The 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennial was held, like its two predecessors, in the Chicago Cultural Center, a sumptuous late-19th-century meeting hall in the downtown Loop. Two years later, rocked by Covid-19 and local protests against police violence, North America’s largest architecture and design show finds itself in very different surroundings.

Instead of having international design elites gather in the Cultural Center’s ornate Beaux Arts galleries for months of parties, chatter and provocative ideas, the 2021 CAB, which opened on Sept. 17 and will run until Dec. 18, is centered on more than a dozen site-specific installations mostly located in struggling neighborhoods on Chicago’s South and West sides. It’s a world away from where architects usually set up to kick the tires on experimental design.