Exhibiting Architecture: A Paradox?
J. Irwin Miller Symposium
October 3-5 2013, Paul Rudolph Hall, Hastings Hall
The ambition to exhibit architecture always entails a paradox: how to exhibit something so large and complex as a building or a city or how to represent something as elusive as an architectural experience that unfolds in space and time?
While the story of major museums and their role in shaping the history of modern architecture has been largely told, this symposium will bring together historians, curators and practicing architects to explore how architecture has pushed exhibition as a medium in its own right and how exhibitions have shaped the discipline of architecture by posing questions that are historical, theoretical and critical. Rather than focusing on major historical surveys where the exhibit is treated as a descriptive event, this symposium will focus on exhibitions where architecture is used as the medium, at times becoming architectural reality in its own right. The symposium will also explore the condition wherein architecture itself has come to mimic exhibition and display strategies, making buildings into producers of scenographic sequences and atmospheric affects or, in some cases, into objects on display. Various exhibition techniques and formats that have emerged through experimental architectural exhibitions as well as fertile institutional settings and curatorial practices that have explored alternative modes of public engagement will be explored.
Schedule:
Thursday, October 3
18:00 Atmospherical Cube
Philippe Rahm
Friday, October 4
11:00 Contemporary Exhibition in Dialogue
Moderator: David Andrew Tasman
Participants: Brennan Buck, Carson Chan, Arianne Lourie-Harrison, Nina Rappaport, Joel Sanders
14:00 Exhibiting Space
Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen (Yale),
14:15 - 16:00 Exhibition as a Medium
Mari Lending (Oslo School of Architecture and Design), Monuments in Flux: Exhibiting Copies and Fragments
Wallis Miller (University of Kentucky), Exhibitions, Objects and the Emergence of Modernism in Germany
Romy Golan (Graduate Center, City College New York), Campo Urbano, Como, 1969
Moderator: Arianne Lourie-Harrison (Yale)
16:15 - 18:00 Immersive Environments
Paula Burleigh (Graduate Center, City College of New York), Exhibition against Architecture: Trigon ‘67
Craig Buckley (Yale), Structures Gonflables, April 1968
Mark Wasiuta (Columbia), E.A.T. in Osaka, 1970: Transducing Technology
Moderator: J.D. Connor (Yale)
18:30 Keynote Speech
Out of Site – In Plain View: The Symbiosis Between Exhibiting and Projecting the Modern
Barry Bergdoll (Columbia)
Saturday, October 5
9:00 - 10:45 Public Encounters
Simon Sadler: (UC Davis), London’s vanguard architectural exhibitions, 1953-1973
Federica Vannucchi [Princeton], ‘The great number’ at the 1968 XIV Milan Triennale, 1968
Andres Kurg (Estonian Academy of Arts, Tallinn), Towards Paper Architecture: Tallinn and Moscow
Moderator: Joel Sanders (Yale)
10:45 - 12:45 Curatorial Acts
Helena Mattson (Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm),The Swedish Exhibition Scene, 1966-1977
Liane Lefaivre (University of Applied Arts, Vienna), Hans Hollein as a Curator
Lea-Catherine Szacka (Centre Pompidou, Paris), Venice Biennale, 1968 to 1980: Acts of Critical Faith
Irene Sunwoo (Bard College), Exhibiting Architecture at the AA
Moderator: Kevin Repp (Yale)
14:15 - 15:30 Exhibitions Matter
Eva Franch (Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York)
Pedro Gadanho (Museum of Modern Art)
Andrea Phillips (Goldsmiths, University of London)
Henry Urbach (The Philip Johnson Glass House)
Moderated: Carson Chan
15:30 Concluding Remarks
Mirko Zardini (Canadian Centre for Architecture)