­Architecture Is Everywhere, in Sou Fujimoto: Futures of the Future

Toto Gallery, Tokyo; Chicago Architecture Biennial

2015

Given the global phenomenon of mass standardization through social media, architectural exhibitions should make efforts to present the discipline via intimate scenario. As a context, the exhibition often forces architecture into the abstract world of notations, models, and renderings, far from the relationship between body and building. This show bridged the gap between the exhibition as a means to showcase architects in their comfort zones and the exhibition as a laboratory for sensorial exploration through a production of moments. Sou Fujimoto playfully chose a series of ordinary objects that were turned into architectural episodes through the addition of human scale figures. The architectural gesture is as small, simple, and immediate as its presentation in the gallery. Exhibition became dialogue, showing how architects might turn away from the self-explanatory and inwardly directed and toward the sensorial environment by rendering space as an intimate yet invisible field that connects us all.

Public Luxury

ArkDes, Stockholm

Curated by Kieran Long

2018

Is intimacy related only to the domestic? Can it reach out into the public? The vast majority of human interactions, still occur in the public realm; therefore, public space has a certain degree of intimacy. By unfolding the mechanisms of conception and development of different aspects of public life, this exhibition rendered it as an intimate field where contact, encounter, dispute, and bliss occur. It is important to move toward the idea of the exhibition as a research space working as a threshold to new and further interpretations of the existing. This particular case offered the public domain as a site where the idealism of Swedish society is redefined as a luxurious endeavour, while also depicting its formal translations into the collective sphere. The show will become an example of how the architectural exhibition can embrace the important task of casting doubt on the obvious.

Measuring – This much, That much, How much?

21_21 DESIGN SIGHT, THE MIYAKE ISSEY FOUNDATION, Tokyo

2015

Although not a typical architecture exhibition, Measuring was built around the human need to tame the environment, which is at its base an architectural act. The project showcased a series of classic abstract systems that different cultures have developed to harness ideas of time, distance, weight, and space. Somewhere in between an art exhibition and an Exploratorium-style science display, it focused on translating the abstract and invisible into something approachable that visitors could see. Architecture exhibitions often seem to take for granted some of the basics of the discipline, depicting a problematization through very self-indulgent formats. Exhibitions should work as constructs where architecture and design engage tools for translating the intelligible into the mundane.