Since the 1970s, architecture has increasingly been welcomed by institutes and museums as an object of collection and exhibition. In this text, Eszter Steierhoffer discusses the problems and opportunities that arise from this process. As a survey of the different typologies of architecture exhibitions shows, these institutional changes are closely tied to the recent expansions and redefinitions of architecture’s disciplinary boundaries.

Besides strongly advocating postmodern architecture, the Strada Novissima presented at the 1980 Venice Architecture Biennale put forward an innovative spatial and representational curatorial device. Proposing both ‘the street as an exhibition’ and ‘the exhibition as a street’, it focused on the representational power of architecture. This article shows how the exhibition format of the street of façades was more than a mere formal invention, but became a critical and political tool in the hand of the exhibition curator.

In 1987, Heinrich Klotz prompted a dozen architects to conceptualise their ideal museum for a sub-exhibition ‘Das Ideale Museum’ at documenta 8. A few contributions aside, the entries embodied the curator’s contention: museum architecture should create a threshold and then ‘disappear’. This essay discusses the participants’ predilections as a de- sired condition for exhibiting architecture. By ‘eliminating’ the architecture inside, the architect, reborn as an artist, can freely indulge in myth creation, self-reflection, or ideological focusing.

Despite its small size, the Deconstructivist Architecture exhibition of 1988, organised by Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley at the MoMA in New York, received widespread media attention and sparked numerous polemics. In her contribution, Tina DiCarlo finds a distinct curatorial practice in Johnson’s ‘exhibitionist’ relation to the media: one that obligates architecture to constantly justify itself as an ethical practice.

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.

Despite its faint historical afterimage and its mystifying rhetoric about the individual architect as seismograph, the Venice architecture biennale of 1996 is worth reconsidering. This article argues that the exhibition’s premise that architecture culture is marked by a growing individualisation remains relevant. It evaluates the no less problematic translation of this sharp observation into concrete decisions concerning the selection and presentation of ‘individual positions’ in this biennale.

Joseph Grima talks about his work as a director at Storefront Gallery and as a curator of the Istanbul Design Biennial. Today, he proposes, the architecture exhibition might best be thought of as a kind of laboratory: a place where conventions are challenged and newly developed ideas are tested.

In its contribution, Belgian collective Rotor elucidates how it works in a seemingly conventional way on architecture exhibition projects. Through the analysis of two recent projects – ‘Usus/Usure’ in the Belgian pavilion at the Venice biennale 2010 and ‘OMA / Progress’ at the Barbican gallery in 2012 – Rotor focuses on the museological character of its exhibitions. What Rotor chooses to exhibit in both exhibitions are existing objects that without being exposed would be condemned to the archives or to oblivion.

In a discussion of their recent work, partners of the New-York based practice Common Room comment on their curatorial projects, exhibition designs and publications. Architecture, in their view, is a spatial practice that continually needs to redefine itself in relation to other disciplines and media.

For the practice of architecture, the format of the exhibition provides a rare opportunity. Besides functional and statutory requirements, with minimal means and an audience to play with, the exhibition provides an interesting site where ideas can be tested one on one. Social ideas especially require testing, as their development is depended on live experiments. The essay focuses on the exhibition ‘The Relational in Architecture’ held by the Concrete Geometries Research Cluster at the Architectural Association in 2012; an event that served a dual purpose: as a space of display, contemplating the relationship between architectural form and social behaviour; and as an actual research space, testing directly how spatial geometry can assist in the production of intersubjective encounters. 

For EventArchitectuur – Herman Verkerk and Paul Kuipers – exhibition design is a medium for practicing a form of temporary architecture in which the ideas of architecture parlante (speaking architecture) serve as a guiding principle. In this interview, referencing several recently completed exhibitions, Verkerk and Kuipers discuss the use of archetypal landscape or architecture typologies, alienating elements, or 1:1 scale models. This interview attests to the explicitly architectural, almost artisanal approach EventArchitectuur uses to create a meaningful context for an exhibition visitor.

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’.

In her contribution Anne Dessing conjures five architecture exhibitions organised in the Low Countries in the past three years. By displaying two images side by side for each exhibition – a fragment and an overhead view – she shows how the exhibition relates to the building and how these temporary projects touch on spatial, architectural experiences.