The Things Around Us

We see the museum as a platform for dialogue. Through a series of exhibitions, we invite architects from different geographies and contexts to share their perspective on pressing issues in the discipline and to critically reframe their work in a process of exchange and debate.

Embedded in politically and economically charged sites in the Pearl River Delta, Mongolia and the European Union, Rural Urban Framework (Joshua Bolchover and John Lin) and 51N4E (Johan Anrys and Freek Persyn) operate in expanded ecologies of architectural practice, questioning the role of the architect today. By collaborating with policymakers, local contractors and NGOs and engaging their respective labs at the University of Hong Kong and ETH Zürich as key sites of research, both offices investigate new forms of cooperation and dialogue as crucial design strategies.

RUF and 51N4E work at the seams of urbanization, with projects situated in transitional settlements in Ulaanbaatar, in the new vernacular of rural China, in the transforming centres of Western European cities and in Albania’s shifting public spaces. Comparing their research and design processes, this exhibition and publication question the extents and certainties of architecture against backdrops of indeterminate notions of citizenship, unstable stages of urbanization, and insecure economies and ecologies.