The Venice Architecture Biennale of 1991 was a peculiar edition: it was the only biennale – so far – without a theme, title, manifesto or agenda. Since the 1990s, the curatorial concepts in Venice have often been dismissed as meaningless. In 1991, Francesco Dal Co made choices in the run-up to the biennale, but these were not substantive. In this article, the possibility of an architecture exhibition as a ‘fair’ is presented – the exhibition as mimesis, showing what is happening in Western architecture culture without trying to propose an argument or an idea.

Geert Bekaert has written about dozens of European architecture exhibitions in essays and reviews since the 1950s. In this conversation, he speaks about the imperatives behind some of the initiatives he was involved in during the 1960s and 1970s. Bekaert also discusses the shifts in the practice of showing architecture during the 1980s and 1990s: the sudden interest in the architecture of art institutions, the constant crisis of the Venice architecture biennale, and the rise of the monographic exhibition and of the ‘architectural installation’.

Models play a crucial role in the work of OMA. All of Koolhaas’s buildings, however diverse, share one common characteristic: they also exist as models, and something happened with these models: this model was discussed; it was put on display, or it was pulled at or pushed in. It changed and it was taken in hand – and above all, the model was presented to the observer, the spectator or the viewer. Architecture no longer reduces its audience; it does not make it small and humble and swallow it up. It turns it into gods who can step over rocks and mountains like giants. 

Christophe van Gerrewey elaborates a literary critique of the newly built MAS (Museum aan de Stroom) in Antwerp.