The Architectural Exhibition Review

The Architectural Exhibition Review We go, so you don't have to.

I travel to Berlin to see an exhibition catalog. It lives in the Universität der Künste library’s media archive, for in-...
24/08/2026

I travel to Berlin to see an exhibition catalog. It lives in the Universität der Künste library’s media archive, for in-person viewing only. I am assigned a seat. Above me, an exposed ceiling installation. In front of me, the small book I have wanted to open since I first came across the exhibition poster by Lotte Laserstein during my research about women in architecture. Apart from this catalog, the poster, a newspaper review and a newspaper advertisement nothing else of the exhibition remains. No photographs. These few documents are the closest thing to prove that it happened at all.
“Die gestaltende Frau” (The Creative Woman) ran for eighteen days in October and November 1930, organized by the Deutscher Staatsbürgerinnen Verband. It was not a modest show. Architecture, interior design, garden design, photography, art and technology; the exhibition insisted on the full scope of women’s creative work. A lecture series ran alongside, opening with the question: “Do we still need women’s associations?” The fact that this question was asked then, and still is today, tells you everything.
To stand on that first floor of the Wertheim department store on Leipziger Strasse in Berlin, among those women, to feel the energy of those eighteen days. I wish I had been there. And I am glad I wasn’t, because of what came shortly after. This contradiction is part of what sitting with this catalog feels like. It would turn out to be one of the last occasions such a space was possible for a very long time. Among the architects listed are Marie Frommer, Hanna Löv, Elisabeth von Knobelsdorff, Emilie Winkelmann; women who built, documented, and claimed space before 1930. I reached the end of a master’s degree in architecture in twenty-first century Germany before encountering any of them, and only because I went looking myself. For eighteen days in late October 1930, they were simply in a room together. Seen, heard and represented. I keep wondering how they must have felt. Empowered, angry, proud, taken serious? They are now. Next step: rewrite architecture history books. All of them, so that collective memory can catch up.

iss.

Good exhibitions transport viewers to another time and setting. This one went further: it transported me to curator Farz...
05/08/2026

Good exhibitions transport viewers to another time and setting. This one went further: it transported me to curator Farzin Lotfi-Jam’s own encounter with the archive. Visiting the “Interactive Entertainment Architecture” exhibition at the Canadian Centre for Architecture’s Octagonal Gallery, I found myself immersed in the electric, eclectic atmosphere of the Culture Lab—a multi-year symposium series led by University of Toronto’s Brian Boigon, which unfolded in the back room of a rock club in the 1990s Toronto. More than that, however, I found myself witnessing the curator’s research-creative practice.

I saw the exhibition as a curatorial proposition of how to exhibit the archive itself—and specifically, the multimedia archive. Digital archives resist the stable, self-contained objecthood that museum collections have traditionally privileged. Attuned to this archival condition of interconnected and distributed materiality, Lotfi-Jam did not cherry-pick and glamorize individual artifacts or technologies as architectural exhibitions of the “digital” have often done. Instead, the curator exposed the mixed media ecosystem—photocopies, microfilm photos, computer simulations, magazine spreads, a video game, a television animation series—that together fed Boigon’s architectural theory and practice.

The curator’s conversation with the archival materials—and resistance to present singular artifacts—is most apparent in the centerpiece of the exhibition: a thirty-six monitor installation lined across four walls of the gallery, effectively surrounding the visitor who enters the octagonal space. Instead of isolating a few clips from the twenty hours footage, Lotfi-Jam programmed a custom playback system—what he calls the “Culture Lab Machine”—which deconstructs and remixes the audiovisual “architecture” of the symposia. In this remix, the content of the recorded talks becomes equally important to the materiality of the recordings and processing of the archived media. Thus, the creator, the curator, older media, and newer technologies all participate in meaning-making through a performative dialogue.

ep.

The post office in Rue Rodier is vacant. In the center of Paris, a leftover building for no obvious reason. Once you ent...
24/07/2026

The post office in Rue Rodier is vacant. In the center of Paris, a leftover building for no obvious reason. Once you enter, a restless film runs in the background. Packages being loaded, sorted, moved away. Is this what was once happening here? And why is there an exhibition here now?

“STOCK - architectures de survie et de transmission” at the Pavillon de l’Arsenal chooses this blank space not as a backdrop but as an argument. Before entering the exhibition, three maps by Atelier parisien d'urbanisme line the way: logistics infrastructure across Paris, mapped and surveyed. The place you are in is one of many. Built to move goods but now standing still.

