Installations by Architects: Building Questions, Building Dialogue

Over the last few decades, a rich and increasingly diverse practice has emerged in the art world that invites the public to touch, enter, and experience the work, whether it is in a gallery, on city streets, or in the landscape. Like architecture, many of these temporary artworks aspire to alter viewers' experience of the environment. An installation is usually the end product for an artist, but for architects it can also be a preliminary step in an ongoing design process.

Like paper projects designed in the absence of "real" architecture, installations offer architects another way to engage in issues critical to their practice. Direct experimentation with architecture's material and social dimensions engages the public around issues in the built environment that concern them and expands the ways that architecture can participate in and impact people's everyday lives.

The first survey of its kind, the book Installations by Architects, published by Princeton Architectural Press, features 50 significant projects from the last 25 years by today's most exciting architects, including Anderson Anderson, Philip Beesley, Diller + Scofidio, John Hejduk, Dan Hoffman, and Kuth/Ranieri Architects. Projects are grouped in critical areas of discussion under the themes of tectonics, body, nature, memory, and public space. Each project is supplemented by interviews with the project architects and the discussions of critics and theorists situated within a larger intellectual context.

The exhibit features many of the projects discussed in the book and adds a video of time-based work. There is no doubt that installations will continue to play a critical role in the practice of architecture. Installations by Architects aims to contribute to the role of installations in sharpening our understanding of and dialogue about the built environment. Dr. Sarah Bonnemaison is an associate professor of architecture at Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia. She practiced architecture in Stuttgart with Bodo Rash and Frei Otto and in New York with FTL before establishing her design firm, Filum Ltd., with Christine Macy in 1990. Ronit Eisenbach is an associate professor of architecture at the University of Maryland. She has exhibited installations internationally at the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Art Gallery of Windsor, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the Institut for Rom Kunst, Princeton University, the Cranbrook Art Museum, and on the streets of Tel Aviv.

Exhibition Credits

Curated by Ronit Eisenbach and Sarah Bonnemaison.

Designed by Michael Fischer and Ronit Eisenbach with assistance of Peter James and Lisa Lacharite-Lostrito.