Menu

Press

CAB has been consistently covered by renowned regional and international news and media outlets. Select recent press and CAB releases are highlighted here.

For press inquiries and to access the press center, please contact press@chicagoarchitecturebiennial.org

Floating Museum Collective Named Artistic Directors of 2023 Chicago Architecture Biennial

Thumbs up for return of Chicago Architecture Biennial in 2023

Floating Museum tapped as artistic team for This is a Rehearsal, the fifth edition of the Chicago Architecture Biennial

Chicago Architecture Biennial selects Floating Museum collective to leave CAB 5 titled 'This is a Rehearsal'

Chicago Biennial Returns to Michigan Avenue Cultural Center with New Exhibition Space

Chicago Architecture Biennial will go on next year with new format and gritty subject matter: Finding creative uses for city’s vacant lots

It's a Go, Folks Chicago Architecture Biennial confirms its fourth edition and announces 2021 director

Chicago Architecture Biennial Announces 2021 Edition

Architecture Prof Offers A New Vision For Vacant Land On Chicago’s South And West Sides

State of Architecture 2020 In Perspective: David Brown

Here are five new and forthcoming architecture exhibitions to check out this summer

Finding The Available City: A Conversation with 2021 Chicago Architecture Biennal David Brown

The 2021 Chicago Architecture Biennial ditches its downtown digs to invest in historically underserved communities

Vacant lots symbolize neglect, disinvestment. It’s on all of Chicago to reverse the damage.

Check out the first installation images of the now open Chicago Architecture Biennial

https://metropolismag.com/viewpoints/chicago-biennial-the-available-city/

Reshaped by Crisis, an ‘Anti-Biennial’ Reimagines Chicago

Possibilities and Limitations at the 2021 Chicago Architecture Biennial

Reshaped by Crisis, an ‘Anti-Biennial’ Reimagines Chicago

Chicago Architecture Biennial helps create ‘oases’ on vacant lots on South, West sides

The pink playground effect: How Chicago turned 12 vacant lots into vibrant community space

The Chicago Architecture Biennial Reveals the Urban Potential of Vacant Lots

Architecture Biennial Sees Potential In Chicago’s Thousands Of Vacant Lots

Chicago Architecture Biennial 2021 opening highlights

Chicago Architecture Biennial: A Meaningful (and Colourful) Engagement with the City

A Radical Idea in Chicago: A Biennial that Listens and Builds

Chicago Architecture Biennial: A new pavilion by SOM & Taubman College makes a statement about SLT technology

Ten installations to see at the Chicago Architecture Biennial

The Available City Revives Ideas for Collective Spaces at the Chicago Architecture Biennial

Ten installations to see at the Chicago Architecture Biennial

The 2021 Chicago Architecture Biennial Opened to the Public

Germane Barnes designs to center blackness and community

Looking for Things to Do? Here’s Where to Go in September

Titled The Available City and curated by David Brown, the event runs from 17 September to 18 December across the city and online

A global group of artists and architects are bringing their visionary ideas to the city for the Chicago Architecture Biennial.

The fourth edition of the Chicago Architecture Biennial, opening September 17, will be a radical shift away from a central exhibition venue and will invite visitors instead to explore vacant sites in various Chicago neighborhoods...

Chicago Architecture Biennial’s Fourth Edition, The Available City Opens to the Public on Friday, September 17

West Side Community Garden Will Become Art Installation For Chicago Architecture Biennial, Showing The Potential Of Vacant Urban Spaces

What to see at the Chicago Architecture Biennial 2021

A Glimpse of What's To Come: Central Park Theater

Wondering what to see at the Chicago Architecture Biennial 2021? We met up with artistic director David Brown at the end of the month before the opening and got a sneak peek at the show...

The Chicago Architecture Biennial Takes a Fresh Approach

Germane Barnes Designs to Center Blackness and Community

2021 Chicago Architecture Biennial kicks off

Check out the first installation images of the now open Chicago Architecture Biennial

The Geography of Emptiness: Newcity Explores the 2021 Chicago Architecture Biennial

At the Chicago Architecture Biennial, the city becomes a community landscape

The Geography of Emptiness: Newcity Explores the 2021 Chicago Architecture Biennial

5 Questions for David Brown, the new Artistic Director of the Chicago Architecture Biennial

Chicago’s 4th Architecture Biennial Reimagines City’s Vacant Lots

Across the city’s neighborhoods, Chicago Architecture Biennial settles in for a few months

Chicago’s Thoughtful New Spaces Make the City Worth Revisiting

A Panorama of Design: A look at design-world events, products and people.

Chicago by David Brown

The Chicago Architecture Biennial Takes a Fresh Approach

Chicago Architecture Biennial Announces Youth and Family Engagement Opportunities for 2021 Edition: The Available City

Chicago Architecture Biennial Announces Cultural Partners Offering Fall 2021 Programs that Bring The Available City’s Exploration of Architecture, Space, and Public Use to a Broad Range of Contexts and Communities.

Chicago Architecture Biennial announces 2021 Citywide Partner Sites and Organizations.