What follows is a clearly marked route through 18 different typologies. The exhibition makes no attempt to fill the space. Each typology is shown through a model, drawings and photographs on warehouse shelving, text panels are on old parcel trolleys. Everything is temporary, reversible. Humans store everything—harvest, knowledge, data and memories—and have always created architecture with its own identity for it. A rice granary on stilts in Java: the elevated floor keeps moisture out, the shadow underneath becomes a meeting place. The visible fullness or emptiness of the reserves regulates what the community consumes. A data center in La Courneuve on the other hand covers 40,000 square meters. No shadow. No byproduct except heat and electricity consumption. The exhibition traces not just the growth of storage architecture, but how it has become limited. What once produced community as a side effect now produces only a singular function.

The post office building will soon be repurposed, its vacancy resolved by design. But the question the exhibition raises is not about this building. It is about the hundreds of others like it whose functions have quietly disappeared. The exhibition argues that storage architecture can find new purposes. And yet the building itself, standing empty in the center of Paris, shows how far that logic still has to travel. What we have not yet figured out is what to do when a building’s original use disappears but the architecture remains.

ao.

Anyone who has played Carcassonne or pictured Notre-Dame with its spire knows Viollet-le-Duc’s Middle Ages, mostly witho...
24/06/2026

Anyone who has played Carcassonne or pictured Notre-Dame with its spire knows Viollet-le-Duc’s Middle Ages, mostly without knowing his name.
“Drawing Worlds,” curated by Barry Bergdoll and Martin Bressani, gathers nearly one hundred sheets from the Médiathèque du patrimoine in Paris across the four floors of Bard Graduate Center’s townhouse, each floor in its own saturated color. The display logic is the show’s quiet strength: framed drawings on the walls, the publications they became in vitrines below, so that every sheet reads twice, as working document and as circulating print. The attachements that recorded the restoration of Notre-Dame hang beside the watercolor chart that decodes their colors. A label concedes that the chimeras, “entirely inventions,” now pass for medieval.
The introduction promises “deep structures of geology, climate, and race.” Race arrives on the third floor, where the labels are unsparing: Le Duc’s friendship with Gobineau, the A***n chalet, the 1864 monument for colonial Algiers annotated with “the art production belonging to our race.” Few monographic shows would hang any of this; the framing, however, presents it as context for his “late scholarship.” Race becomes a chapter that opens around 1860 and closes within a room.
The fourth floor, “The Atelier,” asks how his restorations continue to shape our contemporary conception of the medieval. Only silhouettes travel upstairs: the conical slate roofs kept in the Carcassonne board game’s box art, the Lego spire, the copper rooster regilded in 2023. The fantasies of nation and race that produced those silhouettes stay downstairs; ETH Zurich’s reconstruction of La Vedette, his Lausanne house, alone admits the racial theory into its painted panorama.
The Lego instructions end by turning Saint Thomas, modeled on Viollet-le-Duc’s likeness, to face the spire, the architect admiring his own work. The show studies him with far more honesty, and still leaves him looking at the building rather than at us.

ga.

Humans’ relationship with nature has turned more complicated and ambivalent throughout history. Art, seen as a way to re...
15/06/2026

Humans’ relationship with nature has turned more complicated and ambivalent throughout history. Art, seen as a way to relate to a landscape, is a practice that has accompanied us from the beginning of our civilization to question this relationship. Increasingly, artists have attempted to capture nature in images to bring pieces of the green wilderness into the domestic domain. The exhibition “Solastalgia” presented by the Museum Giersch at Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt, exposes the artificial nature of such a practice by showcasing paintings that represent natural landscapes of the Rhein Main area.

After passing through a wooden door, a red carpet leads the way to a different dimension. Purple lights create an atmosphere that welcomes visitors to a dreamlike world. Live specimens of young trees occupy the space like a surrealistic path through a forest. Behind the trees canvases can be seen through the leaves, canvases that were empty at the point of their creation when the artist’s eye looked directly at a natural landscape. Moving on the red surface, visitors stand among natural actors to discover images of landscapes and experience an inversion of the point of view of the artist and the spectator.

Leaves and branches force the eye to look through instead of simply looking at them. The act of discovering each painting is done by wandering around the trees and looking through “nature” for the image of a landscape that once was. However, is any of it actually natural? We look at nature under chandeliers and lanterns, purple lights bouncing off walls and trees alike, making everything part of this human attempt to bring nature closer to us. The artificial experience becomes evidence of a human longing for what is not there, for what, perhaps, has been lost, for a disappearing landscape of the Main.

ca.

