The Other Architect

The Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery at Columbia GSAPP presents The Other Architect, an exhibition of architects who expanded their role in society to shape the contemporary cultural agenda without the intervention of built form. On display are 23 case studies dating from the 1960s to today that illustrate how international and often multidisciplinary groups applied experimental attitudes and collaborative strategies to invent new tools and alternative methods outside of traditional design practice.

The architects included in the exhibition challenged the concept of individual authorship in favor of establishing networks and partnerships with permeable roles: AD/AA/Polyark, AMO, Anyone Corporation, Architects Revolutionary Council (ARC), Architectural Detective Agency (ADA), Architecture Machine Group (AMG), Art Net, Atelier de recherche et d’action urbaines (ARAU), Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP), CIRCO, Corridart, Delos Symposion, Design-A-Thon, Forensic Architecture, Global Tools, Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS), International Laboratory of Architecture and Urban Design (ILAUD), Lightweight Enclosures Unit (LEU), Multiplicity, Kommunen in der Neuen Welt, Pidgeon Audio Visual (PAV), Take Part, and Urban Innovations Group (UIG). 

Beginning in the 1960s, it is possible to identify a range of experiences that pushed beyond the established domains of academia and the usual dynamics of editorial and institutional activities to develop architecture as a field of energetic, critical, and radical intellectual research. 

The exhibition includes documents that illustrate their ways of thinking and working, manifested in a range of forms including letters, books, drawings, photographs, budgets, tactics for accessing resources, videos, mission statements and manifestos, surveys, posters, meeting minutes and organizational schemes, T-shirts, questionnaires, boats, and buses. Tracing the development of these unusual creative processes allows us to consider how these different ways of defining architecture can be applied today. 

The Other Architect, like the case studies it examines, is a research project in its own way, contributing to a new reflection on the role of the architect and inspiring and proposing unexpected ways of practicing architecture today. It responds to the question of how we can position architecture beyond building, as an original site for the production of ideas.
 

“Search and Research”
September 16, 4pm
“Search and Research” explores the role of research and its different methodologies in a range of creative practices. Discussion with Amale Andraos, Kadambari Baxi, Giovanna Borasi, Matthew Buckingham, Michael Meredith, Susan Sellers & Nader Tehrani 
East Gallery, Buell Hall, Columbia University, 1172 Amsterdam Avenue, New York, NY 
 

The Other Architect is organized by the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), Montréal

Curator: Giovanna Borasi

Curatorial team: Gregory Barton, Lev Bratishenko, Rebecca Taylor, and Alice Haddad

Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery Coordination: Adam Bandler

Research: Gregory Barton, Lev Bratishenko, Alice Haddad, Josephine Minhinnett, Rebecca Taylor with Kayoko Ota and Jin Motohashi (Architectural Detective Agency), Maggie Tsang (Design-A-Thon), Florencia Alvarez (Pidgeon Audio Visual), Konstantinos Pantazis and Marianne Rentzou (Delos Symposion)

Exhibition design: MOS Architects (Hilary Sample and Michael Meredith)

Graphic design: COCCU Christian Lange