LIGA Book vol. 2 “Exposed Architecture”
Curating in the World of Grazing, or the Pleasures and Pitfalls of “Curating”
Barry Bergdoll
In the fifteen years since I first became associated with the Museum of Modern Art, through the exhibition “Mies in Berlin” (2001), the international scene for exhibiting architecture has ballooned in ways no one could then have predicted. Recent Venice architectural biennales have received greater attention that at any moment since the huge debates unleashed by Paolo Portoghesi’s inaugural “The Presence of the Past” in 1980. In addition, university level degree programs in curating archi-tecture, conferences on architectural exhibitions, and special issues of magazines devoted to the topic-like this one-have proliferated.
There is a boom in exhibiting architecture but also in critical reflection on the phenomenon. The recently coined verb in English “to curate” has achieved such ubiquity that “curating” long ago left the walls of the gallery to describe all aspects of consumer culture from fashion and home furnishings (www.curatedby.com) to musical and culinary selections to guest lists, notably for panel discussions. Curating it seems has become the paradigm for everything in our culture of sampling, grazing, styling and branding. And along with it has come the rise of the independent curator, a global citizen with few, if any institutional attachments, often cited in announcements in a larger font that those deployed for the designers exhibited.1
This situation raises questions: notably, how has the proliferation of architectural “curating” benefited architects-most of whom aspire to build —and the general public? Currently I am at work on a book on the history of architectural exhibitions since the mid-eighteenth century, posited on the notion that at every stage of a complex history spanning over four centuries, the culture of exhibiting has entertained a vital feed-back function for the culture of architecture from creating a venue for public debate to exploring wholly new formal issues, to advocating for vital change from better public housing to alternatives to wholesale urban renewal.2 Today, the curator is a globe trotter as never before; as I write many of those whom I chatted with at the opening of the Venice Architecture Biennale in May 2016 are getting ready to leave for the Oslo Architecture Triennial in September 2016, the Lisbon Architecture Triennial In early October 2016 and the Istanbul Design Biennale a few weeks later. Aside from admiring the stamina of those keeping up with this moveable feast, the question of the stakes of a globalized architectural world demand critical reflection.
How car one nourish a relationship between the world of architecture inhabited by everyone alive and the vibrant culture of display which occupies in Some measure a parallel world of fairs and galleries? What- while waiting for a Mikhail Bakhtin of the architectural world- is the productive relationship between the carnival of display and the horizons of design practice? These are questions that can only be evoked here.
In 2007, when I joined MoMA’s Department of Architecture and Design in its 75′ anniversary year (1932), I wanted to rekindle the continually experimental ways with which the museum had engaged with contemporary practice in architecture, landscape, city planning, and design-related engineering. I wanted to update a range of approaches that the museum’s curators had honed since the 1930s, approaches that might be categorized as either reactive or activist. In the reactive mode the curator culls from contemporary or recent production what he or she admires and thinks deserves contextualization and wider publicity. This was, in large measure, the mode of the founding show which coined the category of “The International Style” as it was for the extension after World War Il of an established institution in the art world —the biennale— to architecture. From the outset, the biennale in Venice was on the world stage what the French salon had been nationally, namely a survey of the last two years of artistic production, something first pioneered for architecture in São Paulo in the 1950s. This is the traditional role of the curator as harvester, even if for the architecture curator the question of the display of architectural representations required from the first an active presence and innovative display techniques quite different from the ideal art curator who was preferably meant to recede as a presence in favor of the works on display as the focus.
There are, however, issues so compelling, it seems to me, that the curator should sometimes serve in a more fast-paced productive way-more as a planter than a harvester. That is, we can’t always wait for others to take the lead, but rather should ourselves take the risk of showing things that do not yet exist, things that would not even exist without the curator’s initiative. And this role of producer/activist, easier perhaps for an independent curator in a one-off way to achieve, is all the more resonant when it is pursued in an established institutional setting. In 2008 at MoMA I presented “Home Delivery: off way to achieve, is all the more reso-blished institutional setting. In 2008 at MoMA I presented “Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling” in which both the re-contextual-izing reactive and activist modes were brought together, the latter in a series of four newly commissioned proposals for pre-fabricated housing on the museum’s vacant west end lot and digitally-manufactured sample walls in the exhibition’s introductory gallery indoors.3 One of the four houses, the energy producing Cellophane House by the Philadelphia firm Kieran Timberlake has gone on to win major awards and is now in a next stage of research development.
The exhibition’s aims were manifold. At a time when the idea of a paradigm shift under the rubric “mass customization” was broadly discussed, and in particular among those exploring new horizons of digital manufacturing and parametric design, it seemed an opportune moment to enter the conversation with the intent to bridge isolated professional islands and to invite new possibilities. Research projects were underway in vastly different sectors of architectural culture, sectors which seemed studiously unaware of one another. Confronting some of the most radical work in parametric design with younger firms working with models of factory mass customization, I hoped that a cross-fertilization might be possible. I also thought of breaking out of the traditional style of forecasting exhibitions associated with MOMA-one thinks of the Deconstructivist exhibition curated by Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley in 1988 as perhaps the last great heroic taxonomic show. It is of course difficult to assess the show’s success in stimulating new rapprochements and discussions, even if the number of visitors surpassed all previous records for attendance at a MoMA architecture show. Certainly no new highways have been opened up between the world of, say, Dwell magazine, where so much of the discussion of new horizons of factory-produced buildings is given a popular forum, and the world of academic parametric research which has rarely moved the debate beyond the production of form to the definition and fulfillment of programmatic issues. Amazingly it is a debate that reemerged with Patrick Schumacher’s histrionic reactions this year to Alejandro Aravena’s curating of socially engaged practices from around the world in the Venice biennale.
In MoMA’s 2009-10 workshop/exhibition “Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront” it was not a matter of picking designs from research currently underway. Instead the museum commissioned work, a mode increasingly frequent in the world of art curating too, with all of the possibilities as well as pitfalls of a too-intimate relationship between artist and curator. We issued an invitation for design research to take on, in an interdisciplinary way, urgent problems related to climate change that are global in implication yet local in application and design. With the “Rising Currents” workshop, MoMA served as the incubator rather than the mirror of new ideas, introducing images as catalysts for a debate in which the design professions recapture a place at the table for some of the most urgent issues of the day. The exhibition is then about redrawing the boundaries of discourse as much as it is about a catalogue of designs. The study area was local —and thus dramatically palpable-even as the implications were global. “Rising Currents” inaugurated a series of workshops/exhibitions at MOMA (followed by “Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream” in 2012 and “Uneven Growth: Tactical Urbanisms for Expanding Megacities” organized by Pedro Gadanho in 2014-15) with the ambitions of addressing issues of pressing concern through new design thinking.
But if the commissioning of new work can bring design ideas and awareness of the role of design in pressing issues into public awareness and can expand the boundaries of what architects can think about beyond the limits of market and public sector notions of the architectural, the role of the curator as commissioner also needs to have boundaries.
In recent years the exponential increase of displays of specially created work has begun to open a gulf between the architecture of the gallery and the architecture of the “real world” that runs the risk of creating a short-circuited biennale and museum culture increasingly detached from the real stakes and opportunities for architectural design to engage with the world. When museums and galleries exhibit only material made to order, the museum’s mirror function becomes increasingly self-referential. The expanding meta-discourse on exhibiting architecture must soon engage with precisely this issue.
