This year's Chicago Biennial doesn't provide a blueprint for the future of architecture, but it does offer clues for how to create one, says Aaron Betsky.

The fear of what the future might hold looms heavily over the second edition of the Chicago Architecture Biennial, Make New History, which opened in that city on 15 September 2017. The exhibition's name evokes the looming of the past, whose orders and achievements seem to overshadow our current attempts to make things new as we face a future in which not much good seems in the offing.
If the exhibition, which has moments of great beauty framed by a blessedly low level of "discourse", succeeds in freeing itself from its name, it is probably because history means something different to us today. The exhibition unfolds in a moment in which history has became a data bank, not an order, narrative, or order to either inform or constrain us. Traditionally the past has been the weapon of conservatives and even reactionaries. It is so even today, but only in the alt-right world of hard-bitten, uncompromising neo-classicism as espoused by those battling the Eisenhower Memorial, and the implied racism and Reaganite dreams of the nostalgia-laden New Urbanists.
To others, the past has been a story that teaches us how to act today, but few believe in such unquestionable morals. The past has also been a monument, a fixed presence from which we cannot escape, but these days we prefer to tear down such edifices.
Here is good wo...