Thousands of architects are descending upon the city of Chicago this calendar week for the American Institute of Architects Convention, the biggest gathering of architects and design professionals in the country. This year's conference kicked off Thursday with keynote speeches from Chicago Mayor Rahm Emmanuel; Jeanne Gang, founder of Chicago-based Studio Gang Architects and a MacArthur genius grant recipient; and Theaster Gates, an artist and urban planner who founded Rebuild Foundation, a neighborhood revitalization nonprofit.

Emanuel touted the potential of architecture to transform cities (and plugged his new plans to launch an architecture biennial in Chicago), while Gates discussed some of his artistic projects, similar refurbishing a celebrated High german hotel. Gang urged architects to consider design in the context of larger global bug like climate change and urbanization.

AIA President Helene Combs Dreiling onstage. Photo past MattMartin.Telly

After starting off with a pump-upwardly video reminding a room full of architects how awesome and important architecture is, Stephen Chung, host of PBS architecture show Cool Space appeared on phase. "We've assembled here today to reconsider and reinforce our goals . . . to get back to a fourth dimension when you considered architecture a calling, non just a job," he said.

Rahm Emanuel

AIA President Helene Combs Dreiling introduces Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, whom she describes every bit "an enthusiastic supporter of continued architectural innovation." Earlier this week, he announced the launch of a new Chicago architecture biennial.

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Photo by MattMartin.TV

"The biannual meeting in the urban center of Chicago for compages will be virtually thinking of the mod city," Emanuel said. (And of form, bringing in tourist dollars: "Please walk out of here and go spend some money," he jokes.)

"The idea of rethinking your infinite is essential for a metropolis today," Emanuel said. "People are now migrating back to cities. We are in one case once more at the heart of rethinking livable, sustainable, and beautiful cities–not just downtown, because we take an incredible downtown . . . but also what happens in our neighborhoods."

"We equally a city are embracing . . . how you really utilise the work of architects, planners, to think of the new American metropolis," he said.

He then touched on some of the metropolis's transportation efforts, announcing that every i of the new stations on the city's Scarlet Line–the southern portion of Chicago's busiest metro track line completely shut downwards equally part of reconstruction efforts concluding yr–would include artwork telling the story of that neighborhood, including piece of work past Theaster Gates at the 95th Street station. "Nosotros used to have a organisation in Chicago where people by bicycle went faster than past train," Emanuel said. (This was certainly my experience commuting in Chicago only a few years ago.) The trains on the refurbished Red Line can travel up to 55 miles per hr. Putting the "moderately rapid" in "rapid transit."

Ivenue Beloved-Stanley. Photo past MattMartin.TV

Ivenue Love-Stanley

Ivenue Honey-Stanley, winner of the 2014 AIA Witney Thousand Young Jr. Laurels, gave an inspiring speech about her origins in the segregated schoolhouse system of Height, Mississippi. She was the beginning African-American woman to get licensed as an architect in the Southeast. "I want to simply enquire you to search your souls and ask the question: Is this profession what you lot actually desire it to be?" she says. She urges the crowd (though women aren't totally absent from the room, there are a whole heck of a lot of white dudes) to work to improve the enrollment numbers of women and minorities in architecture schools as well as firms.

"These improvements are long overdue," she says. "Although women make up an increasingly large per centum in the country's schools of architecture, the number of female professionals who enter the profession pales by comparison. Nosotros stand to lose an entire generation if nosotros practise not human activity fast."

Theaster Gates

"In my artistic exercise a big office of it is reimagining how spaces are activated," Gates said.

He discussed his project Huguenot Firm, a old drug house Gates restored in Kassel, Germany. "Compages was a raw material for me," he said. "I would starting time to imagine policy as form. I would start to imagine a city every bit a potential landscape. How could we tweak [architecture] or hack it or make its will discipline to what nosotros believe in?"

Theaster Gates. Photo past MattMartin.Boob tube

"My amateur tactics–while they may not be transformative at a city scale–these [tactics] are the baby steps that lead to policy innovation," he said, noting that artists "have permission to not ever hyper-professionalize." Artists doing architectural work don't accept to follow the rules.

Jeanne Gang

Gang introduced her talk as "Purpose Is Process." She puts it another manner: "Does architecture create social alter? Or is it social change that determines architectural space?"

She introduced the framework she created for Northerly Island, a old lakefront drome that has been turned into a public park (using somewhat controversial tactics on the role of so-mayor Richard M. Daley).

"What's actually cracking is it'southward actually nether construction–nosotros thought information technology was going to take 50 years," she said. "Right now it is the largest urban aquatic restoration projection going on in the country."

"The radical reinvention of the isle speaks to the fact that compages'southward not just a bare canvas," she says. "I'd debate that social modify is really reliant on spatial change to achieve its existent potential."

Gang spoke to her commitment to environmental issues. "For u.s., it'south really a procedure of aligning our design work with these larger urban issues" like mass urbanization and climate alter. "While the metropolis [of Chicago] focuses on high blueprint, compages, landscape compages–it'due south really trying to be a global city–there's all the same a need to come to grips with this pollution and our urban industrial legacy which we have inherited, which is most of the time affecting the people who are most economically disadvantaged," she said.