The sixth Chicago Architecture Biennial (CAB 6)—Shift: Architecture in Times of Radical Change—opened this weekend. On September 18, one day before the opening, a letter was sent to the CAB 6 executive team announcing a coalition of participants had opted to withdraw from the biennial.
The signatories cited CAB’s support from Crown Family Philanthropies as the reason for the discontent. Crown Family Philanthropies owns a 10 percent stake in General Dynamics, a military contractor that supplies weapons to Israel. General Dynamics manufactures the 2,000-pound MK-84 bomb, which has been used in Israel’s occupation of Gaza.
The letter dated September 18 had 21 signatories, or roughly 20 percent of the CAB 6 participants. Some signatories withdrew from CAB 6 while others kept their exhibitions in place.
The participants who withdrew were: Ethel Baraona Pohl, Anna Puigjaner, and Pol Esteve Castelló of ETH Zurich; María Buey González, C+ arquitectas; Lacol Arquitectura Cooperativa; MAIO; and Amaia Sánchez-Velasco, Gonzalo Valiente Oriol, Jorge Valiente-Oriol of Grandeza Studio. The letter cited contradictions between Shift’s curatorial mission and its funding:
It is a matter of public record that the Crown Family owns a 10 percent stake in General Dynamics, the world’s fifth-largest military contractor. This corporation manufactures weapons and warcrafts, including those used by the Israeli military in its ongoing assault on Palestinians in Gaza such as the 2,000-lb MK-84 bomb. This assault has been characterized by several international legal experts, entities and organizations as a genocide, marked by the deliberate destruction of civilian life, the starvation of civilian population as a method of warfare, forced displacements of population, and the systematic targeting of basic infrastructure including universities, hospitals, schools, and libraries—a level of destruction of life, livelihoods, ecosystems and culture that will take generations to recover.
We believe that the aforementioned sponsorship is incompatible with the values of our work as well as with the event’s stated mission of addressing ‘architecture’s role in shaping our collective future’ and pursuing ‘radical change.’
The signatories likewise requested that the CAB executive team “not accept further funding from Crown Family Philanthropies or any other sponsor involved in the perpetration of war crimes for future editions of the Chicago Architecture Biennial.”
Additional signatories that signed but did not withdraw their work from CAB 6 include: Manuel Alba Montes, María Buey González, and Toby Chai of C+ arquitectas; Burr Studio; Nathalie Frankowski and Cruz Garcia of WAI Think Tank; Fredik Hellberg and Lara Lesmes of Space Popular; Lukas Burkhart, Fabian Lauener, Scott Lloyd, and Nemanja Zimonjic of TEN; and Frida Mouchlian of LIGA.
An online version of the letter also lists Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork as a signer. The letter is accompanied by an Instagram account: @shift_right_now. A spokesperson for CAB told AN: “At this time, the CAB leadership team is not providing further comment beyond what is in these two letters” dated August 8 and August 14.
The Second Letter
This is the second letter CAB 6 participants sent to the executive team voicing concerns related to Crown Family Philanthropies. In response to the first letter, the signatories were told that no Crown Family funding was used to support their exhibitions, but instead went to CAB’s educational programming.
In a letter dated August 14, the CAB executive team told the signatories of the first letter in a statement: “We are actively fundraising to meet the budget needs for the 2025-26 Biennial, and are not in a financial position to return funds already committed. Returning any donation with just a few weeks until opening would challenge our ability to raise the additional resources needed for this edition, and for our future.”
The signatories subsequently offered the CAB executive team the opportunity “to collectively replace the contribution from Crown Family Philanthropies, ensuring the Biennial would suffer no financial hardship.” But the executive team’s “refusal to accept this solution makes it clear for us that retaining this donor does not merely come from economic necessity,” the September 18 letter said.
Beyond CAB, Crown Family Philanthropies has made significant donations to other Chicago institutions. It has gifted significant sums for the upkeep of S. R. Crown Hall at IIT by Mies van der Rohe, a building that was named for a Crown family member, and has funded the construction of Crown Fountain in Millennium Park.
This isn’t the first controversy related to fiscal support for the CAB. For the inaugural 2015 biennial, CAB accepted $2.5 million from British Petroleum (BP). The CAB executive team continued to accept BP funding despite criticism. In 2019, writing for Frieze, Minh Nguyen asked: Is the Chicago Architecture Biennial’s Radical Message Compromised by Big Oil? In 2020, Leah Gallant called CAB “the BP Biennial.”
The previous iteration of CAB in 2023 was sponsored in part by Krueck Sexton Partners, the Chicago architecture office helping plan a new U.S. Embassy in East Jerusalem, together with the U.S. State Department, the Israel Land Authority, and Yigal Levi Architectural Studio.
The more recent Crown Family controversy in Chicago recalls similar episodes in the art world today. The executive teams behind Documenta 15 and the 13th Berlin Biennale, for instance, were criticized for allegedly censoring participants who want to address Germany’s complicity in the state of Israel’s violence in Gaza.
On September 16, a report from a United Nations commission stated that Israel has “committed genocide in the Gaza Strip.”
Additional coverage of CAB 6’s exhibitions are forthcoming in AN.
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