The Available City, Chicago Architecture Biennial

The 2021 edition of the Chicago Architecture Biennial (CAB) The Available City was curated by educator and artist director David Brown. Polymode designed the visual identity, a forthcoming digital publication, a series of posters, out-of-home advertising, maps, and a video.

Our design for The Available City was inspired by Chicago’s five-lot grid and its flexibility, adaptability, and open-endedness in outcome. The Available City’s branding was designed to flex, adapt, and respond to its surroundings. We created a modular branding system that relies on patterns and typography as the foundation, illuminated by diverse ways that architectural property configurations can be built.

Lead Partner – Silas Munro
Supporting Partner – Brian Johnson
Designer – Randa Hadi

Poetic Research

Something Patterned, Wild, and Free

The design for The Available City echos David Brown’s vision for a city that is adaptable, flexible, and responsive, which takes inspiration from the poem Something Patterned, Wild, and Free. The patterned grid acts and responds to the variable typeface; they live in relation to each other.

    From David Brown’s Studio The Available City, which is a space designed to be flexible, non-hierarchical, variable, and collective. Analyzing the ways of being in the diagrams and the way those characteristics can be applied to the design and the branding of The Available City.
    Puzzler is a typeface based on square proportions and patterning; each letter providing a unique pattern, density, and style. Tying the pattern to the grid structure of the architecture was an important connection that speaks to the variable nature of The Available City.
    Black Grids by Silas Munro was another inspiration that fuses multiple perspectives and touches on connections, grids, and personal lineages. It explores Africanness, Queerness, and the complexity of rupture into a layered, cultural grid that expresses a sense of poetic research.
    A poem that inspired David Brown’s work written by Robert Hayden
    Exploring the 5 lot grid shown in The Available City in relation to the typography and lockup of patterns.