The Other Architect opens at the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (Columbia GSAPP) on September 16, and remains on view through December 2, 2016.
The Other Architect is an exhibition of architects who expanded their role in society to shape the contemporary cultural agenda without the intervention of built form. On display are twenty-three case studies dating from the 1960s to today that illustrate how international and often multidisciplinary groups applied experimental attitudes and collaborative strategies to invent new tools and alternative methods outside of traditional design practice.
The Other Architect is organized by the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), Montréal, and is curated by Giovanna Borasi, CCA’s Chief Curator. The exhibition has been reshaped for its presentation at Columbia University, distilling each group’s contribution to a focused presentation of their manifestos and ideas on how to redefine the role of architecture.
The architects included in the exhibition challenged the concept of individual authorship in favor of establishing networks and partnerships with permeable roles:
AD/AA/Polyark, AMO, Anyone Corporation, Architects Revolutionary Council (ARC), Architectural Detective Agency (ADA), Architecture Machine Group (AMG), Art Net, Atelier de recherche et d’action urbaines (ARAU), Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP), CIRCO, Corridart, Delos Symposion, Design-A-Thon, Forensic Architecture, Global Tools, Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS), International Laboratory of Architecture and Urban Design (ILAUD), Lightweight Enclosures Unit (LEU), Multiplicity, Kommunen in der Neuen Welt, Pidgeon Audio Visual (PAV), Take Part, and Urban Innovations Group (UIG).
Beginning in the 1960s, it is possible to identify a range of experiences that pushed beyond the established domains of academia and the usual dynamics of editorial and institutional activities to develop architecture as a field of energetic, critical, and radical intellectual research. The exhibition includes documents that illustrate their ways of thinking and working, manifested in a range of forms including letters, books, drawings, photographs, budgets, tactics for accessing resources, videos, mission statements and manifestos, surveys, posters, meeting minutes and organizational schemes, T-shirts, questionnaires, boats, and buses. Tracing the development of these unusual creative processes allows us to consider how these different ways of defining architecture can be applied today.
The Other Architect, like the case studies it examines, is a research project in its own way, contributing to a new reflection on the role of the architect and inspiring and proposing unexpected ways of practicing architecture today. It responds to the question of how we can position architecture beyond building, as an original site for the production of ideas.
