well as civic and economic systems that mobilise people, capital and goods in such a vast region. This approach is akin to the smart city models which seek to enfold all aspects of civic life within infrastructure systemic control paradigms. But in reality, given the scope and scale of this undertaking the modalities of planning in the GBA need to shift from an extensive planned realm in which every part coheres to a plan, to one of a differentiated field in which different intensities arise as an effect of their urban eco-system integration (or its lack of). This clearly needs new approaches, concepts and models of planning that can deal with these regional issues in dynamic, open-ended ways that can foster new modalities of planning. 

What happens when the sensor-imbued city acquires the ability to see – almost as if it had eyes? Ahead of the 2019 Shenzhen Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture (UABB), titled "Urban Interactions," ArchDaily is working with the curators of the "Eyes of the City" section at the Biennial to stimulate a discussion on how new technologies – and Artificial Intelligence in particular – might impact architecture and urban life. Here you can read the “Eyes of the City” curatorial statement by Carlo Ratti, the Politecnico di Torino and SCUT.

Technologies of the virtual realm present an opportunity to rethink the experience of space, society, and culture. They give us the possibility to engage with the city of the future, shaping the built environment of the 21st century. 

What happens when the sensor-imbued city acquires the ability to see – almost as if it had eyes? Ahead of the 2019 Shenzhen Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture (UABB), titled "Urban Interactions," ArchDaily is working with the curators of the "Eyes of the City" section at the Biennial to stimulate a discussion on how new technologies – and Artificial Intelligence in particular – might impact architecture and urban life. Here you can read the “Eyes of the City” curatorial statement by Carlo Ratti, the Politecnico di Torino and SCUT.