Blow Up: Exhibiting the Exhibition of Architecture

By: Chris Melton

During our independent travels, I was fortunate enough to be able to visit Prague, Czech Republic for a few days, and the architecture throughout the city was fantastic. While wandering around the city one day, I stumbled by a small architecture exhibit by Cesky Design that presented their projects and gallery of work in a very interesting way that I have never before seen replicated. Instead of merely creating an exhibition to show their work, they created an exhibition on the very idea of exhibiting architecture. 

This sounds crazy I know, but their thesis on their gallery, 'Blow Up,' stated that while presenting unrealized projects through photos and models is feasible to convey the project's ideas and thoughts, presenting a built structure in this way only diminishes the project; one can only display fragments of information at a time to try to convey what the overall structure and place is like. So in this sense, why attempt to shrink and move a building for presentation's sake? Why not focus on these fragments of information, these bits of data, to create a very strong glimpse of the project that conveys what the entire project as a whole? This was done in the form of a large circular, 'blown-up' image of the project, to which I found quite effective. 

Throughout the gallery, each large image would introduce the project, and a small rectangular slideshow would accompany and cycle through a more extensive 'cloud' of images, sketches, drawings, text descriptions, and factual texts which try to convey other parts of the building in this same, fragmentary way. While no single image, drawing, or sketch completely represented the project, the juxtaposition of the two and presentation in this way created a very unique way to exhibit their work and gave the perception of understanding the project as a whole.

This isn't to say that this featured gallery didn't have any models or renderings whatsoever. In the main gallery space, a few models were constructed in the center of the floor out of select materials to create a single experience when one views the model. The viewer doesn't see texture, paneling, or the like, just the form that the firm wanted to represent. Again, this was just another take on their concept of 'fragmenting' their exhibit to better portray the whole project. 

While the completed, 'Blow Up,' gallery featured this very radical approach to exhibition, the upstairs area held a more traditional exhibit that consisted of a series of different concept models/renderings for a project still in progress. Six proposals were displayed, each with the same site context model but different building structures, forms, and materials, and each model had one rendering that further explained which direction the proposal was going. This area was very interesting and well made, and being a very small space, I was able to take the time to look at each model in detail and see the lengths that this firm was willing to travel to understand precisely how each of their proposals would look and function. 

As a whole, I found this exhibit to be very fresh and interesting. To gain more knowledge, one would often have to wait and view the slideshow several times to catch all the different bits of data, or walk around the room several times viewing different pieces each time. This idea of withholding information and showing the project little by little can only pull the viewer in. These fragments instill a drive to know more and more about the project, and in that sense I think this exhibit was successful not just in showcasing their work, but in showcasing their format as well. Exhibiting an exhibit on architecture is definitely a radical approach, but I think that Cesky Design is headed in the right direction.