Delicately suspended in the Chicago Cultural Center, a dainty filigree of chains filled the room, and sunlight poured in from the neoclassical building’s arched windows. It was impossible not to be enraptured by all this beauty — that is, until I reached down to pick up one of the little red books from the piles below. The literature revealed the unsavoury history of the apparatus on display in this installation designed by New York’s AD–WO (in partnership with Columbia University’s Buell Center) for CAB 5, the fifth edition of the Chicago Architecture Biennial.
Gunter’s chain, as it was once called, was used by surveyors to measure and subdivide land during the colonization of North America. The stacks of books represented the corner mounds used to demarcate the boundaries of each plot. “Together, these tools enabled the conversion of earth into land and inextricably linked liberty to property,” the designers explained in their artists’ statement. When I toured the installation in November, AD–WO co-founder Emanuel Admassu elaborated, “We wanted to think about the horror of these tools, but also how they produce environments that are sublime.”
This tension between horror and beauty ran throughout CAB 5 as designers unpacked structures of oppression and erasure in the built environment. On the Cultural Center’s ground level, three galleries were taken over by A Long Walk Home, a local non-profit that works to combat gender violence and racism through a Black feminist lens. Its monument to missing and murdered Black girls and young women highlighted a sobering reality — all the while managing to capture the vibrancy of the lives it commemorated. In the second gallery of the sequence, poignant notes written on yellow paper hearts hung from a central tree, while the sound of birds chirping filled the space.
In the Chicago Rooms, meanwhile, Ruth De Jong’s CAB 5 contribution at first appeared to explore the theme of horror on a surface level. De Jong created the set design for the Haywood ranch in Jordan Peele’s film Nope, and her installation sought to demonstrate how buildings themselves become dominant characters in cinema. Rendered in monochromatic white, the house was fronted by six buckets of fake blood (nodding to the blood that rains down in the movie).
But while De Jong’s iteration overtly referenced Peele’s film in many ways, it also spoke to the director’s philosophy on horror. “In Jordan Peele’s films, horror isn’t confined to a place beneath the stairs or the space between the walls. It’s not bound to a time of day. It’s pervasive; it’s structural,” explained Andrew Schachman, a member of Floating Museum, the local art collective that curated CAB 5. Indeed, the world’s most marginalized communities experience the horrors of inequality every day — in broad daylight.
Beauty and horror intersected in powerful ways throughout CAB 5, the fifth edition of the Chicago Architecture Biennial.