The fifth edition of the Chicago Architecture Biennial, CAB 5: This is a Rehearsal, curated by the interdisciplinary arts collective the Floating Museum, takes an expansive view of design as an iterative rehearsal process to explore architecture, cities, and the different social, ecological, economic, and political forces that shape them. From artists, architects, engineers, performers, poets, and others, the practitioners represented in CAB 5 collectively set the stage for the cross-pollination of ideas in order to challenge and envision alternatives for the following: how we understand and address the needs of a city, who plays a role in imagining and making the city, and how our potential solutions attend to the overlapping crises that now inform our everyday lives. Cities are always evolving—continuously shaped and reshaped by the millions of people who inhabit them through a process of action and reaction. Over time, the accumulation of buildings and infrastructure creates a layered index of the ideals and policies of past generations. Rehearsal invites new possibilities through open dialogue, creative invention, and a generative process of discovery to understand how hope and care can emerge in architecture. Harnessing dialogue is paramount to CAB 5’s conception of rehearsal. It is a productive tool that establishes new lines of thinking that question the status quo through modes ranging from conversations and performances to installations, drawings, and new technologies. In this sense, CAB 5 welcomes alternative ways of making architecture and engages everyone to rethink, rework, and reimagine the present and future of cities.

Floating Museum is an art collective that creates new models: exploring relationships between art, community, architecture, and public institutions. Using site-responsive art, design, and programming they explore the potential in these relationships, considering the infrastructure, history, and aesthetics of a space.

Jeremiah Hulsebos-Spofford is a visual artist and assistant professor of sculpture at Indiana University Northwest. He is also a codirector and founder of the collective Floating Museum. His work has been shown at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, The University of California San Diego Art Gallery, The Glass Curtain Gallery, and The Hyde Park Art Center, among other spaces. He has held fellowships at the Sculpture Space, the MacDowell Colony, Vermont Studio Center, the Brown Foundation Program at the Dora Maar House, and the Skowhegan School of Sculpture and Painting. His work has been supported by grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Harpo Foundation, the Propeller Fund, the Chauncey and Marion Deering McCormick Foundation, an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship, and a Fulbright Fellowship in Sicily.

Faheem Majeed is an artist, educator, curator, and community facilitator. He blends his unique experience as a non-profit administrator, curator, and artist to create works that focus on institutional critique and exhibitions that leverage collaboration to engage his immediate, and the broader community, in meaningful dialogue. Majeed received his undergraduate degree from Howard University and his MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC).

Andrew Schachman designs environments, infrastructures, and installations. He is the executive codirector of two organizations that are experimental spaces for delivering arts and culture within existing metropolitan networks: Floating Museum and Fieldwork Collaborative Projects. Trained as an architect, he designed and managed projects for the offices of Zaha Hadid, Perkins and Will, Carol Ross Barney, and Doug Garofalo. His projects have received numerous awards, including the Distinguished Building Award from the American Institute of Architects and the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation Award for Architectural Excellence in Community Design. As principal of Studio Andrew Schachman, he completed the design for the Palais de Tokyo’s exhibition, Singing Stones, in the roundhouse of the DuSable Museum of African American History in Chicago. Schachman is a lecturer in urban design at the University of Chicago.

avery r. young is best known as a poet, songwriter, and performer, multi-disciplinary artist. young is also an award-winning teaching artist who mentors youths in the crafts of creative writing and theater. He has been an Arts and Public Life Artist-In-Residence at the University of Chicago and has written curriculum for Columbia College Chicago, Young Leeds Authors, True Star Magazine, and Chicago Public Schools Art Integration Department. His poems and essays on HIV awareness, misogyny, race records, and art integration have been published in The BreakBeat Poets, The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks, AIMPrint, and other anthologies.

The Chicago Architecture Biennial (CAB) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to convening the world to explore innovative ideas and bring people together to collectively imagine and shape the future of design. CAB’s programs are committed to producing opportunities to explore and address timely global issues through the lens of architecture and design, emphasizing community input, sustainability, and equity. Free and open to the public, CAB stands as North America’s largest international survey of contemporary architecture.