Urban Room

Ongoing

Open Access: Exploring 130 Years of American Design

For more than a century, Van Alen’s archive has recorded who was invited in: who competed for the Paris Prize, who sat on juries, who shaped a brief, who attended the Beaux-Arts Ball. But an archive of access is equally an archive of exclusion. Every name preserved implies others who were never entered, never credited, never asked.

Haunting Van Alen’s Archive approaches the archive through that absence, treating haunting as a method of making the structurally invisible appear. These missing people are reanimated as spectral projections in Van Alen’s windows, visible only after dark when the institution is closed. Inside, a sound installation is triggered as visitors move through the space, giving voice to archival fragments, reconstructed testimony, and the atmosphere of past Beaux-Arts Balls. The project reclaims the ghost as a tool for questioning established narratives, revealing that the people excluded from design institutions were always already present.

Where is the ground in architectural and urban representation? Re-grounding the Archive opens up Van Alen’s history to an archeological examination of its institutional attitudes towards the ground, land, environment, and the city over time. Through a series of speculative “core samples” made of paper pulp and clay, these tactile artifacts are encoded with various attitudes toward the ground.

Each “core” references competition proposals at a various moment in the institution’s identity, particularly projects that articulate a position toward the ground. Heeding sociologist Bruno Latour’s call to bring climate change politics “down to earth,” Re-grounding the Archive examines how the archive has represented (or not) architecture’s relationship to the ground over the last 100 years. Visitors are invited to handle the core samples, read them as material indexes of the archive, and have conversations about the institution’s layered history.

A 1973 Van Alen competition tasked architects to design an ecological center dedicated to “the research required to institute a system of monitoring and control of the World’s environment.”

Survival — A World Ecological Study Centre surveys the cultural and political context in which the original competition was conceived, examines the environmental optimism of the early 1970s and traces the emergence of ecological thinking as a design program. The project also includes a new architectural response to the original competition brief as a demonstration of alternative strategies today.

The language contained in competition briefs and entries of the Paris Prize in Architecture is revealing of how some architects viewed the United States’ role in the world: The colonization, domination, or obliteration of others is often implicit in these descriptions.

Western Pattern Language draws attention to this grammar through three CRT monitors displaying imagery and text from documents and entries of the Paris Prize in Architecture. Visitors can also directly interact with these source materials at an accompanying microfiche station. The project asks us to understand the resulting forms as extensions of the state, reflect on the current built environment, and consider the role architects play in furthering the objectives of state power.

If there is only one thing that comes of this exhibition, I hope it is that you ask the next ten people you speak to whose Indigenous lands they live on, and where the governments of those nations are located now.

— Kholisile Dhliwayo

Whose Land Are You On? places Van Alen’s archival competition briefs and winning entries alongside contemporaneous political legislation and activist materials such as protest posters. Contending with archival material from the last century begs the questions: How are we engaging — and can we better engage — with issues of restitution, sovereignty, and spatial justice? Most importantly, how can we be in relationship with the Indigenous Nations and Peoples on whose land we live and work?