Exhibiting Architecture: A Paradox?

The book brings together a collection of essays that are an outgrowth of the eponymous symposium at Yale School of Architecture. It addresses issues relating to exhibiting architecture as formulated by architects, historians, and curators. The ambition of exhibiting architecture entails paradoxes: how to exhibit something as large and complex as a building or a city, and how to communicate something as elusive as an architectural experience that unfolds in space and time. To be sure, architecture poses a challenge to exhibition as a medium. What is it we exhibit when we exhibit architecture: should we be satisfied with photographs of buildings and sites or should we aim to display whole buildings or fragments and models of them? These were among the questions the organizers posed to the group of architectural and art historians, practicing architects, and curators who were invited to participate and contribute essays to the book. Their discussions address the exhibition as a medium and challenge the preconceived idea of what architecture is by examining a range of possibilities as to how architecture is made, experienced, and discussed.