All is Exhibitions

The exhibition is for architects to push the discipline in a new direction without the added stress of constructing a building, a temporary and impermanent way to explore the avenues of architecture that may not deal directly with material assemblages at such scale. While a relatively new phenomenon in the history of architecture, the exhibition became an established part in the architectural toolkit to generate discourse, engage the public, and reveal the zeitgeist of its time. Of course, we tend to record, remember, and reconstruct those that have the most impact, and it’s not without contemporary consequence that a number of those have excluded and ignored buildings altogether.

The architecture exhibition that decenters the buildings seems destined to repeat itself roughly every twenty years. They constitute a small sub-genre of architecture exhibits overall, but perhaps the most notable are Peter and Alison Smithson’s 1956 Parallels of Life and Art, Hans Hollein’s 1976 MANtransFORMS, Paola Antonelli’s 1995 Mutant Materials, Rem Koolhaas’ 2014 Elements, and the most recent 2025 Chicago Biennial, curated by Florencia Rodriguez. The effect of these building-less exhibitions seems to wane over time: the Smithson’s would go on to originate the Brutalist movement, and MANtransFORMS underscores Hollein’s bold claim that “Alles ist architekture,” rupturing the disciplinary bubble (perhaps permanently). Mutant Materials, however, appeared most potently as a book and website archiving technological developments in architectural materials, while the actual exhibition broke boundaries mostly in terms of its display (everything was touchable). However, it did posit an interesting argument that materials themselves are fodder for design intervention, and that truth to material is no longer necessary (or fashionable). Elements takes this a step farther in 2014, showing the individual parts and pieces that make up buildings (windows, doors, ductwork, etc) rather than entire, designed assemblies. Offensive, possibly, to those who hoped to have work featured, but ultimately reflective of the post-2008 crash of the market and its enabler: the starchitect. Finally, 2025’s Chicago Architectural Biennial hints at buildings, but focuses more on their tangential ripples, with fragments of buildings shown as stop-gaps that attempt to solve broader global issues. And the environmental, representational, political, and social issues addressed do just that: lap gently at the shores without making actual waves.

To what do we owe this watered down ramification of the exhibition without architecture? Part of it can be chalked up to exposure: perhaps it was revolutionary eighty years ago when Parallels of Life and Art debuted cellular microscope images next to archeological photographs next to brain scans and the Smithsons referred to themselves as “editors” (of imagery and stuff) rather than curators, but by now the discipline has scattered itself so thoroughly across the realms of humanistic and scientific interest that it’s no longer revolutionary to look outside of buildings for architectural insights and inspirations. Further stretching of jurisdiction (Hollein), technical expertise (Antonelli), and authorship (Koolhaas) have perhaps strung architects out to dry - is the building not enough? The Chicago Architecture Biennial answers with a collapse of what used to be distinct mediums with specific disciplinary roles: the building and the exhibition. In 2025, the two have merged as buildings become testing grounds for implementing adjacencies that were once considered too ephemeral, divergent, and asyncretic to become material form. It is perhaps this blurry mixture that has watered down the once fruitful impact of the building-less exhibitions, and if Hollein’s 1976 assertion that “all is architecture” is true, perhaps it’s time to apply that to buildings once again.