When I think of Chicago, two images immediately come to mind: the Great Fire of 1871 and deep-dish pizza. An odd pairing, perhaps, but one that captures the city’s contradictions—its tragic past and its everyday indulgences. As an architect, I should probably have thought first of Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe, or even Anish Kapoor’s Bean. And yet, the fire has always fascinated me: how devastation left behind a blank canvas for the city to imagine itself anew, ultimately giving rise to the modernist architecture that now defines its skyline. Landing in the Windy City, I did what most first-time visitors do—made my way to the Millennium Park, saw Kapoor’s mirrored icon and Frank Gehry’s Jay Pritzker Pavilion. I studied the Chicago Architecture Biennial in graduate school—read countless papers, did case studies and wrote a little myself. But standing in the city, surrounded by its urban fabric and towering buildings, watching a train pass over a straight road framed by skyscrapers, I couldn’t help but see the city as an immersive exhibition of resilience. I wondered what it meant for a city built on reinvention to host the United States’ first architecture biennial in 2015? Furthermore, what does it mean—10 years on—that its sixth edition under the theme SHIFT arrives at a moment when both the city and the country are experiencing profound political and cultural upheaval?

This edition of Chicago Architecture Biennial is led by Florencia Rodriguez, writer, editor and director at the University of Illinois Chicago’s School of Architecture. For Rodriguez, this is a full-circle moment. She first came to Chicago in 2015 as a critic to review the inaugural biennial. “When I first came to Chicago, I was teaching a course in Buenos Aires about arts and culture in modernity. As I walked through the city, I kept thinking: I could teach my entire class just by walking here. Chicago has so many moments when it has been reimagined—as after the fire, in the fantastic speculations about technology and high-rises, in its role as a laboratory for the future. Understanding the urban implications of those moments has always been inspiring to me,” she recalled in conversation with STIR.

Under her direction, Chicago Architecture Biennial 2025 takes on the theme, SHIFT: Architecture in Times of Radical Change’, bringing together over 100 participants and 25 large-scale installations across four main venues—the Chicago Cultural Center, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the Stony Island Arts Bank and the grounds of the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry—alongside more than 60 partner sites across Chicagoland. For Rodriguez, the theme pushes against the long-standing polarisation in architectural discourse. “The theme,” she explained, “is very much inspired by conversations in academia—particularly around the polarisation between seeing architecture as an autonomous field that looks only at itself, versus the idea of realism or social engagement. I don’t believe in that polarisation. For me, this process has been about embracing shifts and transformations and responding to urgent, tangible matters happening right now through architecture and design tools.”

Architecture as activism surfaced powerfully at the Stony Island Arts Bank. WAI Architecture Think Tank’s A LOUDREADING Tribune (A Post-Colonial Still Life of a Traveling Loudreading Workshop) transformed the space into a radical 3D collage: a banner declaring “DOWN WITH COLONIALISM AND IMPERIALISM” hung alongside tropical plants, banned books, a keffiyah and effigies of dismantled monuments. The installation drew from the Caribbean tradition of loud reading, in which texts were read aloud in tobacco factories as acts of solidarity and emancipatory education. Its presence at the biennial was especially charged. On the morning of the opening, a group of designers published a letter objecting to the Biennial’s association with Crown Family Philanthropies. While the committee offered no response, they also chose not to censor the work—a small gesture, but a noticeable one in today’s climate.

Memory and preservation are threaded through several works. Massachusetts-based LA DALLMAN Architects presented Shifting Reuse and Repair, reimagining a neglected 1901 granary in Wisconsin as a site of cultural value through adaptive reuse. Chicago-based artist Jason Campbell’s The Linen Closet used salvaged comforters suspended on a carved wooden frame to evoke textiles as carriers of collective memory. Illinois-based architectural practice Kwong Von Glinow brought their Forget-Me-Not Pavilion. The project envisions a new future for the 2015 Chicago Horizon Pavilion, originally designed by Ultramoderne and Brett Schneider for the inaugural Biennial. Hungary’s Paradigma Ariadné reflected on adobe fireplaces as hybrid forms between architecture and furniture in The House of Fire. Meanwhile, Argentina- and Boston-based Balsa Crosetto Piazzi, along with New York-based Giorgis Ortiz, built TRACES in Jackson Park—10,000 dry-stacked bricks tracing the footprint of temporary “Great Buildings” from the 1893 World’s Fair, an homage to what was lost and what might return.

