Image courtesy of Tom Harris and the Chicago Architecture Biennial
100 Links: Installation and Book
Buell Center and AD–WO
November 1, 2023 – February 11, 2024
Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago, IL
Invited installation at the Chicago Architecture Biennial
There is architecture in the simplest of tools. Gunter’s chains and corner mounds are devices that measured and marked vast territories during the colonization of North America. The sixty-six-foot chain, tagged and divided into 100 links, combined decimal and English systems so that 18th-Century surveyors could lay out fields, farms, towns, and, eventually, the Jeffersonian grid. The mounds were dug out from four pits to show where the grid intersected and where plots could be bought. Together, these tools enabled the conversion of earth into land, inextricably linking liberty to property. Any alternative way of being with the world—by indigenous communities who considered themselves as belonging to the lands, not the other way around or by enslaved peoples who invented new modes of life despite being declared property—were odious obstacles to this brutal dynamic.
“100 links” unsettles the historical and ongoing dynamics of enclosure and dispossession by redefining land not as object, but as relationship. It invites visitors to move beneath sagging chains, amidst wall-mounted tags, and around pits filled with books for the taking. These books unpack the lineage of a paradox that still feeds development today: as soon as any territory is enclosed, new architectures have to be invented to declare land an endless resource again.
To unsettle land today is to reflect on the techniques that sustain this legacy; to find solidarities across history and geography; to heed the work of contemporary abolitionists and indigenists; and to generate robust forms of unlanded freedom.
Project Leads: The Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture (Lucia Allais, Director) and AD–WO (Emanuel Admassu and Jen Wood, Principals)
AD–WO Design Team: Katharine C. Solien, Eric Hagerman, Gene Han
Engineering Consultants: Tom Reiner, Axel Kilian
Fabrication: Paul Russell, TheChicagoBlacksmith, Lawndale Forge (Chains); Corcoran Fabrication & Design, Inc. (Beam and Pits)
Book Editing: Maur Dessauvage, Lucia Galaretto, Catherine George Weilein
Book Writing: Eddie Joe Antonio, Aleksandr Bierig, Clarisse Figueiredo, Jacob R. Moore, Jordan Steingard, Spenser Krut, Cecília Resende Santos
Additional Research: Erisa Nakamura, Aaron Smolar, Stephen Zimmerer
Project Management: Catherine George Weilein, Michelle Huynh Chu
Book Design: Marie Otsuka
Book Printing: Lowitz + Sons Inc.
100 Links is made possible by support from:
The Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture at Columbia GSAPP
Elise Jaffe + Jeffrey Brown
Special thanks to the student fabricators and assemblers of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago: Jakki Cafarelli, Rex Zahedi Delafkaran, FÁTIMA, Liangyu Huang, Olayinka Ogunleye, Pablo Lazala Ruiz
Cover Image: Marie Otsuka (right)
Press
Mimi Zeiger, "One More with Feeling," New York Review of Architecture, November 30, 2023. (or read here)
Christopher Hawthorne, "At the Chicago Architecture Biennial, Artists Run Free," The New York Times, November 28, 2023.
Ann Binlot, "The 8 Best Exhibitions at the Chicago Architecture Biennale 2023," Galerie Magazine, November 20, 2023.
Joe Dixon, "7 exhibits not to miss during the Chicago Architecture Biennial," Chicago Chicago, November 17, 2023.
Anjulie Rao, "Discover Chicago's layered history," Chicago Reader, November 28, 2023.
Will Jennings, "Chicago Architecture Biennial 2023 launches diverse survey of the built environment," Wallpaper, November 9, 2023.
Matt Hickman, "The Fifth Edition of the Chicago Architecture Biennial Envisions the City as a Sprawling Work in Progress," Architectural Record, November 20, 2023.
Ellen Eberhardt, "Ruth de Jong draws upon Nope set design for Chicago Architecture Biennial," Dezeen, November 10, 2023.
Ben Dreith, "Nine installations to see at the 2023 Chicago Architecture Biennial," Dezeen, November 13, 2023.
Kristina Rapacki, "Dress rehearsal: Chicago Architecture Biennial 2023," The Architectural Review, November 17, 2023.
Daniel Roche, "CAB5," The Architect's Newspaper, November 9, 2023.
"Before the Architecture, There was the Land, This is a Rehearsal: Chicago Architecture Biennial 5," Terremoto, November 28, 2023.
Lori Waxman, "Chicago Architecture Biennial returns with 'This is a Rehearsal' and the Cultural Center shines," Chicago Tribune, November 28, 2023.
A November 2 discussion marking the launch of "Architecture and Land in and out of the Americas" at Chicago's Thompson Center in conjunction with the Fifth Chicago Architecture Biennial
