The Archival Exhibition - A Decade of Research at the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery, 2006-2016

Architecture is a field organized by documents produced within distinct historical, mediatic, and disciplinary registers. Whether in the mode of drawing, design, fabrication, computation, photography, or video, architectural documents are defined by different discursive and institutional exigencies. But architectural archives are hardly stable or uniform. Rather, archives are active processes and systems of coordination, woven into architecture’s media, their histories, and their communicative effects.

Over the last decade, the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation has conducted a sustained experiment in archival exhibitions. Fueled by the recent historicization and theorization of exhibition practices, the gallery has offered a critical alternative to the conventional role of architectural school galleries and exhibitions at major museums and architecture associations. Through a commitment to researching under-examined projects from the postwar period, the Ross Gallery has forged an identity based on the uncovering and display of a wide range of documents that expand and test the contours of architectural practice.

This book collects text and documents from fourteen exhibitions that span the past ten years of the Ross Gallery. These exhibitions are accompanied by commentaries by a group of architects, artists, historians, theorists, and curators that examine each exhibition, survey the work of the gallery, and foreground the shifting status of architectural exhibitions more broadly.