Selected Topics in Architecture: Architecture Exhibitions - Everything, Except Architecture Itself
Image 1: Installation view of the exhibition, "Modern Architecture: International Exhibition." February 9, 1932–March 23, 1932. Photographic Archive. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. IN15.1
Image 2: Visitors to Interbau 1957 in front of the so-called Schwedenhaus and Pierre Vago's flats, Berlin. Photo: Horst Siegmann
Image 3: Architecture and Its Image: Four Centuries of Architectural Representation. Installation view, 1989. Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal.
ARC3704H S
Instructor: Mauricio Quirós Pacheco
Meeting Section: L9101
Synchronous
Monday, 12:00PM - 3:00PM
Architecture exhibitions are both a format and a form of representation. They construct content by showing and organizing objects and documents – even events – in a new context. And this new context, according to curator and architect Mirko Zardini, inevitably “contaminates” them with new discourse.
Architecture exhibitions are about constructing narratives through visual and spatial means. They are a genre that can be considered, at least when dealing with the past, much more as story-telling than as history, writes Jean-Louis Cohen.
Exhibitions assume the existence of a public; an audience. And in the case of architecture, and unlike art, this audience is exposed to all sorts of paraphernalia giving evidence to Sylvia Lavin’s brutal claim that “architects produce work that is executed by, commented on, paid for, and used by others, but others who themselves produce no work in architectural terms.”
Architecture exhibitions never exhibit architecture itself.
The course Architecture Exhibitions: Everything, Except Architecture Itself will be developed through a mix of lectures, presentations, readings and discussions looking closely at the history of architecture exhibitions. Students are expected to produce an “archive,” containing documents on past and recent exhibitions, as well as “curate” a visual essay for the final project.