Architecture and Display
Putting architecture on display is one of the most widely enacted and fundamental aspects of critical contemporary architecture, as evidenced by the recent wave of pavilions, installations, exhibitions, and biennales. As a practice, display makes public (and sometimes evident) architecture itself, including its meanings and definitions, but it also produces other architectures: the cabinet of curiosities, the urban procession, the house museum, the period room, the white modernist cube, the full-scale mock-up, the computational media room, the site-specific installation, the temporary pavilion, and the digital interface. As such, when architecture is put on display, it also produces new architectures and is thus a mode of production.
Putting architecture on display is one of the most widely enacted and fundamental aspects of critical contemporary architecture, as evidenced by the recent wave of pavilions, installations, exhibitions, and biennales. As a practice, display makes public (and sometimes evident) architecture itself, including its meanings and definitions, but it also produces other architectures: the cabinet of curiosities, the urban procession, the house museum, the period room, the white modernist cube, the full-scale mock-up, the computational media room, the site-specific installation, the temporary pavilion, and the digital interface. As such, when architecture is put on display, it also produces new architectures and is thus a mode of production.
Kathi Hofer's Untitled Cluster 08 (Garden), 2022, reproduced and rearranged exhibition copies. Photo by Roadwork Studio, courtesy The MAK Center for Art and Architecture.