Dress rehearsal: Chicago Architecture Biennial 2023

A review by the London-based Architectural Review of CAB5: This is a Rehearsal features our collaboration with Samuel Levi Jones and Sam Van Aken. “A few rooms along, artist Samuel Levi Jones and architects and landscape designers LAA Office present a project they have recently embarked on for a garden facing Grant County Courthouse in Marion, Indiana. On 7 August 1930, on the courthouse lawn, a white mob lynched three Black men – J Thomas Shipp, Abraham S Smith and James Cameron – murdering Shipp and Smith. A photograph taken at the lynching was circulated, moving Abel Meeropol to write his poem Strange Fruit, which, in turn, became the lyrics for Billie Holiday’s haunting protest song. How to memorialise such a troubled site? Levi Jones, LAA Office and their collaborator, artist-botanist Sam Van Aken, are proposing a garden with a ‘Tree of Strange Fruit’ as its centrepiece. Hosting more than 40 grafted plant species, the tree is envisaged as a metaphor of resilience and rebirth for Marion’s residents.” Read the full article by Kristina Rapacki here.