W 9:30 – 12:00 p.m.
ANH 230
Architectural exhibitions have historically been important public sites of testing, disseminating, and consensus-building around fundamental questions in architecture. They have shaped broader definitions and understandings of architecture and its relation to the social, political, and economic questions of the contemporary world. The specific formats and challenges of exhibiting architecture, both built and speculative, have often been used as key devices for identifying and communicating urgent issues to a broader public—from cultural questions of equity, social justice, labor, race, class, and lifestyle to spatial issues of density, living standards, infrastructure, climate, and sustainability.
A dilemma of curating and designing architecture exhibitions is that built work as such is necessarily impossible to include in collections and can be manifested in the gallery only via other forms of media, such as drawings, models, photographs, renderings, building materials, office documents, films, or publications. These challenges have prompted curatorial design responses to long-standing questions: How can the specificities of architectural space be experienced or made legible in the gallery setting? What strategies for representing architecture are appropriate for a broad public versus a discipline-specific audience? Is there a language of display that is specific to architectural exhibitions? How can exhibitions actively engage visitors with architectural ideas and concerns, and how can these be translated into cohesive sequences in space and time?
On Display introduces students to architectural criticism through oral histories and theoretical writings on spoken history and interviewing methodologies. We will study and practice the skills and techniques required to conceptualize, conduct, edit, and disseminate oral histories. Deviating from the seemingly more neutral character of oral history, we will engage the interview format as an active form of architectural criticism.
Equipped with the best practices of interviewing—introduced via reading, discussion, and by experienced guests—and after thorough background research, we will collectively conduct interviews with globally experienced exhibition designers and discuss the specific challenges of exhibiting architecture. As a class, we will engage in extended critical discussion of their individual approaches to the representation of space through the techniques and formats of the architectural exhibition. Each conversation will be transcribed and edited into a publishable record, resulting in a compendium of case studies that expand not only the field of architecture but also the space of the gallery into a platform of architectural criticism in its own right.