A new facade decorates the German pavilion at Giardini della Biennale in Venice. Three million marble tiles create a gig...
26/05/2026

A new facade decorates the German pavilion at Giardini della Biennale in Venice. Three million marble tiles create a gigantic trompe-l'œil of the Gehrenstraße block of flats, a prefab housing estate in the former GDR, in Berlin-Lichtenberg, where Vietnamese contract workers and their families were accommodated in the 1990s. Once a temporary home of the artist Sung Tieu, nowadays an abandoned ruin. Sung Tieu and Henrike Naumann, tragically deceased, represent the German pavilion at the 61st Biennale di Venezia, with an exhibition entitled the “Ruin.”

The point of departure for both artists are architecture and design objects as placeholders for “Gemütlichkeit” (coziness). Home here points to the former GDR and to the post-unification Germany of the 1990s but appears strangely unhomely. Curtains are pierced with metal rings, chairs are divided in half; the interior dioramas of living rooms and Bauernstuben (peasant parlors) are flattened, the walls are painted in the green color of Soviet military barracks. Naumann’s “hieroglyphs,” or possibly a system of objects in the sense of Baudrillard, signify not only nostalgic reminders of the GDR community (belts and ties with GDR symbols, depictions of pioneers, etc.) and of GDR aesthetics (reworked mural “The Mechanization of Agriculture” from 1950s). They refer to an “inner front” of the post-1989 East German experience of “Second-Hand-Re-Education” (Naumann) lead by West Germans, paired with societal uncertainties and the breakdown of economic and societal infrastructures and values. What remains is the feeling of being left behind.

The German art pavilion as well as other artistic pavilions at La Biennale di Venezia often interprets architecture by artistic means that push the boundaries and critical reception of architecture. This was the case of “Relocating Structure” by Maria Eichhorn in 2022, who excavated the remnants of the original Bavarian Giardini pavilion from 1909 and revealed the Nazi’s transformation. “Ruin,” through an artistic gesture, reveals in turn the symbolical and physical ruins of the German reunification.

hhd.

At the end of the 1950s architect Vjenceslav Richter built a two-story home in the northern hills above the city of Zagr...
12/05/2026

At the end of the 1950s architect Vjenceslav Richter built a two-story home in the northern hills above the city of Zagreb, Croatia. Its wooden walls stemmed from a bungalow construction kit Richter had purchased in Bosnia. He reconfigured the pieces and raised them above a concrete ground floor that would become his office, with subsequent additions stepping up and down the sloping terrain. The site originally included a pine tree that was kept as a part of the home with tiles and ceiling accommodating its irregular shape. Today the more than 60-year old resident remains though it is currently threatened by an upcoming remodel.

Trees were also denizens in Richter’s utopian, all-encompassing reorganization of society, Sinturbanism. Large-scale ziggurats would create their own indoor landscapes and cater to all daily necessities. Their position in the open countryside was meant to assure everyone’s proximity to the great outdoors—a city in one building. This time, trees would have to relocate inside the mound and become part of its permanent domesticated nature.

In a series of annual shows at the Richter house called SintArt Nika Radić recently took such domesticated trees back to the streets by visualizing how an increase in inner-city forests would reorganize Zagreb. In “1/3” she proposed a way of challenging the city’s traditional layout by converting a third of all roads to be rewilded as wooded areas. Her show takes Richter’s resident tree as a starting point. The installation opens the door to even more perennials that populate the former office as hanging curtains of full-scale trunks. Maps of the city bring in the woods not just to reimagine life on such a domestic scale but to allow for a vision in which the forest overtakes the man-made environment one tree at a time; a vision that subtly alters Richter’s view from up on top of the hill, high above the city.

tf.

“Abundance not Capital. Anupama Kundoo” at Az W exemplifies a major dilemma of feminist architecture theory and curatori...
28/04/2026

“Abundance not Capital. Anupama Kundoo” at Az W exemplifies a major dilemma of feminist architecture theory and curatorial practice: How to acknowledge contributions without falling into a starchitecture, artistic-genius master narrative?

Anupama Kundoo is an award-winning architect and professor of architecture and design methods at TU Berlin. For the show, her work, though mostly located in Auroville and Pondicherry, India, is taken as a foil for a wider critique of capitalism, extractivism and established methods of architecture history writing. The curators suggest words such as “soothing architecture,” “regeneration,” “abundance,” “generosity,” “maintenance,” “place-based modernism,” and “care” to challenge established and rather generic categories of “modern architecture,” “functional,” “standardized,” “iconic,” and “global.” The former terms characterize Kundoo’s approach, while the latter are “hidden abodes of capital.”

I don’t think it is a sin to curate a retrospective monograph of a woman architect. The Az W focuses on Kundoo’s material and technological innovations. She is without doubt an extremely inventive architect, combining low-key methods with scientific analysis, awareness raising and pedagogy. Her material and color experiments with ferrocement, construction innovation with terracotta pots and cones, and work with irregular achakal bricks were exhibited 1:1 as Wall House (2000), Full Fill Homes (2015) and Easy WC at the Venice architecture biennale in 2012 and 2016. The Az W exhibition displays many 1:1 samples and building elements with the Hut in Petite Ferme (1990) as the central intervention.

