LIGA Book vol. 2 “Exposed Architecture”
Shared Impetus: Architecture and Curating
Carlos Mínguez Carrasco
I’ve always been impressed by the drive-the ambition, the generosity-of people who decide to open a cultural space for architecture.
That initial moment when the agreement is signed, when they say yes (though they are also saying no, since such moments are always an exorcism, a reaction to a way of understanding architecture they disagree with), has something of emancipation, of independence, of an alternative about it.
I also imagine a second moment. It is not as glamorous, but it is more meaningful. I imagine the same space five years later, ten years later, thirty years later. The site may have changed little or not at all, but I imagine a faithful community, an increasingly robust institution and archive, an accumulated intelligence.
The thread that links these two moments is filled with countless small decisions about how to present and discuss architecture. To choose, to edit, to format, to place, to present, to explain, to criticize, to reveal, to rethink, to select, to plan, to publish, to discover, to distinguish, to outline, to name, to show, all those moments— even if we call them curating-are also a form of designing.
Exercises in curating have multiplied in recent years, whether in relation to mounting exhibitions, editing publications, or organizing events. Curating architecture is increasingly present in contemporary spaces of cultural production, including museums, galleries, research institutes, universities, biennials, triennials, and have even been incorporated into architecture study programs and the work of studios. It is more and more common to find architects working as curators, regardless of their professional or educational background. While in the past architecture exhibitions provided spaces for renewing reflection, criticism and experimentation in the discipline, this is something that has rapidly consolidated and expanded.
Curatorial work extends the traditional set of ways of exercising the architect’s profession. Due to the very nature of architectural construction, the sphere of curating architecture shows confronts the impossibility of exhibiting buildings at scale, and in their physical, social and legal context. As a result, curators have had to resort to two basic strategies: displacement and representation. It is this very impossibility of bringing the building into the gallery that creates a space of opportunity for contemporary curatorial practice in architecture: revealing the complexities of the discipline, analyzing the successes and failures of our built environment.
Exhibition formats allow us to analyze and communicate the influence of architecture on the world we live in—and vice versa. It is not only a question of learning about how the discipline works, but the role it plays in current cultural, political and social processes. This locates architecture exhibitions in a space that is less about selection —the pointing finger-than about designing an open, subjective and narrative platform for discussion, where documents, objects and installations dialogue with each other in order to articulate an idea. Closer to theater than to dissertation, more like a rehearsal than a review, mounting an architecture exhibition stands at the junction of presenting slides on architecture research and representation, and the visual construction of a critical argument and the design of performative actions that includes objects, spaces, ideas and bodies. The space where it is shown, the institutional connotations, its public character and the exhibition design are just as important as the elements displayed.
I understand my work as curator as part of my practice as an architect.
Over the past ten years I have developed exhibition projects on the basis of different institutional aspects and frameworks. Initially, this was with PKMN, a team of architects founded in Madrid in 2006, where we began to understand exhibitions and interventions in public spaces as a way of developing certain architectural ideas using formats that went beyond the construction of a building. Later, it was through my experience as curator at a not-for-profit institution like Storefront for Art and Architecture, and as an independent curator at the Oslo Architecture Triennale in 2016, as part of a team of architects we called After Belonging Agency.
Storefront
My experience as curator at the New York institution Storefront for Art and Architecture enabled me to gain insight into the many different ways of exhibiting architecture. Founded in 1982 by Kyong Park and RL Seltman, Storefront for Art and Architecture is one of the few independent institutions that for over thirty years has consistently focused on exhibiting architecture, and exploring its relationship with other disci-plines. Studying the work of its founders and subsequent directors in its archives— including Shirin Neshat, Sarah Herda and Joseph Grima-it is possible to analyze the different roles played by the director, who usually also functions as curator, together with the roles of the exhibition space and how architecture (and art) has been understood and presented.
These range from the use of the gallery as a base for commissioning site-specific installations (Unprojected Habit, 1992); to the presentation of an argument in the form of an exhibition (Queer Space, 1994); the exhibition of projects and authors barely known in New York (Petra Blisse in Movements: Introduction to a Working Process, 2000), the affirmation of the architect’s role in a debate on public space in the city (Adam’s House in Paradise, 1984), or an exhibition on the political connotations of architecture (White House Redux, My direct experience as a curator at Storefront, together with its current director Eva Franch i Gilabert, has developed across several different lines of research, particularly to do with rethinking the architect’s role in taking decisions on building the city (Letters to the Mayor, 2014-2016); architectural practice in a globalized world (OfficeUS, 2014, World Wide Storefront, 2014) and the forms of cultural construction in a neoliberal context (No Shame: Storefront for Sale, 2013).
