Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

If we can state that certain architectural production currently finds its origin and explicit accommodation in the field of the exhibition, it is even more logical -considering the unavoidable visual culture- to assert that the images of architecture prevail autonomously over the architecture they represent, becoming independent of the strictly disciplinary and exhibited illuminated in the aura of the artistic on the walls of a museum. To explore this argument in line with the subject from the current Ra’s issue, we will review eight exhibitions, and their corresponding catalogues, held in different museums and art galleries from 1982 to 2018, and focused on exploring architectural photographic representation and its translations to and from artistic practices. We aim not just to make an exhaustive review of this reality, but to extract from its analysis a contemporary critical reading of its potentialities and interpretations.

Mies van der Rohe was thinking about architecture when in 1929 he designed the German Pavilion for the Barcelona World’s Fair, a building that set out to portray the new Weimar Republic. Without a programme as such, and with hardly any time, its ultimate purpose was to showcase itself as the culmination of a previously dormant research project studying a series of exhibition stands for German industry. It was a temporary museum for a new genre of architecture that depicted the myth of “permanent void” once it was disassembled, with fourteen images considered as examples of a new spatial arrangement. Barcelona City Council was thinking about architecture when it decided to reconstruct the Pavilion in the 1980s, while each year a call is made out to architects and artists to think about architecture by holding a series of temporary installations, highlighting the paradoxical value of the exhibited exhibitor and the (in)visible void ABOUT the key characteristics that (un)define it.

The interventions within the Rijksmuseum offer us an opportunity to raise new concepts linked to museum-related functions and its relationship with the city. The Rijksmuseum museum was born with a series of conditions that have forced the building to be used under two superimposed premises: its form and museum-sort typology and its unique condition as a symbolic gate connecting the centre and south of the city via this passageway. These two superimposed premises have been key in its interventions, revealing disparate situations throughout history, turning it into an unfinished project. These functions - as a museum and as an infrastructure of connection - are linked and intertwined, therefore affecting the nearby spaces of the museum and its relationship with the city. The analysis of the interventions carried out till now - including the last one by the architects Cruz y Ortiz - unveil a new set of functions associated to the museum, creating a heterotopia by means of a series of constellations that correspond to a cultural and leisure-kind-of-space, that broadens the museum’s function and project’s the day to day life of the city distinguishing it from those particular spaces of the museum itself.

Architectural drawing exhibitions framed the cultural and architectural debate in the 1970s and 1980s. In Spain, this interest developed in parallel with a renewal of the Schools of Architecture that was taking place during the process of democratization of the country. The new curriculums aimed to confront the pedagogical crisis attributed to the education policies approved during the technocratic period of Franquism. In this sense, the teaching of drawing would be, on the one hand, the result of the international contemporary context of the critique of modernity, and on the other, the possible solution to a highly technified pedagogy of architecture. The numerous architectural drawing shows and publications constructed a new “drawing ambience” that brought to the foreground not only questions about the status of architectural drawing within the architectural discipline, but also the more crucial debate on the status of the professional architect.

There are not many examples in the architectural panorama of museums built to house the visual artwork of a single artist. Even less when the artist actively collaborates in the architectural conception of the space that should receive his legacy. This research establishes a relational reading to understand the connections between the way in which Jorge Oteiza (1908-2003) proposes that his sculptures should be exhibited, exemplified in the exhibition montage suggested for his participation in the IV São Paulo Modern Art Biennial in 1957, and the project for the Foundation and Museum in Alzuza, Navarra, the work of his good friend Francisco Javier Sáenz de Oíza (1918-2000). In both cases, the use of time as an instrument for controlling perception will be essential to achieve greater coherence between the museum space and the displayed work.

The idea of a ‘museum’ on the moon seems to be taken from a B-movie or a pulp science fiction magazine, although the surprising thing is that it actually is a reality, of sorts. Just how a miniature artwork by six of the most important American artists of the 1960s came to be surreptitiously etched onto a small ceramic wafer the size of a SIM card attached to one of the legs of the lunar module of the Apollo 12 mission and secretly dispatched to the moon in November 1969 (the second manned mission), has all the ingredients of a mystery film and questions the very notion of what a museum is, representing as well one of the most exciting adventures in the history of 20th Century art, embodying the spirit of a decade of optimism and faith in the redemptive power of technology.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates had a great repercussion in the international architecture scene. The three MoMA exhibitions the firm participated in, constituting the guiding thread of this article, attests to that. Through detailed analysis of these three shows I wish to demonstrate how important architecture exhibitions are as sources in research, representing, as they do, the times in which they were held, and serving as a thermometer of the discussions of the period. The objective here is to reconstruct the theoretical framework into which the museum exhibited the work of KRJDA, and the process of connecting the firm to the debates and professionals of the particular moments.

IT The Museum of Innocence is a novel and a museum created by Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk that tells the story of two young lovers in Istanbul through the objects of everyday life. The Museum of Innocence project is a collection of objects arranged in the form of a novel and displayed in a museum, calling attention to the importance of the narrative both in the building of the collection and in endowing the museum with spatial form. It is a tale of passion, told through the objects that trigger the characters’ memories in different places in the city. For this reason, it is also the story of a time and a city. In particular, it is a reflection on the importance of our houses, of the people who live in them, their objects and their stories, and how they can be turned into museums.

Building an “archive” of this kind involves compiling all the architecture exhibitions ever held in Barcelona throughout its history. This compilation or archive focuses on what has been seen and less on how, on the content rather than the medium, on the abstract behind the display, without overlooking the moments when both have an intentional relationship. This “archive” is approached from the perspective of the proactive architecture project, as an active and useful resource and not from a historical and conservationist perspective.