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Curating Architecture Across the Americas

Since the late 19th and early 20th Century, architecture exhibitions have helped imagine, construct, and order the built environment. Architecture exhibitions, however, remain understudied and challenging to produce, particularly in Latin America. CAAA seeks to promote research and establish this nascent field by focusing on themes, support research, and promote projects that dovetail and intersect architecture in the Americas.

This program is organized in collaboration with the Department of History of Art and Architecture and curated by professor Patricio del Real; Carolina Sepulveda, GSD Master in Design Studies graduate with a concentration in Art, Design and the Public Domain; and Marcela Ramos, Program Manager for Art, Film, and Culture at DRCLAS.

Current Work

 

Architecture as a cultural object in display is the subject of the Spring 2021 course: Architecture in the “Museum.” This course explores the historical conditions that normalized the presentation of architecture in cultural spaces and will be run as parallel seminars held at Harvard’s Department of History of Art and Architecture, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile’s Master in Architecture (MARQ) and Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico’s School of Architecture, and led by local faculty members. Each seminar will focus on their national architectural contexts and work together to survey and construct an Americanist geography of curatorial practices in architecture during the 20th century.

The seminar serves as a foundation for the second iteration of Curating Architecture Across the Americas: Historias Ausentes / Missing Histories (CAAAII.) This iteration will take place in 2022 to foment historical research on pre-1990 architecture exhibitions and expositions by establishing collaborations between scholars, archives, and museums, and alternative exhibition spaces. The aim of Historias Ausentes / Missing Histories is to survey the state of the field with an open call for and seeks to establish meaningful and lasting collaborations with scholars, curators and institutions to become manifest and active presence in the region.

 

Launch of CAAA

The first iteration of CAAA gathered architecture curators, historians, and architects, working in art museums and architecture galleries from Mexico and the United States in the symposium titled Curating Architecture Across the Americas: Espacios de Contacto MX-US /Contact Spaces MX-US. With presentations focused on past and ongoing experiences and projects, the symposium discussed the role of architecture exhibitions in the expanding world of curatorial exhibition practices and cultural debates of the 21st Century. This program sprung from the seminar-workshop: Displaying Latin America, given in the Spring of 2019 at Harvard University’s Department of History of Art and Architecture and successfully inaugurated future endeavors.