But there are ways to bypass the exhibition’s master narrative such as focusing on her personal design approach or teaching experiments. Though a little schematic, the introductory exhibition chapter texts better frame the Az W catalogue. Another option in order to engage Austrian visitors might have been to mirror Kundoo’s work with Eda Schaur’s, a pioneering researcher of bamboo constructions and self-help manuals in India and Austria’s first woman architecture professor, at TU Graz, to highlight the long-lasting impact of women in architecture.

hhd.

As a teenager growing up in rural Lower Saxony, Germany, I had the opportunity to perform with the percussion ensemble o...
22/04/2026

As a teenager growing up in rural Lower Saxony, Germany, I had the opportunity to perform with the percussion ensemble of the local music school at the “Expo 2000” world’s fair in Hanover. I still have a vague memory of the exciting atmosphere, the sprawling grounds, and the international vibe of the event, which was shaped in no small part by the architecture of the pavilions. On the one hand, some of these structures looked extremely modern and technologically advanced; on the other hand, there was something doll-like about them and—taken as a whole—something deeply folkloric, much like a circus or a fairground.

What I definitely still remember is the curved Japanese pavilion made entirely of paper, and, of course, the spectacular Dutch pavilion by MVRDV: a tower-like, layered landscape symbolizing the specific characteristics of the country, with—at the time—avant-garde wind turbines on the roof and an endless line of visitors stretching out in front of the entrance.

Looking back, “Expo 2000” was a high point of enthusiasm in the post-Cold War era. It was the time of “globalization” and “global village” (almost none of my bandmates had a cell phone). In architecture, following the era of classical CAD, the hype surrounding the “Blob” took hold. The myth of “digital architecture” was in its formative years.

Eight years later, in 2008, I visited the Expo grounds again and took (analog) photos. The millennium euphoria had long since faded, and the site looked like a ghost town after the gold rush. Some pavilions had been repurposed. Quite a few others stood empty, boarded up, and visibly falling into disrepair—the Dutch pavilion being particularly striking. Instead of the exciting international flair, the site was dominated by the melancholic atmosphere of a desolate industrial park. A lesson, as it were, in the transience not only of an architecture exhibition.

The Spanish pavilion was destroyed by fire in 2016. The Lithuanian pavilion was demolished in 2024. Instead, the Dutch pavilion is currently undergoing renovation. Overall, the transformation of the entire site is still ongoing.

fh.

“Design on Stage” presents the award-winning products of the 2025 Red Dot Design Award. It works as an indicator of curr...
15/04/2026

“Design on Stage” presents the award-winning products of the 2025 Red Dot Design Award. It works as an indicator of current tendencies in product design. Set within the former coal complex of Zeche Zollverein in Essen, the show brings together a wide range of everyday objects, from bathroom fittings and robotic lawn mowers to strollers and bicycles, all arranged within the raw industrial setting.

There is a clear shift away from oversized and complex devices toward compact, smart and reduced solutions, especially in the domestic sphere. What, a few years ago, was dominated by large coffee machines is now replaced by smaller and more precise appliances. Even washing machines and barbecue grills appear here as designed objects. This is less about innovation in a radical sense and more a continuous refinement of form, usability and integration into everyday life.

What stands out is the possibility to touch and test almost everything. The exhibition becomes a space you move through and engage with, rather than observe from a distance, producing a different kind of awareness, one rooted in direct interaction rather than representation. The range goes from furniture to technology to packaging.

At the same time, a certain ambivalence remains. Some areas feel less like curated statements and more like staged brand environments. Some companies appear repeatedly, and the presentation sometimes resembles a showroom rather than an exhibition. The boundary between exhibition visit and window shopping becomes blurred, a sign that what is presented here as “good design” is always also part of an economic system. Still, the experience remains interesting as a snapshot of what is currently considered “good design”—or simply: outstanding marketing.
cf.

Adresse

EPFL, Bâtiment SG
Lausanne
1015

Site Web

https://architecturalexhibition.com/wp-content/uploads/2025-issue-4-final.pdf

Notifications

Soyez le premier à savoir et laissez-nous vous envoyer un courriel lorsque The Architectural Exhibition Review publie des nouvelles et des promotions. Votre adresse e-mail ne sera pas utilisée à d'autres fins, et vous pouvez vous désabonner à tout moment.

Contacter L'entreprise

Envoyer un message à The Architectural Exhibition Review:

Raccourcis

Partager

Type