As inhabitants of an entropic world, it should come as no surprise that our grasp of time, and our understanding of the systems upon which our countries and beliefs and families were predicated, can become tenuous at any particular moment. Yet, we stand together and we build and we wish for permanence. Longevity is a pipe dream, but we have to try anyway.

Such is the endeavor central to the Chicago Architecture Biennial’s sixth edition, SHIFT: Architecture in Times of Radical Change, a series of over 70 exhibitions, installations, performances, and conversations unfurling across the city through February 2026.

The Biennial invites viewers to immerse themselves in the rapid evolutions of environmental, social, and cultural shifts of the present through works splayed out across the city’s civic landmarks, cultural spaces, and neighborhoods. Each installation becomes a mirror for the city’s people—how they respond, endure, and find beauty in flux. Architecture here is anything but static; it breathes with its inhabitants, asking how design might nurture resilience rather than merely withstand disruption.

The city is no stranger to change—or the celebration of it. From May to October 1893, the World’s Columbian Exposition, also known as the Chicago World’s Fair, took over Jackson Park in celebration of the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s 1492 New World expedition. Although Columbus’s legacy is one marred with violence in the United States’ memory, the World’s Fair ultimately serves as a reckoning with the radical change the nation underwent post-Columbian contact. Through violent pillaging and revolutionary wars, the United States of America—and the city of Chicago—changed dramatically in those 400 years, and have in the 132 years since the fair.

In many ways, SHIFT feels like a modern echo of that fair—less a showcase of dominion, more a meditation on resilience. It suggests that transformation, while inevitable, can also be intentional. Cities, like people, must continually redesign themselves to survive. SHIFT: Architecture in Times of Radical Change absorbs this enterprising and sometimes seditious mindset ingrained in our national imagination and reflects it onto the issues most pressing today. It asks the question: How will we adapt as the world changes around us?

And perhaps more urgently: how will we ensure that, in adapting, we bring one another along?