Alternative Histories Kaleidoscopes, parlour games, and architectural history

摘要

The exhibition 'Alternative Histories' was a collaboration between the Architectural Foundation, the Drawing Matter archive, and curators Jantje Engels and Marius Grootveld, in which over eighty contemporary architectural practices were invited to make an architectural model in response to an historical architectural drawing. The Drawing Matter archive, numbering many thousands of sketchbooks, architectural drawings and models, dating from the sixteenth century to the present day, provided the curators with the pool of drawings from which to select. They acted as matchmakers by assigning each drawing to an architectural office, perhaps with some implicit provocation in mind, but always with the overt request that the office make 'a model that not only responded to what they saw, but envisioned an alternative future for the original drawing'. Engels and Grootveld made sure that each practice received a facsimile of their assigned archival drawing with which to work. The instructions included the demand that the model's footprint would not exceed the dimensions of the source drawing, thus restricting the size of the overall exhibition so that its packed contents could fit into a van that collected models from across the UK and mainland Europe. The drawings that served as prompts were not displayed with the exhibited models but, rather, reproductions were made available during the exhibition in a folio that visitors were able to consult. The exhibition existed concurrently as an online presence in which each practice presented their model, a written commentary, and a link to the original source drawing. In addition, a programme of public colloquia was scheduled, and a publication is anticipated. Each architectural practice in the show took the task in hand and applied their imagination, skill, and critical endeavour to whatever were the parameters of their own concerns as they interfaced with the prompt drawing. There was an extraordinary creativity and diversity in the range of exhibited models, but in order to access the particular individual trajectories the website was more effective than the show, and the subsequent publication will surely offer further potential.