by Merith Bennett
In 1932, The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York hosted The International Style: Architecture Since 1922, marking a pivotal moment in the architectural history of and practice in the United States. The exhibit showcased the works of numerous architects, primarily from Western Europe, introducing Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and Mies van der Rohe to an American audience. Today’s urban landscape indicates the widespread influence of the show, but the exhibit also reflected expanding ideologies concerning architecture and design within the art community, as The International Style was the opening exhibit for the world's first curatorial department devoted to architecture and design.
Institutions such as the MoMA are important in that they not only help to record the history of architecture and design, but they also help to support the larger design community. Successful collections and exhibitions raise questions and indicate what is considered relevant and worthy of exploration within the fields of architecture and design.
Presence
Since 1932, numerous museums and galleries within the United States and the larger global community have adopted departments for architecture and design related fields. Following New York’s MoMA, museums with such departments include the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), The Art Institute of Chicago (AIC), and the Denver Art Museum (DAM). Some museums are completely dedicated to the area of design, including Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt - National Design Museum, Architecture and Design Museum - Los Angeles, the Museum of Design Atlanta (MODA), The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design, and London’s Design Museum. In either case, often the museum itself is an icon to architecture and design and part of the larger collection, such as Daniel Libeskind’s addition to the DAM.
Nevertheless, architecture and design departments and museums are largely nascent, as most were formed in the 1980s. Regions of the country lack architecture and design collections, including the South and the Pacific Northwest, while the Midwest and Southeast must depend on one city or one museum, such as Chicago or the Museum of Design Atlanta, respectively, to house and display such a collection. Boston, a city with the largest number of architects per capita, is home to only one architecture and design collection in the MIT Museum. Seattle closely follows Boston in the number of designers per capita, yet lacks any museum or collection dedicated to one of the city’s greatest strengths.
Furthermore, the collections that do exist, though often sizable, tend to lack breadth outside of western tradition. The MoMA, once a revolutionary force, remains entrenched in its original canon nearly 80 years in the making, often favoring exhibits and acquisitions of work by architects of the Modern Movement, as illustrated by a recent exhibit on the work of Mies van der Rohe. New York Times writer Nicolai Ouroussoff notes:
Traditionally, the department's collecting strategy has been to pick up what it considers to be the best examples of drawings or models by major architects, a strategy that favors a drawing by Le Corbusier or a collage by Koolhaas over a collection of material that allows deeper exploration of an architect's life's work. As a result, the museum has stood by and watched rival institutions snap up important archives. The Canadian Center for Architecture, for instance, has purchased the archives of major figures like Aldo Rossi, James Sterling, Cedric Price and, recently, Peter Eisenman. And Mr. Eisenman is negotiating with the Beinecke library at Yale over his substantial collection of rare architectural journals.
Additionally, as of June of 2009, the newly constructed 8,000 square foot gallery space for the Architecture and Design Department at the Art Institute of Chicago surpasses the MoMA’s exhibition space, and the AIC A&D collection holds 250,000 items, far exceeding MoMA’s 28,000 works of design. The sheer volume and presence of the AIC A&D collection clearly indicates a growing interest in design within the museum world, pointing to a new institutional leader in architecture and design collections and savvy.
A few institutions dedicate their energy to contemporary practice in architecture and design. The Van Alen Institute in New York, begun as a school based on the Ecole des Beaux-Arts curriculum, continues to reach out to the design community by offering fellowships, design competitions, and exhibits on contemporary practice. Though the institute holds a collection, mostly drawings and photographs from its earlier days, its exhibits focus on contemporary issues practitioners find relevant today. In July, the Van Alen Institute hosted Aesthetics of Crossing: Land Ports of Entry / Citizenship by Design, a show addressing immigration and the built environment. The institute also expands on the notion of how to exhibit architecture. Many museums present models, drawings, and photographs by famous architects and of famous buildings. As a center for contemporary design, the Van Alen Institute, instead, can afford more temporal installations, including The Good Life: New Public Spaces for Recreation, an exhibit from 2006. Zoë Ryan, former curator for the Van Alen Institute, elaborates on the exhibit:
I began to be very interested in this idea of how our spaces are being reinvented to meet our 21st-century leisure needs, like learning and fun, not just socializing. A lot of other issues were boiling in the air at the time, such as the idea that recreational spaces create links between neighborhoods, that they become our nodes of transportation. Also, there’s this idea of getaway destinations: For those who can’t leave the city, we need to provide spaces and places for people to come to relax and enjoy moments of repose... Instead of differentiating projects by, say, scale, exploring different themes around recreation allowed us to show that something temporary has as big an impact as something permanent. It also offers a more global perspective. The themes aren’t exhaustive, but they give a snapshot of inspirational case studies for New York... I think that after 9/11, the level of dialogue about architecture and design was elevated. People really wanted to take part and be informed, and really understood architecture’s impact on daily city life. It’s not just the streets, but the street furniture, the lighting. People have really become engaged.
Contemporary architecture and design has also achieved global recognition. Since 1980, the Venice Biennale has rotated between art and architecture and next year will mark the 12th International Architecture Exhibition at the Biennale. Numerous countries fill their respective pavilions with installations ranging from the practical to the utterly conceptual, allowing a global audience to view the achievements of individual countries beyond photographs and film, thus providing additional material for a global dialogue on the conditions, directions, and concerns of architecture and design.
Practice
As noted, curatorial practice in architecture and design is a relatively new field, previously left to art historians and curators to present to the public. However, architecture and design are not off-shoots of art, and the academic and museum worlds are beginning to take notice. An architectural education prepares the curator not only on the history of architecture and design, but also helps the curator to understand spatial relationships between works of art.
New academic programs have recently been formed to respond to this nascent field of museology. Previously, a curator would need a degree in art history, preferably with an emphasis in architecture, but now master and Ph.D. programs in architectural history and theory are beginning to be offered in a number of universities, providing a more straightforward academic approach for the eventual curator of architecture and design.
Most specifically, Columbia University recently unveiled a new program offering a Master of Science in Critical, Curatorial, and Conceptual Practices in Architecture.
The CCCPArch program's emphasis is on forging new critical, theoretical, and historical tools, and producing new concepts and strategies for researching, displaying, and disseminating modern and contemporary architecture and closely related fields. The program is aimed at those with a background in architecture who wish to advance and expand their critical and research skills in order to pursue professional and leadership careers as architectural critics, theorists, journalists, historians, editors, publishers, curators, gallerists, teachers, and research-based practitioners.
The program offers a tailored curriculum that addresses specific skills and knowledge necessary for a curator of architecture and design. Likely other universities will follow suit.
Clearly the field of curatorial practice in architecture and design is growing, yet it too has not faired well in the recent economic recession. Most museums have had to let go much of their staff, some museums have even had to sell portions of their collection. In June of 2009, Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art laid off their curator of architecture and design, reflecting attitudes about the field’s importance within the art community, as well as economic hardship. However, most museums did not go to such drastic measures and the field will likely continue to grow after this economic setback, necessitating curatorial positions in architecture and design.
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