In all these projects the intention is not so much to exhibit architecture as to exhibit for architecture. By presenting ideas for the advancement of the discipline, these curatorial projects avoid focusing on the selection of the best studios or buildings and instead seek to produce a platform for action, where the function of the architect and of architecture is tried out in different ways, in response to pressing contemporary controversies.
For years, Storefront has established itself not only as an exhibition space, but as an ever-evolving meeting place for the architecture com-munity, with a high-density programming dynamic. The program comprises six exhibitions per year, weekly events, several annual competitions, book publishing and long-term initiatives. But what makes Storefront a unique space is its institutional backing for critical and experimental development of design for the city, for the territory and for public life, in relation to the most pressing problems in contemporary society. It is a space that is continually calling into question the conventional wisdom on which architectural culture is built.
It is always worth recalling the founder of Storefront, Kyong Park, who cast doubt on everything when he wrote of the gallery’s façade, designed by Steven Holl and Vito Acconci: “No Wall, No Barrier, No Inside, No Outside, No Space, No Building, No Place, No Institution, No Art, No Architecture, No Acconci, No Holl, No StoreFront. (No Money)”.
Belonging
As an independent curator I had the opportunity to prepare the Oslo Architecture Triennale in 2016, as part of a team of curators comprising Lluís Alexandre Casanovas Blanco, Ignacio G. Galán, Alejandra Navarrete Llopis and Marina Otero Verzier. This project, called After Belonging: A Triennale In Residence, On Residence and The Ways We Stay In Transit reflects on the architectural response to the current transformation in belonging, both in the spaces we inhabit and in the objects that surround us. The curatorial project analyzes the agency of architecture in contemporary processes of social transformation, which range from migration to tourism to the flow of money. After Belonging looks at how the idea of “being at home” has been redefined in recent years, transforming the spaces we inhabit at their different scales of action, from the domestic sphere to national borders.
For a triennial that turned its gaze to the processes of building cross-border processes of belonging, mirrors the size of a coin were unable to cross the border—leaving Lebanon for Norway —because they had the word “revolution” written on them (“Monuments of the Everydav” by Khaled Malas). By contrast, following a bureaucratic process, a section of Mexican soil was removed and crossed the ocean to be exhibited in Oslo as a reflection on the architecture of remittances (“Longing fo Belonging,” Frida Escobedo and Guillermo Ruiz de Teresa). Another material that had no problem crossing borders was soya, in a process that takes in the deforestation of the Amazon and the creation of large-scale farms. It is exported from Brazil to dozens of countries to be made into fish food, in this case, for Norwegian salmon. (“In the Frontiers of Climate Change,” Paulo Tavares). As the exhibition text declared, not all things and not all people move around in the same way.
We treated our role as lead curators of the Triennale as an opportunity to develop a research project on contemporary processes of construction of belonging, and their relationship with architecture. As part of the first program actions, we launched an international competition for the presentation of intervention strategies in ten sites located around the world that functioned as case studies for the project. The selection of these case studies was key to communicating the different narratives of the curatorial project through specific examples. The five curators worked as a team, taking all the decisions jointly, from writing the texts to designing the exhibitions, as well as selecting the work and editing texts for publication.
One of the most important aspects of our work on the Triennale was redefining the formats we worked in. We called on over 100 participants to create the different platforms we curated: the exhibition On Residence, on the role of architecture in the processes of transformation of belonging; the exhibition In Residence, on how architecture can have an impact in ten case studies; a publication bringing together essays reflecting on the past and present of these processes; a conference for architects, sociologists and politicians to discuss the future of architectural practice in relation to questions of identity, migration and tourism; an academy that assembled over 120 students from architecture schools around the world to take a workshop on belonging and architecture; and, finally, an embassy that established a platform of discussion to hear the voices of minority communities in relation to ideals concerning “stateless democracy.” The experience of working as curators at a triennial has allowed us to take risks in developing concepts and formats that other types of institutional platforms would not have allowed. We took advantage of the Triennale space not to celebrate the most successful projects of recent years, but as a platform for research and critical reflection on concepts that were not being discussed by the discipline of architecture.
The thread of the argument, if we can call it that, which brings together my different experiences as an architect and curator is a public vocation for discussing and disseminating the impact of architecture on the construction of our societies, beyond the field of the discipline.
The greatest challenge for curatorial practice in architecture today is the ability to define a field of specialization beyond simple communication of the discipline. A space for research that specializes in the construction of critical thought through the commission, intervention, and reporting of other works as construction material.