Chicago Architecture Biennial Reveals 2021 Contributors

"The Available City results from a long interest in the landscape of vacant spaces that are so prevalent in many cities across the US, and beyond,"

"Chicago Architecture Biennial announced the initial list of contributors selected by Artistic Director David Brown for the 2021 edition, “The Available City.” The list includes contributors..."

“The Available City is an urban design framework that focuses on the potential of Chicago’s 10,000 plus city on vacant lots as collective spaces,” explained Brown, during this morning’s announcement."

Chicago Architecture Biennial Announces Contributors for Fourth Edition: The Available City

"Soil Lab will focus squarely on North Lawndale, a West Side community described by Neighborhood Housing Services of Chicago as one of the “most architecturally eccentric and socially complex” neighborhoods in the city..."

Chicago Architecture Biennial and Danish Arts Foundation Announce Winning Design Team for North Lawndale Commission

“What that means, really, is giving people and groups the ability to coordinate sets of spaces for themselves, where they feel reflected in their city..."

"...the ideas in The Available City—that missions of community organizations can be understood as urbanisms... is a future we could have today"

"Imagine if we envisioned thousands of parcels of vacant land on Chicago’s South and West Sides as one large space — And imagine if we used that space collectively … for things that benefit entire communities instead of individual property owners."

"The organizers of the 2021 edition of the Chicago Architecture Biennial (CAB) have announced that the show will indeed go on under the artistic directorship of David Brown."

Chicago Architecture Biennial Announces Appointment of Artistic Director David Brown and Major Collaboration with the Danish Arts Foundation for Fourth Edition: The Available City

"The event, titled 'The Available City,' will build on a Chicago architecture professor’s long-term efforts to find creative uses for thousands of vacant city-owned lots. It will ask viewers to ponder how shared spaces, like small community gardens, affect cities' quality of life."

"Chicago, in the curators’ telling, is being continuously made and unmade along a horizon that extends far beyond the modern high-rise..."

“A bevy of provocative and thoughtfully considered works that aim to re-situate architectural discourse firmly at the center of larger social justice-driven conversations that surround the built environment today.”

“If you want to know what a range of professionals—not just architects but planners, preservationists, historians, writers, philosophers, activists, and artists—are thinking and doing to solve real problems, like how to make clean water and toilets available to people who’ve never had them, you’ll learn a lot.”

“This new pulse sees architecture as a practice that expands to include issues of harm, connection, trauma, and access—all ideas and experiences that combine to create, subvert, take, or co-opt power. This new biennial might have a pulse that beats within us all.”

"Powerful, provocative exhibition—New Chicago Architecture Biennial opens, and wants to upset the way you see the city. That’s why you should see it."

“As North America's largest contemporary art, design and architecture survey, the Chicago Architecture Biennial, now in its third run, has become a platform for discussing some of today's most pressing issues."

"This biennial is less about buildings and more about the changes and challenges that the human occupation of the world has created — land rights, ecological issues, contested memories."

"Chicago Architecture Biennial reveals the city’s true foundations. Inspired by its black mayor and a curator from the UK, Chicago is reviving the social narratives that shaped the city."

The Chicago Architecture Biennial Encourages a New View of the City — "The 2019 Architecture Biennial encourages visitors to seek out buildings and installations that tell a story of the city beyond the well-known sights."

"The show looks at the bigger, often invisible systems — economic policy, development forces, occupation, environment — that give cities their shape... It also looks at architecture not just as buildings, but as a process that all citizens can engage. Throughout, issues of equity and inequity loom large."

“For many Chicagoans, pride in local architecture is as natural as rooting for the Cubs or White Sox. But at the Biennial, you won’t find much in the way of Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Sullivan. Instead, exhibits and installations from around the world hope to reframe – and sometimes challenge – the very idea of what architecture is in the first place.”

“Here and at the Stony Island Arts Bank, a troubled past isn’t being erased but creatively recycled.”

"The biennial makes efforts to extend beyond the Cultural Center, occupying venues across the city. Photographer Lee Bey’s exhibition Chicago: A Southern Exposure, at the DuSable Museum of African American History in Washington Park, documents the South Side’s architectural classics, placing vernacular works alongside projects by notable designers. The exhibition makes a case for what may need to be fought for in an often-maligned area of the city endangered by future speculation."

"Much like in 2015, this edition of the biennial eschews superstar architects—no Norman Fosters or Frank Gehrys (although there will be Stanley Tigerman and Pritzker-winning Japanese firm SANAA). Instead the roster comprises rising stars on par with New York’s SO-IL, Berlin’s Diébédo Francis Kéré, and other firms spread across four continents.

"There are all kinds of indications in this biennial of the forces shaping contemporary architecture; the show puts an emphasis on the ad hoc, the resourceful, the collaborative, the open-ended, the temporary, the socially and environmentally conscious and the formally subtle. Housing is a strong point. Grima and Herda have mostly banished form-making for its own sake. They carefully encourage — coax along — the field’s renewed interest in history."