Other participants turned to materials and speculative futures. Austria- and Spain-based Space Popular presented The Global Home, an immersive film exploring how humans might inhabit virtual spaces and how hidden physical boundaries shape behaviour. Massachusetts-based Iman Fayyad countered the need for sustainable, ergonomic architecture with Thin Volumes: In the Round—a plywood structure that transforms flat materials into curved enclosures. A rising trend that was noticed in a few installations was a return of the 1960s Inflatable Architecture. In a city, where the Floating Museum creates monumental inflated installations, this resurgence comes as no surprise. Greece and NY-based Objects of Common Interest / LOT Office for Architecture had a floating inflatable dome with a modular, low-lying platform titled Surfaces in Flux. Austria-based Studio Jacob’s Soft Dolmen reimagined one of architecture’s oldest forms: the Neolithic dolmen. Elsewhere, visual artist Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork brought her Variations in Mass Nos. 5, 6, 7—a series of inflatable brick walls that expand and contract in a rhythmic choreography, set to a unique musical score.

A little different to the models, structures and installations was the dominance of words in the works at the Graham Foundation. American architect and theorist Stan Allen brought writing and drawing—two core components of architectural thinking—into one shared space with Building With Writing. On metal bookstands, visitors found 48 drawings from 12 buildings and 12 pieces of writing, each presented as a pamphlet. Moving from words to read to words to sit on,  Architecture firm MOS and American visual artist Tony Cokes presented Public Benches, an ongoing series featuring benches that bring Cokes’ chosen text fragments into public spaces. By turning words into physical objects, the benches create chances for people to pause, gather and interact and indeed, it did.

The Biennial explores themes such as climate resilience, immersive art, and public space recreation, but the most pressing among them is housing. International practice APPARATA presented A House for Artists; Argentinian studio Balparda Brunel Oficina de Arquitectura explored the impersonality of collective housing in Baigorria; Nigerian firm Oshinowo Studio’s Homes for Ngarannam addressed rebuilding for displaced communities; and Serbian practice TEN designed House for Five Women for survivors of war and violence. As Rodriguez observed, “One of the most pressing issues, very clearly established in the Biennial, is the housing crisis, which remains ever-present. That will be the starting point for many of the conversations we are going to host in the coming months. We’ll also be asking questions about what public spaces represent, who they are for and how they should be designed. The theme itself is a powerful statement and a provocation and many projects speak directly to that.”

SHIFT also underscored cultural and geographic diversity, drawing much from the Global South—not in exoticised or vernacular frames, but through technologically advanced and deeply researched approaches. Yet the Biennial also prompts a larger question: have biennials, as a format, become oversaturated? Too often, they serve visiting global audiences rather than the local communities. Chicago Architecture Biennial risks joining that crowd, but its saving grace lies in the richness of Chicago itself, the vitality of its participants and the fact that it remains the continent’s only architecture biennial. As Rodriguez reflected, “If we truly want diverse platforms that integrate different perspectives, biennials and fairs must not only invite these voices but also provide the structural support to sustain them. Chicago, in this regard, has made important strides. My hope is that more global platforms commit to actively visibilising the work of creators whose practices exist outside dominant funding and institutional systems. This requires intentionality—a clear commitment to creating financial and structural systems that allow these contributions to be part of the global conversation.”

Like Chicago itself—a city that has rebuilt, reimagined and resisted erasure—the Biennial thrives on moments of reinvention. It is not without its flaws: as with so many biennials, questions linger about who such events are truly for and whether the format itself works anymore. Yet what keeps the Chicago Architecture Biennial relevant is precisely what keeps the city alive: an openness to multiplicity, a willingness to engage with global voices alongside local ones, and a restless drive to confront urgent issues rather than retreat into architectural formalism. SHIFT may not offer a singular vision, but in its fragments, it mirrors the complexity of our world today. In that sense, Chicago remains not just a zoo of buildings, as I first thought, but a laboratory of ideas—a place where architecture continues to wrestle with memory, care, activism and possibility.

‘SHIFT: Architecture in Times of Radical Change’ is running until February 28, 2026, in Chicago, Illinois.