Redirect Attention at the 2025 Chicago Architecture Exhibition
The 10th edition of the Chicago Architecture Biennial (CAB), running from September 19, 2025, to February 28, 2026, is set to be a landmark event in the world of architecture. Led by Latina artistic director Florencia Rodriguez, this year's theme is SHIFT: Architecture in Times of Radical Change.
Notable contributors to CAB 6 include MASS Design Group, Breathe Architecture, APPARATA, SO-IL, Objects of Common Interest, and the Chilean firm Plan Común. The biennial attracts nearly 100 contributors from around the world, including studios, artists, collectives, and critics from cities like Lagos, Zurich, Santiago, Dhaka, and beyond.
The Chicago Architecture Biennial sprawls deliberately outward, with installations, dialogues, and ephemeral structures in public schools, neighborhood parks, alternative galleries, and underutilized civic spaces. This year, the focus is on addressing ecological, political, and spatial crises through architectural design.
Key themes of CAB 6 include material innovation, migration, housing, and design as media. Several works in CAB 6 examine how the architecture of borders and transit centers shape our sense of home in relation to migration. Participants in CAB 6 also investigate the ecological and political costs of extraction in relation to materials.
CAB 6 behaves less like a conventional design exhibition and more like a civic research project, with public programs unfolding in formats ranging from film and podcast to on-the-ground interventions. One such project is the workshop "Build Your Dream Team," hosted by DesignDash during Design Chicago on October 8, 2025. This full-day workshop aims to help residential designers scale their businesses with intention, offering practical tools like a Salary + Fee Alignment Plan, Org Chart templates, and a hiring playbook tailored for firms of three to fifteen people.
The projects presented at CAB resist easy categorization, often blurring the line between art and architecture, and practice and pedagogy. Some participating projects engage with existing structures in innovative ways, such as using underpinning technology to stabilize and expand foundations, illustrating a surgical approach to reworking and reclaiming built environments to better meet current and future needs.
CAB 6 insists that Chicago architecture is not fixed in time, calling attention to what's still at stake: land use, equity, and belonging. The biennial continues to be the most ambitious and inclusive survey of contemporary architecture in North America, marking its tenth anniversary. Projects revealed at CAB often live on in museums, publications, policy circles, and real-world commissions.
In summary, CAB 2025 aims to address urgent ecological, political, and spatial challenges by promoting architectural practices that are resource-conscious, socially engaged, inventive in adaptive reuse, and grounded in intercultural dialogue across the Americas, thereby fostering architecture’s role as a catalyst for positive change.
- News: "The Chicago Architecture Biennial 2025, known as CAB 6, is set to make global design headlines with its emphasis on addressing ecological, political, and spatial crises through architecture and fostering architecture as a catalyst for change."
- Lifestyle: "For architecture enthusiasts and design enthusiasts, CAB 6 offers an exciting lineup of events and workshops like the "Build Your Dream Team" workshop during Design Chicago, aiming to help residential designers scale their businesses with intention."
- Travel: "Visitors to Chicago in 2025-2026 can expect an immersive travel experience with installation, dialogues, and ephemeral structures spread across public schools, neighborhood parks, alternative galleries, and underutilized civic spaces as part of the Chicago Architecture Biennial, marking its tenth anniversary."
