Futures of the Architectural Exhibition

Architectural exhibitions have always been important public sites of testing, dissemination, and consensus-building around fundamental questions in the built environment. Just as the master narratives of architectural Modernism in the US are hard to imagine without the International Style show at New York’s MoMA in 1932, such displays have been crucial to shaping broader definitions and understandings of architecture and its relation to 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. These have included cultural questions of equality and social justice, labour, race, class, and lifestyle in relation to spatial issues of density, living standards, infrastructure, climate, and sustainability.

Futures of the Architectural Exhibition records a critical discussion of individual approaches to the representation of space in a museum through a series of conversations. Five eminent international curators speculate on the specific challenges and potentials of exhibiting architecture.