Making an architecture exhibition can be a way of changing the world as much as designing a building. Exhibitions operate in many ways. They can be statements or manifestos, or a means of staking a position. They can take the form of surveys or overviews, consolidating differences and similarities across forms of practice, themes, or periods.

Exhibitions may be descriptive, analysing and framing the past, or projective, campaigning for a possible future. They can also be formative in the present, embodying and giving shape to the emergence of a particular architectural practice. Exhibitions can also be architecture.

In this course we will be making an architecture exhibition—one that not only represents architecture but actively takes part in its production.

Therefore, we will understand exhibition making as an architectural practice: the organisation of materials, spaces, budgets, relations, sequences, and forms of attention. The exhibition will emerge from the conditions of its production rather than from a predetermined theme.

Making means working with restrictions and opportunities: We will take the Angewandte and the city of Vienna seriously as infrastructural, spatial and material resources. Despite having no initial budget, we will be able to find spaces with specific characteristics and loads of different materials to work with; we will also draw up a budget and find sponsoring; and further develop an exhibition concept from the available resources and our conceptional interests.

Students will gain experience in all the steps of a whole exhibition making process: From finding a location to developing an exhibition concept and design, from planning the exhibition production to installing the exhibition, from writing the exhibition text to preparing the press material, from conceiving the opening speech to planning and hosting a framing events program.

The course will be led by Jerome Becker and Matthias Moroder.

Regular attendance (at least 80%) and active participation in the seminar. Research of several themes (40%) and the realization of the architectural exhibition (60%).

In the first seminar we will discuss together what would be a good date for the opening of the exhibition.