The Chicago Architecture Biennial announces Artistic Director Florencia Rodriguez for 2025 edition
Florencia Rodriguez, CAB 6's Artist Director. Courtesy of Chicago Architecture Biennial. Photo: Noah Sheldon.
CHICAGO, IL.—
The Chicago Architecture Biennial celebrates its tenth anniversary, alongside the announcement of CAB 6: Shift: Architecture in Times of Radical Change, the next iteration of the Biennial to be held in 2025, led by Florencia Rodriguez, a writer, editor and Director at the University of Illinois Chicago’s School of Architecture, who will be the Biennial’s first Latina Artistic Director.
In the past decade, CAB has sustained an international forum on architecture and urbanism centered in Chicago and has continued to produce the largest exhibition of contemporary architecture in North America every two years. CAB exhibitions and public programs have engaged over 2.2 million visitors with innovative ideas in design through over 400 original projects created by architects, artists and designers from nearly 50 countries. As one of the most public and accessible architecture events in the world, CAB has created a powerful platform for ideas and now embarks on a new decade of growth and ambitious programs.
CAB 6 will enlist Florencia Rodriguez, Director of and Associate Professor at the University of Illinois Chicago’s School of Architecture (UIC/SoArch), as Artistic Director to lead this pivotal edition of the Biennial. Titled Shift: Architecture in Times of Radical Change, CAB 6 will form an expansive and multi-faceted exploration of the field of architecture and the built environment globally, with a special focus on the cultural forces that impact design, such as the need to rethink collective housing, material culture, ecologies and the impact that migration has on our cities. New and commissioned projects will address the most pressing issues of our time and in doing so chart a new agenda for contemporary design.
The sixth edition of CAB, which is free and open to the public, will open its central exhibition in the Chicago Cultural Center on September 12, 2025 and run through February 28, 2026. The historic Chicago Cultural Center, the headquarters of the City of Chicago Department of Culture and Special Events (DCASE), located in the heart of downtown Chicago within the Millennium Park Campus, serves as the Biennial’s hub and the site of the main exhibition. Through partnerships across the City of Chicago and around the world, a network of organizations will create a constellation of projects, expanding the conversation and exploration of ideas around the most salient issues facing the field of architecture today.
With exhibitions, installations, events and a robust youth education program throughout Chicago, CAB 6 will also produce an array of virtual initiatives that will open possibilities for participation beyond the city itself. Alongside an international open call for ideas will be a podcast featuring leading voices in design from around the world and a program for international schools of architecture. With more programs still to be announced, the full scope of CAB 6 will be to encapsulate the complexity of the challenges facing the field of architecture today through a network of resources that will remain accessible long after the Biennial closes.
Florencia Rodriguez is Director of and Associate Professor at the University of Illinois Chicago’s School of Architecture (UIC/SoArch). Having practiced mainly as an editor, writer and educator, she has built a career path driven by a strong entrepreneurial spirit that led her to create and run cultural initiatives related to architecture and design.
In 2010, Rodriguez founded PLOT, a publication she continued to direct until 2017, when she co-founded NESS with Pablo Gerson. From that platform, she’s edited books and organized events committed to the dissemination of new narratives, the exploration of alternative forms of design criticism and discussions about the contemporary role of design.
In 2015, she created Monte, an independent space in Buenos Aires, where she created and promoted a very active public program. Before coming to UlC, she was a lecturer in architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where she was granted the Loeb Fellowship between 2013 and 2014. During that year, she focused her research on new modes of criticism and the architecture of the Americas. Rodriguez has lectured, curated exhibitions, acted as a juror and organized international symposia in different institutions.
As Director of UIC SoArch, Rodriguez has advocated for the inclusion of more diverse cultural perspectives in the form of lectures, symposia and publications. Through public discussions and conferences, she has sought to pull the school into broader conversations occurring in society today and to integrate contemporary criticism to reinforce the importance of collective thinking and its role as a nexus of intellectual and creative engagement. As founder of SoArch’s yearly publication Pollen, Rodriguez further capitalizes on the school’s public program to open discourse happening within the school to larger audiences.
She’s received awards for her editorial work and published several articles in books and specialized media such as Domus, Oris, summa+, Arquine, A+U and Uncube. In 2020, together with Mark Lee, she guest-edited America, the 48th issue of the Harvard Design Magazine. Her more recent book, MCHAP 2 Territory & Expeditions (ITAC, Actar, NESS), was launched in March 2022. She’s currently working on two new titles: one on Machado Silvetti / Drawings from 1975-1995 with Harvard Design Press and A Critical / Editorial Manifesto in the Age of Dispersion with Park Books.
