The City as Laboratory: How the Chicago Biennial Builds on its Legacy to Design the Future

Chicago is a city built on audacious architectural bets. It’s where the skyscraper was born from the ashes of a great fire, where Mies van der Rohe perfected the modernist glass box, and where Frank Lloyd Wright pioneered an American style. This legacy is so monumental it could easily be a gilded cage, trapping the city in its celebrated past. Yet, since 2015, the Chicago Architecture Biennial has ingeniously inverted this dynamic, transforming the city not into a museum of its own history, but into a sprawling, vibrant laboratory for the future of urban life.

The Biennial's founding was itself a statement of intent. Mayor Rahm Emanuel, seeking to cement the city’s status as a global hub for design, envisioned an event that would do for architecture what Art Basel does for art. The inaugural edition, "The State of the Art of Architecture," curated by Sarah Herda and Joseph Grima, immediately established a distinct identity: less a trade show for starchitects, more a critical forum for emerging ideas. It posed a fundamental question that continues to drive the event: In a world beset by climate crisis, inequality, and rapid urbanization, what can architecture *do*?

What makes the Chicago Architecture Biennial uniquely compelling is its deep, often critical, engagement with its host city. While other biennials might import global ideas, Chicago’s grounds them in local reality. The 2021 edition, "The Available City," curated by David Brown, was a masterclass in this approach. It moved beyond the traditional exhibition format to partner with community groups in neighborhoods like the South and West Sides, activating vacant city-owned lots with installations and pavilions designed by international architects in collaboration with local residents. The project wasn’t just about displaying architecture; it was about demonstrating its potential as a tool for community empowerment, reclaiming underutilized space, and challenging systemic neglect.

This civic-minded ethos contrasts sharply with the top-down, heroic modernism that defines Chicago's skyline. The Biennial’s main hub, the Chicago Cultural Center—a dazzling 1897 building with Tiffany glass domes—becomes a stage for this productive tension. Inside its ornate halls, visitors might find projects on radical housing models, biodegradable building materials, or indigenous construction techniques. The message is clear: the future of architecture may look less like the gleaming towers of the Loop and more like the grassroots, community-driven interventions taking root in its neighborhoods.

The fifth edition in 2023, "This is a Rehearsal," curated by the art collective Floating Museum, pushed this idea further, framing the entire city as a site of ongoing creative practice. It blurred the lines between art, architecture, and performance, with projects that addressed environmental justice on the Southeast Side and activated public spaces with mobile installations. This approach has not been without its critics, some of whom argue it dilutes a focus on formal architecture. But it has also positioned the Biennial at the forefront of a global conversation about expanding the very definition of design to encompass social and ecological systems.

The Biennial’s legacy is not measured in new skyscrapers, but in new conversations. It has launched the careers of practices that prioritize social impact and has provided a highly visible platform for architects from Latin America, Africa, and Asia. More importantly, it has empowered Chicagoans to see their own city as a place of possibility—a canvas for experimentation where the solutions to tomorrow's urban challenges are being rehearsed today, block by vacant block.