Why are cafeteria walls set up in the ornate, Tiffany-domed Chicago Cultural Center, home to the biennial’s main exhibit? It turns out that Preissner and Andersen are in good company. Many of the projects here are similarly interested in elements of architecture that are boring, banal, or ugly. In various acts of image rehabilitation or re-contextualization, this festival makes a home for outcasts and weirdoes, often stigmatized in design because they just aren’t weird enough.[...]
“Visions of Another America” is one of an entire category of projects at the biennial that use collage and aggregation to tear down hierarchies and widen the circle of serious architectural consideration. This idea, of transparently re-appropriating architecture for use in other architecture, is itself outside the canon, as architects have historically dreaded admitting their ideas aren’t only peerless products of singular genius. [...]
There is a populist advantage to not explaining history from an assumed position of authority (in architecture, usually a bespectacled and suited white man). But that risks the loss of a sense of coherent narrative the broader public needs to understand. The biggest danger with exhibits on the color beige and glazed tile is that visitors will see elements of their own lives on stage, but might not know how to connect it to a larger story. The question of whether there is a larger story to tell will be, explicitly or implicitly, on the mind of many biennial curators and visitors to come.
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