Imagining enhanced 'Futures of the Architectural Exhibition'

Across disciplines, individuals now relinquish the practice of gatekeeping in a louder and bolder tone. While some advocate for development to be hinged upon the welfare of all sentient beings, others abhor and reject the prevailing consumerist mode of consumption across myriad realms. Calls against wastefulness, and in favour of collaborative and communal means of production, maintenance and living have begun to dominate more than a few public symposiums, events and festivals of international repute. As part of the advocacy for an inclusive and richer creative discourse, it is imperative for pedagogical domains and exhibitory spaces, too, to accommodate a revised dialectic—one that is pivoted on examining, understanding and disseminating novel learnings about historically disregarded regions, practices, people and perspectives. It is spaces such as these that are often approached with more curiosity and less restraint, and hence, bear the potential and responsibility of transmitting information and discussions that do not evade the mention of pertinent and distressing issues.

In an attempt to establish a more progressive mode of presentation and discourse within gallery spaces, Park Books recently published Futures of the Architectural Exhibition. The book, edited by Reto Geiser and Michael Kubo, attempts to examine the means and processes undertaken by various curators while putting an architectural exhibition together. It investigates the many ways in which contemporary curators have approached a varied range of questions about the display and scale of installations, the representation of space in specific exhibitions and the curatorial approaches that culminate in expositions across major international museums, small galleries, informal venues, and academic research collaboratives. The book serves as a record of a series of conversations about the envisioned future of architectural exhibitions.

From 2018 to 2021, seven curators were invited to give public lectures and lead student workshops at Rice University, the University of Houston, the Moody Center for the Arts, and the Glassell School of Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The culminating discourses are archived in this book in a condensed format, such that the chapters are presented as a dialogue—between the curator and various discussants—that documents excerpts from the aforementioned discursive events. These seven curators include Mario Ballesteros, Giovanna Borasi, Ann Lui, Ana Miljački, Zoë Ryan, Martino Stierli and Shirley Surya.

In the introductory chapter of the book, Reto Geiser and Michael Kubo write, “In recent years, numerous curators have explored new approaches that challenge traditional understandings of how architecture should be displayed, seeking to reframe the space of the architectural exhibition as a means for staging and discussing matters of both public and disciplinary concern in relation to the built environment. [...] These practitioners have expanded the scope of the architectural exhibition to encompass new formats for public debate, knowledge production, and even action. Such shifts have come as the design disciplines undergo a profound reckoning with architecture’s ongoing complicity in structural forms of racism and exclusion and the ongoing impacts of historical processes of spatial violence on contemporary conditions. In this context, recent exhibitions speak to the charged questions of race, class, gender, labour and identity that have accompanied architecture’s stocktaking with regard to equity and social justice.”

Another concern about architectural exhibitions, specifically, lies in the representation of the subject at hand, within a confined space. While design and art objects can be transposed to different galleries with ease, the representation of architectural subjects relies on photographs, scaled-down models, sketches, films and descriptions. This manner of presentation can often limit a cohesive experience of the spatial dimensions and the tactical features of built spaces. In a similar vein, it can pose the question of necessity—of displaying a showcase dedicated to entities that can, perhaps, be experienced more viscerally when encountered in person.

Both architectural and museological professionals continue to grapple with the central problem of how to represent external sites and objects within the extent of the gallery space, where those sites and objects are displaced in time, location and use from their ‘real’ presence in the outside world. - Reto Geiser and Michael Kubo

The edited dialogues that make up Futures of the Architectural Exhibition offer seven approaches to exhibit architecture in a manner such that it facilitates research and criticism and, in the process, helps produce learnings on the shortcomings of the built environment and the biases perpetrated by the spatial configurations of buildings and cities.

In the first chapter, titled ‘Shaping Positions,’ Zoë Ryan (who is Daniel W. Dietrich, II Director of the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, USA), expresses her hope to designate proportionate space for architectural expositions as compared to art and design showcases. Enunciating the importance of discourses surrounding creative practices, Ryan shares, “My work is centred on exploring the social, political and cultural implications of the arts. Architecture and design are inextricably linked to every aspect of our lives and are powerful tools for asking critical questions that open up new readings of the world.” When asked about the implications of involving individuals from myriad fields in the process of getting involved in architectural discourses and curation, Ryan asserts that such collaborations are necessary as they attest to multifarious voices that have shaped the architectural discipline.

In addition to collaborating with individuals from varied fields, Ryan also ponders upon platforming experimental works and ideas, as well as individuals from underrepresented domains and regions, to trigger alternate discussions. Ryan also mentions the importance of juxtaposing interesting visual dioramas in an exhibition space, to attract attention and curiosity, especially in current times, when attention spans have drastically declined. “My work is centred on exploring the social, political and cultural implications of the arts. Architecture and design are inextricably linked to every aspect of our lives and are powerful tools for asking critical questions that open up new readings of the world,” Ryan shares. An interesting exhibition design can manage to pose various pertinent questions. Ultimately, the curator asserts that exhibitions are meant to serve as conversation starters, and not necessarily provide solutions and answers to the issues raised.

