Display Rooms

This paper argues that the role of the exhibition has begun to impact contemporary architecture’s concept of room; a result of conflating the room of the project with the room of the exhibition. For both the home and the exhibition the room can be recognized as a space constructed by its content. Understood in the broadest sense as an enclosure for inhabitation, the domestic room contrasts with the exhibition room, whose content is disseminated, produced, and received through a much wider set of ‘channels’ and media. Yet, in a moment in which our media and information platforms give architects access to everything at once, practices have begun to use the room as both a container of an occupant’s life, and a container of architectural histories. Within this “atemporal” moment, contemporary architecture has sought to display its referential production just as much as the individual has sought to display theirs. As a result, the rooms of both the exhibition and the architectural project have begun to assimilate, often bringing about a denial of open space with room agglomerations. The paper thus seeks to unfold an analysis of the contemporary exhibition room through the 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial and its family tree.

Volume Editors
Jasmine Benyamin, Kyle Reynolds, Mo Zell, Nikole Bouchard & Whitney Moon

ISBN
978-1-944214-28-9