Curating Architecture

Jakub Kopec

The information revolution, global as well as local, expands the physical environment into volatile virtual spheres. The possibilities of a new technological interface blend with current social, environmental, and economical demands, and together they exceed the narrow notion of architecture as a building art. Architecture becomes a medium of an emerging situation, generating, processing and transferring a larger and larger pack of data.

The mediator (curator) creates tagged paths in the ever growing volume of information. As Hans Ulrich Obrist has put it, this formerly obscure profession, that nobody knew what it meant, is now highly observed. Besides exhibitions, even various events, workshops, public space interventions, websites, blogs or print publications and periodicals, including this issue of the magazine, have their own curator. Curating grows through different disciplines and rather than a separate profession it is a certain critical way of thinking and acting. A projective approach that can redefine even the current role of the architect. The singular builder/master turns into an active mediator of architectonic work based on interdisciplinary cooperation, processual methods and bottom-up strategies.

This issue’s topic oscillates between curating as critical theory and practice, from exhibitions, cultural activism and interventions on existing structures, through temporary installations as laboratory of emerging architecture, to interactive architecture and experiments in new technologies. The theoretical part, consisting of two polyphonic interviews and four authorial essays, is parallelly interwoven with seventeen selected realizations.