Mario Ballesteros, an independent design and architecture curator and editor, shares, in the second chapter ‘Exposing the Margins,’ his observations and learnings on Mexico. He weighs in on the importance of examining both well-known and lesser-known narratives from history, especially those on exhibitory mediums, to derive an enriched understanding of the past. Straying from the path of solely studying larger stylistic patterns, Ballesteros shares, “What’s interesting about material culture or the study of objects is that it allows a much more complex reading of history. It allows people, moments, or issues that wouldn’t necessarily make it into the history books to be expressed. Kitchen appliances, for example, that would never be in a history book of the 19th or early 20th century, are suddenly a lens for understanding specific histories from that period. We always try to read what’s behind the object, including its social, political, cultural and economic qualities.” In a similar vein, the curator also restrains himself from labelling installations, to avoid preconceived notions and welcome atypical interpretations. Like Ryan, Ballesteros, too, thinks that exhibitions have a life beyond their showcase dates—as platforms for archiving information and interpretations for posterity.

In the third chapter of the book, perspectives by Shirley Surya (Curator, Design and Architecture at M+ in Hong Kong) are compiled under the title ‘Curating as Collection Building.’ Surya expresses her interest as a historian in searching for noncanonical objects and primary archival sources from regions with underrepresented design and architectural histories. However, she also deliberates on the importance of focusing upon both the canonical and the noncanonical, and how an expanded discourse such as this can draw focus, through known entities, towards lesser-known aspects and perspectives. In tandem with M+, the curator also focuses upon the importance of designing exhibitions with a transnational perspective—that does not limit the examination of influences in a creative’s work to their geographical locale but also expands to trace international influences on an artist or architect's work.

In ‘The Exhibition as Research,’ Martino Stierli (Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York) expands on the challenges of establishing a formal format for designing and structuring architectural exhibitions. Stierli further explains the dilemma of deciding upon the length and breadth of a showcase. There is always a need to choose from amongst various drawings, sketches, films and other forms of documentation when explaining an architect or a specific kind of architecture. Deciding upon this aspect always helps drive the narrative of the showcase. “You don’t want oversaturation, because that leads to fatigue,” Stierli asserts.

As part of the chapter, ‘Museum Work and Museum Problems,’ Giovanna Borasi (Director of the Canadian Centre for Architecture [CCA] in Montreal, in Canada) exclaims upon the necessity of making architecture a public concern. “We’re interested in architectural processes distinct from the model of the imperious principal architect, ones that involve the people whose environment is being changed, ones that expand the definition of ‘doing architecture’,” Borasi shares. The curator also expressed the need for collaboration, citing a programme, namely c/o, started by CCA a few years ago. The programme welcomes a curator in a different geographic area to provide their region-specific perspectives upon showcases in a distinct landscape, hence enriching narratives.

Ana Miljački (Associate Professor of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she directs the Critical Broadcasting Lab [CBL]), in the section ‘Tending to Discourse,’ explains work at CBL, “The Critical Broadcasting Lab’s key objectives are to cultivate, seed and multiply awareness about the media economies we inhabit and, even more important, the myriad contemporary and historical entanglements of architecture and politics. By politics I mean a broad constellation of issues that involve the flows of global capital, labour and material, the climate crisis, the way the discipline and individual architects conceptualise the subjects for whom they design, the status of the object of architecture in culture and academia, the value placed on authorship, the mechanisms used to extract value from and with architecture, and so on.”

If we were to conceptualise this work as being about the production of discourse alone as if that were somehow an autonomous realm, then we would absolutely be contributing to the problems of communicative capitalism, where discourse is severed from real political outcomes. I want to think of discourse not in those terms but as something that is productive of outcomes in all kinds of realms in real life. - Ana Miljački

Pondering more upon CBL’s focus on critical discourse, Miljački traces inspiration in George Saunders’s cautionary tale that states that within certain kinds of exchanges, where distortion, simplification and inflation come in, there is an evident diminishing of the quality of public discussion. Miljački also cites Jodi Dean’s perspective on the problems of contemporary discourse, and her focus on ‘communicative capitalism’ concerning social media. Enunciating upon the disconnect brought on by this phenomenon, Miljački shares, “In the condition of communicative capitalism, people who in another version of capitalism would have been actively engaged politically are content solely to contribute to the flow of exchanges and are no longer able to ensure that their discursive participation in communication platforms has anything to do with actual political effect or affect.”

Lastly, Ann Lui, a registered architect and founding principal of Chicago-based Future Firm, in the chapter ‘Curating Collective Space,’ insists on understanding exhibition spaces as places where multiple voices and stakeholders come together to work. “No architectural project of scale, whether a building or an exhibition, is ever produced in isolation,” Lui shares. She acknowledges the tension between valuing disciplinary expertise and expanding the boundaries of the discipline; that is, between depth of knowledge and breadth of experimentation. She insists upon the need for practitioners to expand upon an exhibition’s afterlife by means of research, discourse and dissemination through digital platforms and publishing.

In addition to subscribing to the practice of collaboration, all aforementioned curators also extend the need for undertaking discourses with great care, so as not to distort, digress or miscommunicate harmful and stereotypical notions. At a time when the implications of biased cultural commentaries are evident for all to see, a sensitive approach such as this is only imperative.