Vertical City at the 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial
Make New History
Curators: Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee
16 September 2017 - 07 January 2018
Almost a century after the Chicago Tribune Competition took place in 1922, the Chicago Biennial’s artistic directors Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee invited a group of architects to make their 21st century contribution in 1:24 scale models. Instead of designing another iconic object, Kuehn Malvezzi suggests a hybrid, turning Hood as well as Loos inside out. The space in-between the high-rises becomes building mass and will house the offices of the Chicago Tribune. The buildings’ shells instead turn into clearly defined voids that act as urban squares, with their facades reversed. Figure becomes ground, objects turn into spaces and vice versa. The result is a novel urban fabric that introduces common grounds into the commercial block. Where there used to be facades along the block perimeter, there are now sectional cuts, whereas inside the block we encounter the historical facades oriented towards the articulated urban spaces enclosed by them.
