The Essay I Can’t Stop Thinking About
By Mary-Margaret Zindren | February 10, 2022
Illustration by @drawnwell.
SPOTLIGHT
Knowing that our team pores through dozens of architecture-related articles every month, selecting a handful to highlight for the What We’re Reading section of each edition of ENTER, someone recently asked if there was one article from the past year that stuck with me the most—one that I’d be carrying into 2022.
Without hesitation, I sent them “Breaking the Dead Paradigm for Design Exhibitions: Notes on the 2021 Chicago Architecture Biennial” by Craig Wilkins, associate professor and former director of the Detroit Community Design Center at the University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture + Urban Planning.
One thing to know right away: The title doesn’t do the essay justice. It is about so much more than design exhibitions. It is, as Wilkins puts it, “a trip through this edition of CAB [Chicago Architecture Biennial] . . . down a road less traveled.” That road winds through the history of cities and the profession of architecture, and the most fundamental ideas of what architecture has been and might become.
Wilkins starts off by noting that most biennials focus on architecture as “art object.” He speaks to the lack of welcome and belonging inherent to most cultural centers and exhibitions, and to the power “tastemakers” wield in controlling access and shaping the learning that they view as a requirement for having worthwhile opinions about art or architecture.
He describes the success of the 2021 CAB—titled The Available City—as being in its effort “to reintroduce, if not center, site and function, place, purpose, and people into the discussion of architecture as art—not simply as a background or stage for the production of objects, but as the very elements that define it.” He notes the radical approach of the exhibit, which is woven into various Chicago neighborhoods, as “co-created, shared, and subject to critique from the same audiences who’ll both live with and have a hand in its success or failure over time.”
But while the virtues of the 2021 CAB are the bookends, the essay’s staying power is in its central focus on the nature of architecture.
The essay speaks to the history and evolution of cities, the foundational economic interests that have shaped them, and the displacement, segregation, and isolation that has been planned, facilitated, and sustained by those who influence the built environment.
His critiques of policymaking and policymakers may seem harsh, but I have spent decades connected to that world and, unfortunately, they resonate as too often true. His description of ever-shrinking access to and freedom within the public realm is both a sobering lament and an alarm to be heeded. He challenges the profession to own its responsibilities to the public realm, and he does so in a way that hurts your heart and leads you to question your integrity. And I’ve never read a better description of gentrification and what it does to and fails to recognize about the people and communities displaced by it.
The musicality of Wilkins’ writing also makes the essay a joy to read. Intellectual without intellectualizing, rational yet wrenching, it swirls around you, sweeps you up, and won’t let you down until you’ve heard it out.
Thousands of members of the nation’s architecture profession will make their way to Chicago this summer for the AIA Conference on Architecture. Hopefully, a good number of attendees will venture out from the convention hall and into The Available City to experience what Wilkins casts as a continuous biennial—one where “who gets to speak authoritatively about context, form, meaning, appropriateness, usefulness, etc.—and on what grounds—is substantively (irrevocably?) inverted,” and where that decentering inversion creates space for a different kind of tastemaker to emerge, “one whose authority derives from lived experience, from everyday life, from not an abstract but an intimate command of context.”
Read the essay, first published in Common Edge, here. I hope you share it widely and engage with it rigorously, and that you will continue the conversation that The Available City and Wilkins’ essay have so boldly begun.