Inscriptions: Architecture Before Speech

Curated by: K. Michael Hays, Eliot Noyes Professor of Architectural Theory, and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, and Interim Chair of the Department of Architecture; and Andrew Holder, Assistant Professor of Architecture, in collaboration with GSD Exhibitions

If recent theory has highlighted architecture’s turn to evident resemblance and signification, we argue this tendency has also produced its other: The landscape of contemporary practice is filled with work whose motivating interests are anterior to meaning and averse to thematization; they are, in a way, pre-speech. Projects in this mode are born of the original human postulate to claim a place in the world, to confirm having been there, to make and mark a difference. Inscriptions is a broad survey of work that problematizes, resists, and exceeds signification by appealing to other kinds of cultural engagements, agreements, and fantasies of architecture’s origins. Important projects by Harvard University Graduate School of Design faculty spanning more than 35 years of practice are interspersed as conceptual keystones among works from emerging architects across the American academy, offering a theory of the structural relationships that bind and organize even the apparent delirium of the contemporary field.

Image: Mack Scogin Merrill Elam Architects, Wolfsburg Science Center, 1999

When
22 January to 11 March 2018
Where
Harvard University Graduate School Of Design
48 Quincy Street
02138 Cambridge, MA
Organizer
Harvard GSD
Link
Inscriptions

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