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Curating Architecture

Curating Architecture was an exhibition of new commissions by AMO (Rem Koolhaas and Reinier de Graaf), Ângela Ferreira, 
Nikolaus Hirsch and Philipp Misselwitz, and 
Walid Raad, at The Showroom, London, 
20 November–14 December 2008, curated by myself and Edgar Schmitz.

The exhibition was the final outcome of a two-year AHRC award in which a group of international academic and professional experts were brought together to discuss their engagement with architectural exhibition-making, raising questions about exhibitions as promotional tools for architects, the aestheticisation of planning processes, the (then) huge investments by museums and galleries in new architecture, and the role of exhibitions in developing debate about the built environment.

The practitioners invited to participate in the exhibtion were approached because of their interest in the political and aesthetic shaping of the lived environment. Koolhaas and de Graaf made digital wallpaper based on past projects influenced by Koolhaas’s then position as architectural advisor to the EU; Ferreira made a video inspired by her research into utopian European modernist architectural planning in Maputo, her city of birth; Hirsch and Misselwitz designed a new Kunsthalle that was then installed in the gallery in maquette form; and Raad installed a near-invisible ‘history of Arab art’ on the walls of the gallery as part of his research into the building of new cultural infrastructure in the UAE and elsewhere in the Arab world.

As a result of Curating Architecture, I continue to be invited to speak and publish on the subject internationally, and have formed long-term and collaborative partnerships with many of the researchers involved. As well as AHRC, the research and exhibition received support from the Henry Moore Foundation, the Japan Foundation and was sponsored by Colourlink.