Princeton University School of Architecture Rumor 18.01
CONTENTS p1—Material Evidence p2—Spring Lectures: Representation p2—Stand by Your Monster
p2—The Historian and the X p3—Zaha Hadid: Pedagogy as Practice p4/5/6—21 January 2017, In 08:44 Out 20:16 p6—17 Volcanoes
p7—Post-Professional Program Thesis Exhibition p8—Opening of Embodied Computation Lab
Material Evidence architectural ideas to a broad public. Some of these collections survive today in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Musée National des Monuments Français in Paris and the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh. This method of exhibiting architecture always looks back—a way to bring the past to the present. With the advent of modernism, the display of architecture shifted away from reproduction, and instead, exhibitions became a tool to disseminate experimental ideas to wider audiences. For example, the first curator of Architecture at the Museum of Modern Art, Philip Johnson, understood that the museum served as a platform to give new forms of architecture institutional validity. Within the confines of the gallery, unprecedented and revolutionary buildings were rendered plausible. Through exhibitions and their requisite catalogues, modernism presented its newness in models and drawings of things to come. More significantly, emerging ideas coalesced, shaped, and promoted examples of recently built work. Mark Wigley’s 1988 Deconstructivist Architecture show, for example, brought together loosely related design practices under one rubric and propelled them into the public consciousness as a movement. The history of architectural exhibitions has had a remarkable run and it is difficult to think of architecture in the last century without its display. In the 20th century, schools of architecture adopted exhibits as part of their educational mission. Harvard, Yale, Columbia and Princeton, among many others, incorporated galleries within their facilities; chief curators for Architecture were appointed at several museums internationally; and institutions emerged with the primary purpose of exhibiting architecture as a means of educating the public—the Canadian Center for Architecture in Montreal, the National Building Museum in Washington D.C., and Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, to name a few. Architectural institutions and the architectural exhibition are now intrinsically connected. Similarly, the public impact of international exhibitions has grown exponentially. Cities as disparate as Chicago, Istanbul and Seoul recently began to host architectural biennales with great success. In its 16th installment, the last Venice Biennale welcomed a record of 260,000 visitors, but this number pales in comparison to the Chicago Biennial’s 500,000 visitors this year. It is significant that architectural scholarship has shifted and exhibitions are now up to par with publications as a means of dissemination for history and theory. Some of the most respected scholars in the field have an extensive tack record as curators and participate frequently in high profile exhibitions. Colomina and Lavin are but two examples in our midst. Plaster casts may have become a thing of the past, but the interest in communicating page 01
ideas by exhibiting in full scale never left the discipline. Modernism deftly experimented with actual size very early on. While a student at Harvard, Philip Johnson chose to build a house in Cambridge for his degree project— not a scaled down version, certainly not a replica, but an actual size model of what was possible. As curator at MoMA, he would pursue similar strategies. For his series The House in the Museum Garden, Johnson commissioned architects to design and build experimental single-family homes complete with furniture. The first in the series, Marcel Breuer’s butterfly roof house, was later replicated here in Princeton when a local resident commissioned Breuer to build it in 1953. A more recent MoMA example, Home Delivery, curated by Barry Bergdoll, displayed five contemporary prefabricated homes erected on the lot west of the Museum. Actual size has proved to be an effective way to communicate with the public. A 1998 collaboration between MoMA, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Wexner Center for the Arts, the Fabrications show marked the emergence of the full-scale as an architectural project of its own. Borrowing from art practices, these installations became a new medium for architecture. Unlike their actual size predecessors, installations are neither a stand in for the past (cast), nor a sign of things to come (building). Free from the constraints of program and site, and responding to internal material logics rather than the external pressures of building conventions, these temporary projects opened new avenues for speculation and experimentation. Now firmly rooted in the discipline, installations have propelled many designer practices and transformed institutions and their programing—PS1’s Young Architects Program and the gallery at SCI-Arc are coveted venues for emerging and mature practices alike. This trajectory presents opportunities to pursue innovative pedagogical models. As we construct a future for the discipline, material evidence seems all the more pertinent in the age of digital production. At Princeton, exhibitions provide fertile ground to seek a common discourse. Whether archival or newly produced, whether in actual size or scaled down, we use the physicality of materials in space to formulate ideas. This pedagogical intent is making its way out of our gallery, to the rest of the building and into our studios, seminars and lecture courses, facilitating new ways of understanding design. For example, our year-long Post-Professional Thesis now culminates as a month-long group show in New York City, no longer exclusively reliant on the final review. With the expansion of our exhibitions program, the speculative work taking place in the school has a fresh framework to share and explore ideas. —Mónica Ponce de León
Review
In the age of digital media, the growing significance of architectural exhibitions seems surprising, but perhaps it need not be. While everything now is ostensibly accessible in an instant, being there, present, has turned out to be all the more critical. It has become evident that there is knowledge to be acquired from experience and that digital reproduction will not suffice. As media is saturated with images, the image has lost its currency. This is significant for architecture, since it is architecture that constructs the there, and it is space that frames presence. Shaping space is, of course, an essential part of our job description. In the education of an architect, being there has historically taken many forms. In America, before architecture schools were formed and architecture was learned by apprenticing in the studio of a master architect, the European Grand Tour was considered an essential part of an architect’s training. Understanding the buildings of the past firsthand was a prerequisite in an era dominated by historicism. Travel was not without extraordinary expense, and thus limited to the very few. With the introduction of architecture schools at the university by the late 19th century, the Hall of Casts emerged as a means of providing access to actual size architectural examples. Harvard, Yale, Michigan, Carnegie Mellon, the National Academy of Plastic Arts in Mexico, and the National University of Colombia, among others, boasted collections of plaster casts where full-scale reproductions of architectural components from canonical western buildings were on display, to be measured, studied and used by students in their own architectural designs. Princeton was no exception. Although many of these universities also obtained and displayed originals, the general consensus was that a copy of a masterpiece would be more useful to students than a second-rate original. Travel was still considered of great value, and thanks to the generosity of alumni, a few students received scholarships to travel abroad and experience buildings in situ. Our own Butler Traveling Fellowship, the Feay Shellman Travel fund and the Shanley Memorial Award stem from this tradition. At Princeton today, we are fortunate that our endowments—combined with the increased affordability of travel—permit every studio at the school (and many seminar courses) to travel abroad or to other American cities, if the pedagogy calls for it. Collecting plaster casts, of course, was part of a larger western phenomenon dating back to the 4th century and culminating in 19th-century England when the Victorian fervor for education turned casts into a valuable commodity. In the public sphere, museums collected casts and international exhibitions used them as a means of communicating