Architecture Itself and Other Postmodern Myths

Architecture Itself and Other Postmodern Myths brings together an array of building fragments, drawings, models, and primary source documents, to present canonic projects from an unexpected and unfamiliar point of view. The exhibition challenges the typical narrative of the heroic architect by revealing a counter- reading of postmodern procedures. The purpose is simultaneously to deflate the postmodern mythologizing of the architect and inflate the importance of empirically describable architectural activity. In so doing, the exhibition will make original contributions both to a counter-historiography of the postmodern and to contemporary curatorial method. A broad selection of material evidence—gathered from building sites, libraries, and archives—supports accounts of architects’ and architecture’s entanglements with bureaucracy, the art market, and academic and private institutions, as postmodernization challenged the discipline to redefine its modes of practice and reconsider the very idea of architecture itself.

Curator: Sylvia Lavin
Associate Curator: Sarah Hearne
Exhibition design: Erin Besler, Los Angeles
Graphic design: Chad Kloepfer, Cambridge/New York