pre-architectures

Envision a world without architecture, a world-tecture without arche, the latter meaning not only beginning or origin, but also the authority to arrange and subordinate persons, objects, and processes into an identifiable power structure.

Pre-architecture is not simply "not architecture"–it is what architecture could have become, but ultimately disavowed. The same unfulfilled potentialities haunt not only the distant past but also architecture's anxious present in a time of environmental crisis, energetic transformation and related social challenges.

With the participation of a transdisciplinary field of architects, artists, sociologists and archeologists, the exhibition pre-architectures critically unveils how the study of prehistory might uncover not only causes of modernity’s present crisis, but also signs of architecture’s future past. Referring to the beginnings of human habitat and the “birth” of design, the exhibition speculates about the cultural, social, economic and political foundations of spatial organization.

With works by: Kader Attia, Mariana Castillo Deball, Forensic Architecture & David Wengrow, Jacques Gillet, Hans Hollein, Frederick Kiesler, Gianni Pettena, Ettore Sottsass, Paulo Tavares, Anton Vidokle & Pelin Tan.
 

Once I thought the world was somewhere else © Mariana Castillo Deball