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.

The term “pre-architectonic” was coined by architect and theorist Gottfried Semper (1803–79) and describes a general structural condition that survived the inventions of history and of architecture. This concept emerged as a fictional hypothesis in the mid-nineteenth century, an age marked by increasing industrialization, globalization, and colonialism, which shaped the modern natural and human sciences.     

With the participation of a transdisciplinary field of architects, artists, sociologists and archeologists, the exhibition “pre-architectures” 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.

Curated by Silvia Franceschini, Nikolaus Hirsch, Spyros Papapetros
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Publication

The exhibition is accompanied by the publication pre-architectures, edited by Silvia Franceschini, Nikolaus Hirsch, Spyros Papapetros; with a text by David Wengrow; French/Dutch/English. Published by CIVA and Spector Books.



Public program

In parallel to the exhibition, the project organizes pre-architectures Talks, a public program of lectures, roundtable discussions, and film screenings which among others features Laurent De Sutter, Charlotte Malterre-Barthes, Sébastien Marot, Spyros Papapetros, Paulo Tavares, Pelin Tan, Anton Vidokle, Eyal Weizman, Kathryn Yusoff, and many more. 



Artistic director: Nikolaus Hirsch 
/ Secretary general: Jeremy Uhr / Curators: Silvia Franceschini, Nikolaus Hirsch, Spyros Papapetros
 / Press: Anne-Gaëlle Solé, ag.sole [​at​] civa.brussels.

The exhibition is made possible with the support by Instituto Guimarães Rosa, The Embassy of Brazil in Brussels, Austrian Frederick and Lillian Kiesler Private Foundation.