The fifth iteration of the Chicago Architecture Biennial (CAB5), This is a Rehearsal, addresses the quintessential question of architecture: how do you design for transient realities? No matter how responsive, the process of sculpting the built environment must involve fixed entities, inevitably historicized by perpetual progression in architectural thought and practice. Architectural interventions must expand and adapt—or remain as awkward remnants of a time long past. This is a Rehearsal sees this condition and raises the concept of rehearsal as a means to construct new worlds. “Rehearsal” implies a constant state of development through an ongoing process of ideation, prototyping, testing, and dialoguing, all to construct a city that is empathetic to the anxieties of the metamodern world. For Chicago—a center of constant change and challenges—rehearsal is critical, making room for movement through the uncertainty of the current moment without pressure for permanence or perfection.

Installation view, sculptures installed on the second floor of the Chicago Cultural Center in a display called The Monuments Room. Photograph by Christine Mehring.

Rehearsal as a method to conceive a more conscious architecture allows the Floating Museum, curators of CAB5, to cull participants that speak to the many historicities haunting Chicago spaces. Rather than tightly controlling the subject matter of exhibitions, This is a Rehearsal allows architects, artists, and organizers to present a wide variety of projects. With this freedom, CAB5 contributors address the confusion, pain, and beauty of bodies in space by proposing new realities to house them and activate their feelings. Unfolding across four exhibition venues and twelve city sites, partnerships for the biennial are as diverse as the city of Chicago itself, guaranteeing that any visitor will find resonance in the show.

The crown jewel of CAB5 is undoubtedly the Chicago Cultural Center. Three floors of the landmark People’s Palace are populated by installations that thematically address the social issues of contemporaneity through historical reckoning and radical community engagement. One work, ACCOUTRORAMA by architect Amy Kulper in collaboration with the creative team of PROPS SUPPLY, is a portmanteau stacked with objects mimicking the items associated with January 6th insurrectionists. Labels contextualize the pieces by exposing the racial violence of the attack and the ensuing obfuscation of the event by conservatives. In the same room, Division by artist Paul Ramírez Jonas reimagines antiquated equestrian monuments by slicing statue and base in half and trading traditional bronze and stone for corkboard, transforming the works and the sites they refer to. ACCOUTRORAMA and Division demonstrate CAB5’s dedication to contending with legacies of brutality, rehearsing different terms of response to make sense of an extremely complicated global present.

The most profound works of the Chicago Cultural Center exhibition are those that offer resilience and care to the communities they engage. Freedom Square: The Black Girlhood Altar presents an arresting encounter, examining the cruelty and terror experienced by Black girls and women in the United States. The work is by Chicago-based nonprofit A Long Walk Home and is divided into three galleries, organized by the motifs of reflection, play, and grief. These rooms concurrently offer shelter for the remembrance and mourning of those lost to gender and race-based violence, and protection for Black girl play as a mode of resistance in a world that disregards their suffering. Uncomfortable and stirring, the sight of a shrine of children’s toys provokes questions about what Americans are willing to allow Black girls to endure, and the memorializing photographs and sites of reflection that follow create a unique space for lingering and responding to agonizing and often invisible tragedies.

The direction of the Floating Museum delivered a biennial that undertakes the convoluted and disquieting state of the metamodern world, allowing creators to rehearse design responses that must necessarily be as varied and inventive as their issues are entrenched.

Natalie Jenkins