The 1996 architecture biennale: the unfulfilled promise of Hans Hollein's exhibition concept

Despite its faint historical afterimage and its mystifying rhetoric about the individual architect as seismograph, the Venice architecture biennale of 1996 is worth reconsidering. This article argues that the exhibition's premise that architecture culture is marked by a growing individualisation remains relevant. It evaluates the no less problematic translation of this sharp observation into concrete decisions concerning the selection and presentation of 'individual positions' in this biennale

The musealisation of the artist's house as architectural project

Artist’s houses that are opened to the public as museums shift from a private and everyday to a semi-public and institutional functioning. This transformation of an artist’s house into a house-museum might appear as a mere legal issue or as a matter of making previously secluded rooms and collections accessible to the public. But this musealisation of an artist’s house always involves a set of museological and architectural interventions as well. Not only need the house and its content to be displayed as historical documents through a careful mise-en-scène and through the addition of a sub-text of labels or explanatory panels that disclose the meaning of these historical documents; there is also a need for a logic and clear visitor’s route in a house that was not intended for this. Often this already demands architectural design decisions, but it is mainly in the introduction of the supporting museum functions like the necessary office spaces and an entrance hall with reception desk, cloakroom and bathrooms that the musealisation comes down to an architectural design challenge. The proposed paper wants to discuss the artist’s house museum from an architect’s point of view, on the basis of a selection of artist’s houses that were recently transformed into museums, such as the Atelier-Museum Luc Peire in Knokke (B) or the renovations of the Permeke and Rubens house museums. I want to propose the artist’s house museum as an architectural typology by mapping its various typical architectural and spatial characteristics. The first crucial point of interest here is how the spatial division is articulated between the historic interiors, the exhibition spaces and the museum’s service spaces outside of the visitor’s circuit. A second architectural question is how the museum as an active institution can be given an architectural ‘face’ while respecting and presenting the house and its collections as historical documents; how can both the ‘authentic’ private atmosphere and the contemporary public museum be given shape, and is there a place for authorial design in this mediating exercise

Revisiting Roland Barthes's effet de réel : an analysis of the use of insignificant details in artist's monographs and monographic museums

The anti-authorial criticism voiced in La mort de l’Auteur is probably Roland Barthes’ most direct attack on the traditional life-and-work format of the artist’s monograph. The essay has become - together with Foucault’s Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur? – the seminal text for any discussion of authorship. Yet, several other of Barthes’ writings contain just as critical positions throwing the artist’s monograph into suspicion for other reasons, but they are rarely brought to bear on it. In this paper, I would like to discuss Barthes’ concept of the ‘reality effect’ and apply it to the artist’s monograph and to the monographic museum as two instances of art historiography. While La mort de l’Auteur radically questions the author’s authority over the interpretation of a work, the L’effet de réel essay (1968) affects the artist’s monograph because it questions the status of ‘reality’ in realist literature, historiography or biography. Barthes argues that realist literature or historiography achieves a sense of reality not thanks to some heightened degree of objectivity, but thanks to formal characteristics of their texts, namely an employment of over-detailed descriptions. Some of these details obtain a clear significance in the overall narrative but others – Barthes calls them ‘détails inutiles’ – have an apparently contingent presence in the text and merely serve to provide the text with an impression of reality: l’effet de réel. Yet, concrete details occupy a critical position since too much detail can make the narrative, and thus meaningfulness, collapse. The concept of a reality effect thus opens onto the abyss of a contingent material reality which can only be given sense through an imposition of (conventional) narrative structures, such as those of an artist’s biography. To clarify the agency of the reality effect in life-and-work narratives, I will analyze a couple of passages of artist’s monographs and distinguish between significant and insignificant – but reality enhancing – details. A parallel analysis will also be made of different museal stagings of artist studios, a typical situation in which the materiality of the real provides more than a reality effect and might begin to challenge monographic narration

Grindbakken by Rotor. The Art and Architecture of Framing in Situ

In 2012 architectural design and research collective Rotor was invited to make the inaugural exhibition for a new open air cultural event space in a former part of Ghent’s sea harbour that is being redeveloped. Architect Sarah Melsens and visual artist Roberta Gigante had designed the conversion of the 200 m. long series of concrete gravel containers – grindbakken in Dutch. Their most striking intervention was to paint over the entire surface of the obsolete harbour infrastructure with white road paint. Rotor in turn produced a site-specific architectural exhibition by intervening during the painting works: they covered specific zones of interest to keep them from being overpainted. These zones were then exhibited as fragments inside the newly whitened spaces. The exhibition produced at once a powerful aesthetic valorisation and a careful archaeological analysis of an unassuming piece of infrastructure, as well as a conceptual critique of the architectural reconversion upon which Rotor’s exhibition nevertheless depended in many ways. This paper maps and interprets the important variety of shapes, positions and constellations that Rotor used to frame in ‘finds’, and compares Rotor’s framings to selected artistic and architectural reframing projects, from Le Corbusier to Lawrence Weiner

Assessing and valorizing the values of Belgian reconstruction cityscapes today : revisiting Labo S’s engagement with Ypres and Heuvelland

Readily dismissed as inauthentic vieux-neuf, the centrally orchestrated architectural production during the Belgian reconstruction campaigns after the Great War faced a rather cold architecture historical reception in Belgium. The reconstruction of individual monuments and entire towns, villages and landscapes was often only discussed in historical overviews as what came in lieu of a modernist alternative that had missed its appointment with history. This negative appraisal in architectural histories was however but one of the factors that complicated the possible recognition of this varied yet unified architectural and urban production as valuable heritage. Mid 1980s, the Resurgam research, exhibition and publication project directed by Marcel Smets meant however a first turning point. Twenty years later, also local planners and cultural policy makers from the former war front area in West Flanders initiated a second phase of engagement with the reconstruction heritage, now from a more contemporary perspective. In this context, the Labo S research group within the Department of Architecture and Urban Planning at Ghent University was asked to advise local authorities on how to assess and valorize the various aspects of reconstruction heritage in Ypres and Heuvelland, but also to suggest possible approaches to give contemporary developments a place in the still largely extant reconstruction landscape. This paper presents the conceptual approach Labo S took, combining a value analytical approach with morphological close readings. It also makes an evaluation of how this impulse and initiatives by other actors subsequently played out on the ground, in recent planning and preservation management, and in architectural projects