Glaze, Trace, Museum Board

A museum seems to be one of the best places to bring your teenage nephew to show him what you are doing all day and, sadly, sometimes all night, when he gets to the point of making a career decision. Hopes are that those exhibitions depict the discipline better than Boysfirm memes.

There are, usually, two types of exhibitions related to architecture, in which architects are either curated or sometimes curators themselves.

The first type usually shows up with a shiny name from the galaxy of star architects, with a title following the format of: STAR_ARCHITECT_NAME: Their_Poetic_Philosophy. Walking through the often-ticketed space, you get overwhelmed by the chronological display of projects, mystic sketches, and incredibly detailed models. While finding the best angle for a story post like you have always been doing in the photo lab, your nephew asks you, is this what architects do? That’s so cool! You made the shot, smiled and looked at him, saying maybe.

But what is left unshown that has made you so unsure? The flashback of the back and forth during every studio and every project spoke to you softly: this is way too frictionless. There are so many fights and compromises that a design like this has to go through, and there are so many names whose efforts gave birth to every single piece on the wall or podium. That absence haunts.

Haunted, you head to the second type. Though not clearly noted on the poster, still you can sense the smell of an architectural mind from the plan of the exhibition, or from the drawings on the wall—you just know this is the way we map things out. Your nephew soon gets confused: is this also what you do? Yes, you said again, yet again with hesitation. That’s what we do all day, but the strangeness hit when the context changed: could we document and look through everything like we do with space?

How can we find a fragile balance between violence, voice and silence? A mapping of the trace of life, a look through the X-ray of the observed, without a warning sign of the radiation. What is the force and shape of the particles that we ourselves have emitted through that observational gaze?

Those traces on the museum board seem to show a fork in the road, with one way leading to a fantasy of transparency through a fluorescent screen, another to a heroic fairy tale of a smooth and glazing avenue of success. Neither of which is truth-telling.

Then we come to wonder: is there a way in which the most mundane labor and care and the most cultlike fondness for several fonts or jargons could be represented; where failure, risks, friction, and sometimes unpaid labor could also have their place; where our method and its setbacks show their shape?

So that one day you are finally able to walk your granny through an exhibition and say, to make beautiful, sometimes; to make function, often; to care, always.