EXHIBITING ENVIRONMENTS
Atmospheres on Display in Architecture
Edited by Stamatina Kousidi (DAStU/PoliMi)
The relationship between buildings and the natural world is a recurrent topic in design. Each time it resurfaces in the con- text of the exhibition space, it provides evidence of a novel and cogent understanding of environmental consciousness in architecture. This volume aims to gather contributions that shed light on the intersection of architecture with the concept and realm of the environment, as well as on the spatial implications of this intersection within the context of architectural exhibitions. It seeks to explore how architectural exhibitions have addressed the environment both as a spatial setting and as embedded thinking within the featured displays. This exploration aims to point to new associations between display, design projects, and critical discourse. The volume envisions bringing together writings and projected works by architects, designers, and curators whose exhibition work has explicitly addressed the environmental agency of architecture, created new meanings of the environmental context, and made it visible. The volume aims to present, discuss, and problematize key moments of exhibiting environments in architecture: to elucidate how they have envisioned possible environmental futures and stimulated new forms of architectural display; to retrace how the manifold definitions of environmental performance in architecture have become explicit through the temporary exhibition display and setting; and to interrogate how the exhibition medium has served as a catalyst for the emergence of notions of environmental sustainability in architecture.
1 – ENVIRONMENTAL NARRATIVES
Notions of the natural environment are increasingly reflected in the thinking conveyed by architectural displays, as these displays center on the environmental dimension of the design project. Maquettes, free-standing installations, and full-scale mock-ups reinterpret the role of the architectural model from an essential visualization tool of the spatial necessities of light, shade, and color to an atmosphere-making device in the exhibition context. Visitors activate and enact the produced architectural environments, pointing to new interactions between bodies, objects, and the non-physical traits of the exhibition space. This section aims to explore key monographic exhibitions of contemporary architects in connection to the environmental narratives produced. It seeks to elucidate the tools, strategies, and processes deployed in the exhibition layout to convey the environmental imagination embedded in the featured theoretical, built, or projected work, which intersects pertinent design issues such as architectural immaterialities, transience, and performance.
2 – SPATIAL ENVIRONMENTS
Temporary exhibitions, pavilions, and installations have interpreted the natural environment as something both at hand and far away, both salubrious and toxic, reproducible and in extinction. Several projects have comprised hybrids between man- made artifacts and natural components by means of integrated landscapes, conceived as gardens, oases, natural biomes, or forests. Others have redefined the exhibition setting conceptually, materially, and physically through interventions into the indoor climate, air, and lighting of the exhibition space, replicating temperature changes, highlighting color contrasts, or emphasizing light reflection. In both contexts, the architectural display has coined new definitions of the exhibition space, reinterpreting the relationship between the indoor space of the gallery or museum and the surrounding context, engaging visitors in an immersive experience. This section aims to examine how architectural exhibitions have addressed and represented climate change: the ways in which they have articulated new conceptual frameworks for interpreting architectural, social, cultural, economic, and political issues related to the environmental crisis. It seeks to explore how the medium of the exhibition has allowed for the environment to be observed, reinterpreted, and understood as a realm in which design may take action.
Contribution categories
Essays (3,000–5,000 words accompanied by 3–5 images) Graphic essays (max 1,000 words) driven by visual mate- rial accompanied by extensive captions.
Deadlines
Contributions submission: September 30th, 2024.
Submission guidelines
Manuscripts must be submitted in English and formatted according to the Chicago Manual of Style, notes and bibliography system (available at https://www.chicagoman- ualofstyle.org/tools-citationguide/citation-guide-1.html). At submission, the supporting images need to be submitted as separate files; image captions must be placed on a separate page at the end of the manuscript. Authors need to obtain permission for the use of copyrighted material from other sources prior to submission. A short biographical note for each author, limited to 100 words, needs to be included in the manuscript.
Please submit your proposal to the following address:
stamatina.kousidi@polimi.it
EXPOSED PRÀXIS
The atelier and other cripto-exhibitions of architectural poetics and intentions
Edited by Fabrizia Berlingieri (DAStU/PoliMi)ù
In its various facets of atelier, home office, workshop, and lab, the architectural office is a proper stage for expressing and disseminating, consciously or unconsciously, the generative processes and imaginaries underlying design poetics. A dual place where architecture, in the making and thinking, shows itself. It is not just a working environment, indeed, but a place where attitudes and experiences crystallize in spaces that often turn out to be true personal collections, fragments of a discreet and authorial mosaic. For instance, the archive, the library, the model room, the gallery, and the desk appear as spatial tropes, allusions to formal and intellectual decoding of the world and, at the same time, fertile microcosms for the project and its constant reformulation. Assuming the intrinsic relationship between studiolo and wunderkammer – between production and projection –later outlining the more institutional museographic model, the volume is a collective exploration of the atelier as a proto-exhibition space of architectural poetics and intentions. Its purpose is to present a discreet survey not focusing on self-reflection of way of doing, but instead on the challenge of representing the submerged world of references essential for the design process. What kind of relationship does exist between a specific poetic and the organization of the place hosting its creation? What figures emerge, and through which media are they conveyed? Ultimately, the aim of the volume is a broader dowsing investigation into whether and how these spaces – in-between the personal and the public, exposed to risky fetishistic perversions – can identify some lateral exhibition practices in the contemporary world, contributing in reverse to the expansion of the architectural praxis itself.
The requested contributions explore the two terms of investigation – space, and intention – starting from their concreteness in exhibition methods poised between production and authorial representation.
1-FIGURES/SPACES
This section explores specific case studies on existing house museums or ateliers museums. Contributions should investigate and reflect on the spatial features and the relationship between work and exhibition space, posing some questions. For example, is it possible to draw analogies with previous models (wunderkammer, studiolo, scriptorium, herbarium, archive, workshop, laboratory, atelier, gallery)? And do these analogies reveal other possible interpretations? The contribution, focused on a space and/or a way of exhibiting, takes the form of micro-narratives made up of a text of approximately 6000 characters (1000 words), including spaces, notes with internal bibliographical references excluded, and a maximum of four significant images and exemplars to convey the narrative itself, preferably unpublished or authorial.
2-INTENTIONS/DIALOGUES
The section addresses today’s theoretical questions on the role of exhibiting – and of collecting – within the spaces of contemporary architectural production, understood as expressions of cultural and operational positioning and tools for communicating authorial poetics. Contributions should critically focus on exhibitions or publications by architects based on the idea of collection or explore the relationship between space and poetics through interviews and interdisciplinary dialogues (with philosophers, architects, curators, artists, and art historians). The objective is to create a narrative collection contrasting with the visual one of Figures/ Spaces. As an extended essay, the contribution must be between 15,000 and 25,000 characters, including spaces and notes (3000-5000 words) and excluding the bibliography. No images are allowed in this category.
Deadlines
Abstract submission: September 25th, 2024
Evaluation notification: October 7th, 2024
Contributions submission: November 4th, 2024
Reviewing process communication: November 25th, 2024
Revised submission: December 16th, 2024
Submission guidelines
Manuscripts must be submitted in English and formatted according to the Chicago Manual of Style, notes and bibliography system (available at https://www.chicago- man-ualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide/citation-guide-1.html). At submission, the supporting images need to be sent as separate jpg files; image captions must be placed on a separate page at the end of the manuscript. Authors need to obtain permission for the use of copyrighted material from other sources prior to submission. A short biographical note for each author, limited to 100 words, needs to be included in the manuscript.
Please submit your proposal, and eventual requests for further information, to the following address:
fabrizia.berlingieri@polimi.it.