ABSTRACT
The proposition that architecture can be exhibited is one that contains within it an inherent paradox: that the subject of such exhibitions is typically not present in the exhibition itself and must be represented by some other ‘intervening medium’.1 As Barry Bergdoll has documented, although architects have been displaying their work in galleries since before the advent of the public museum at the end of the eighteenth century, architectural exhibitions only emerged fully as a phenomenon in the late twentieth century.2 Prior to this later stage of development, which might be marked by the milestone of the first dedicated architecture Biennale in Venice, architectural exhibitions had followed a fairly rigid model. One of the most significant of these early architectural exhibitions, Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock’s Modern Architecture: International Exhibition (1932) at MoMA, established a mode of architectural exhibiting that would come to dominate most major institutions. Models and photographs were ‘sublimated to conventions of exhibiting art’ – photographs were hung like paintings and architectural models sat on plinths like sculptures.3 Bergdoll argues that since this seminal exhibition, rarely did architectural exhibiting break from the ‘salon like presentation’ standards it established (though the example of Mies van der Rohe’s 1929 Barcelona Pavilion, and other avant-garde exhibitions such as Archigram’s 1963 Living City, somewhat disrupts this neat history).4 This mode of exhibiting produced exhibitions that recorded and documented work, viewing the architect through the ‘master’ lens, with a formal and academic curatorial strategy often accompanied by a lengthy catalogue.
