Local Anxieties: Relocating Architecture in a Global Public Space

A two-city symposium on the occasion of the inaugural Chicago Architectural Biennial presented by the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

If art and architecture over the past decade have been working through their increasingly global financing and field of operations, the national, local, and personal consequences of this shift have been but imperfectly charted. Given this unevenness in the debate about the future of our cultural institutions, it is striking to see initiatives like the Chicago Architectural Biennial play the global game against the grain, attracting attention to a city that is both the cradle of nineteenth-century industrialism in the Western Hemisphere and a refuge for ‘International Style’ modernist architecture was exiled from Europe in the era of fascism. The return of Chicago as a historical site and a biennial-circuit tourist destination allows us to ask a number of timely questions about the relations of architecture, politics, and the spaces we inhabit. We want not just to raise these questions, but also to suggest answers or at least avenues of research. To that end, we opt for a binocular focus, staging panels both in Chicago during the biennial (at the School of the Art Institute) and in New York shortly afterward (at the Museum of Modern Art). Theorist-practitioners located in public art, architecture, urbanism, and the museum will address each other and the larger issues in a dialogic setting in public, with a written publication following in a leading architectural journal.


Panel 1, Chicago:
"Death and Afterlife of the Post-Industrial City"
organized by Mechtild Widrich (SAIC) and Martino Stierli (MoMA)

Wednesday, September 30th, 4.30-6.00pm
School of the Art Institute of Chicago
SAIC Ballroom, 112 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago, Illinois 60603
free and open to the public

Abstract
The rhetoric of a post-industrial (and post-ideological) society is already a half-century old, but as phenomena like the Chicago Architecture Biennial show, the challenges of articulating narratives of growth and crisis in a metropolis that is no longer primarily a factory town have not declined in complexity. If anything, global networks of trade and tourism expose the limitations of the biologistic imagery of revival and decay, which relies implicitly on a theory of progress or of quasi-natural cycles. This panel invites experts in international modernism, urbanism and race theory, and historic preservation, some of whom themselves practitioners in urban space, to reflect on the realities and the fictions of the post-industrial metropolis as it turns outward.

Shiben Banerji, Assistant Professor, Art History, Theory, and Criticism, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Jorge Otero-Pailos, Associate Professor of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University
Martino Stierli, The Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, Museum of Modern Art, New York
Mabel Wilson, Associate Professor of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University
Mechtild Widrich, Assistant Professor, Art History, Theory, and Criticism, School of the Art Institute of Chicago

This event co-sponsored by the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Eikones Institute, the Schapiro Center for Research and Collaboration, and the Department of Architecture, Interior Architecture, and Designed Objects at SAIC.

Format: Roundtable discussion, followed by audience interventions.


Panel 2, New York (MoMA):
“Going Global? The Art-Education-Speculation Complex”
organized by Martino Stierli (MoMA) and Mechtild Widrich (SAIC)
November 18, 2015, 6pm
The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Abstract
The public face of leading American (and some European) museums and universities has in the past decade increasingly become an extraterritorial one: NYU has branches in Abu Dhabi and Shanghai, and the financial center of gravity of the art world (not mention architecture) is steadily shifting eastward. But this speculative growth has also brought controversy, ranging from labor disputes to issues of free speech and collaboration with repressive regimes. What roles do individual academics, museum professionals, and architects play in the minefield of global commerce and publicity? Do innovations like the Chicago Architecture Biennial, with its seemingly effort to shift attention west and indeed, into the past (Chicago as great modernist city, as well as site of reclamation), work against or merely manifest a new facet of global capitalism?

Speakers include:
Sarah Herda, Director, Graham Foundation, Co-Director Chicago Architecture Biennial
Jacques Herzog, Architect, Herzog & de Meuron, Basel
Glenn D. Lowry, Director of The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Martino Stierli, The Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, Museum of Modern Art, New York
Mechtild Widrich, Assistant Professor, Art History, Theory, and Criticism, School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Co-sponsored by the Eikones Institute and the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Format: Roundtable discussion, followed by audience interventions.


Parts of both conversations will be published in the journal Future Anterior

 

 

Konzept: Martino Stierli, Mechtild Widrich

School of the Art Institute of Chicago SAIC Ballroom, 112 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago, Illinois 60603 // The Museum of Modern Art, New York