RECORD's monthly list of upcoming and ongoing exhibitions, events, and competitions. 

Upcoming Exhibitions

An exhibition on view at the Casa da Arquitectura, Portugal’s center for architecture, is dedicated to the life and work of the Brazilian Pritzker laureate, a founding member of the center who died in 2021. Curated by Jean-Louis Cohen and Vanessa Grossman, the show spans seven decades of architectural production and includes a project by Eduardo Souto de Moura and Nuno Graça Moura. Partnered with a smaller, more intimate exhibition in a nearby gallery, the exhibition will also be complemented with a program of debates, conferences, and site visits. See casadaarquitectura.pt/en/

Tomás Saraceno’s first solo exhibition in the UK, on view at the Serpentine Galleries this summer, draws on the Argentinian multimedia artist’s ongoing research into spiders: their behavior, the architecture of their webs, and their significance in human mythology and cultural perception. Composed of artworks, video, and interactive installations that extend onto the Serpentine’s outside grounds, the exhibition partners with two of Saraceno’s other initiatives Arachnophilia, an “interdisciplinary, research-driven community of humans, spiders and their webs,” and the environmental activist collective Aerocene. See serpentinegalleries.org.

Ongoing Exhibitions

An exhibition on view at Art Omi, an arts center with a 120-acre sculpture and architecture park, presents the work of four international collaborative design practices: WIP, FUNdaMENTAL Design Build Initiative, Colloqate Design, and ASSEMBLE. Featured projects emphasize a community-centered approach to shaping public space and address larger social concerns, including gentrification, privatization, urban neglect, and social inequity. See artomi.org.

After World War II, the Washington University in St. Louis (WUSTL) was the only school of architecture in the country that allowed students of Japanese heritage to enroll. An exhibition at the WUSTL’s Thomas Gallery presents an exhibition exploring the work and impact of Japanese-American architects who survived the World War II internment camps, centering around four architects who studied at the university following their release from West coast exclusion zones: Gyo Obata, Richard Henmi, George Matsumoto, and Fred Toguchi. Obata and Hemni settled permanently in St. Louis, and went on to lead influential firms (HOK and Hemni & Associates). The exhibition explores the relationship of American architecture to issues of immigration, exclusion, and cultural identity in 20th century, underscoring the unique experiences of the architects as Japanese Americans: the lasting effects of unconstitutional detention, their contributions to the modernist project, pressures to assimilation, and their involvements in Japanese-American cultural and political advocacy. See library.wustl.edu.

Architect and engineer Alejandro Zohn (1930–2000), a Jewish émigré whose family fled Nazi-occupied Austria for Mexico during World War II, is little known outside his adopted country, but built widely in Guadalajara from the 1950s through the 1990s. The MAK Center for Art and Architecture presents the first Los Angeles exhibition of Zohn’s work, at the Schindler House in West Hollywood, featuring commissioned photography and video by artists Adam Wiseman, Lake Verea, Onus Luque, Sonia Madrigal, and Zara Pfeifer, alongside select items from the architect’s archives. See makcenter.org.

Seeking Zohn at the Schindler House. Photos © Taiyo Watanabe

The Centre Pompidou presents the largest retrospective so far dedicated to the prolific career of Pritzker laureate Norman Foster. The exhibition includes drawings, workbooks, and prototypes of almost 100 projects from the past six decades, including the Carré d’Art in Nîmes, France (1993), the Hong Kong International Airport (1998), and the Apple Park in Cupertino, California (2017). See centrepompidou.fr/en.

Austria’s national architecture museum, the Architekturzentrum Wien, presents the first monographic exhibition on Yasmeen Lari, Pakistan’s first woman architect and recent RIBA Royal Gold Medal awardee. Born in 1941, she established her own office in 1961, beginning her career as a pioneer of Brutalism and designing Modernist projects for the country’s middle class before founding the humanitarian group Heritage Foundation of Pakistan in 1980. In 2005, Lari initiated a zero-carbon self-build movement for climate refugees and the landless, and has built tens of thousands of Pakistani homes using traditional technologies and low-cost, low-carbon materials. See azw.at/en

Yasmeen Lari at the renovation of Denso Hall circa 2010, part of an ongoing project to restore the city of Karachi by the Heritage Foundation of Pakistan. Photo © Archive Yasmeen Lari

In 1978, Charles Jencks, the seminal theorist of Postmodern architecture, bought a house in the Holland Park neighborhood of west London with his wife Maggie Keswick, an artist and garden designer. Between the years of 1978 and 1983, Jencks, Keswick and the architect Terry Farrell transformed the interior of the four-story, stucco-fronted Victorian residence into a “built manifesto” of Jencks’s architectural ideas. In 2021, two years after Jencks’s death, “The Cosmic House” reopened to the public as an exhibition space. Now on view is an exhibition which launches the Jencks Foundation’s exploration into remapping the year 1980 as the inception of the Postmodern canon. Centered around a commissioned film from the Raqs Media Collective titled “The Bicyclist Who Fell into a Time Cone,” the exhibition also includes wall drawings and three augmented-reality ‘interferences’ that spread across all four levels of The Cosmic House. For more information, see jencksfoundation.org.

Events 

The 18th edition of the Biennale is curated by Scottish-Ghanaian architect Lesley Lokko, who founded the Graduate School of Architecture in Johannesburg in 2015 and the African Futures Institute in Accra, Ghana, in 2020. This year’s theme is “Laboratory of the Future”; the citywide exhibition features contributions by 89 participants, over half of whom are from Africa or the African diaspora. See labiennale.org.

In light of federal funding now available for infrastructure repair, the Institute for Public Architecture is hosting a free one-day symposium to discuss reuse opportunities for the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, which has slowly been falling into disrepair due to decades of deferred maintenance. Four diverse panels will convene at the Harbor School on Governors Island to discuss highway removal, alternative transportation systems, community land trusts, and community visions for the future, led by experts, policy-makers, and community members from Brooklyn and Queens. See bqe2053.org

An annual fair that has been held in the city since 1969, NeoCon gathers industry professionals to learn about and experience the latest innovations in commercial interior design. This year, nearly 1 million square feet of exhibitions will display over 400 products, from both leading companies and emerging designers. See neocon.com. 

Competitions

The competition, presented in part by AIA California, is seeking design proposals for an agricultural center in Allensworth, the first town in the state to be founded, financed, and governed by African-Americans. Emphasizing goals of decarbonization, equity, and resilience, the competition brief invites students and professionals to design proposals that recognize and advance the site’s aspiration to become a destination for sustainable agriculture and Black history. For more, see architectureatzero.com.