Throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, architects have increasingly taken on curatorial roles, using exhibitions as powerful tools to define, challenge, and reshape architectural discourse. From Philip Johnson's canonical 1932 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art to Lesley Lokko's groundbreaking 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale, architect-curators have demonstrated that building culture is as important as building structures.
Architecture has never been limited to the physical act of construction. It constantly negotiates between material practice and intellectual reflection, yet many architects have found that built projects alone cannot address the full spectrum of questions facing their discipline. Economic pressures, political contexts, and programmatic demands often narrow the scope of architectural practice, leaving little room for experimentation or critique.
Exhibitions and curatorial platforms have emerged as crucial spaces where architecture can examine itself critically. These venues allow the discipline to reinterpret its past, challenge its present assumptions, and project possible futures. In this dynamic environment, the architect-curator has become a figure who treats curating as a form of design – not of walls or facades, but of discourse, narratives, and frameworks of meaning.
The importance of this curatorial role cannot be overstated. Without such interventions, architecture risks being reduced to mere service or style, stripped of its capacity for critical thought. Architecture biennales and triennales have become fundamental stages where the discipline reflects on its identity, formulates new agendas, and tests its theoretical and practical limits.
The emergence of the architect-curator began with Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock's pivotal exhibition "Modern Architecture: International Exhibition" at the Museum of Modern Art in 1932. This show did far more than simply display contemporary buildings – it invented an entire narrative about modernism. While modernist architecture had already emerged in Europe through figures like Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and Mies van der Rohe, it lacked coherence as a unified cultural movement.
In the United States, isolated examples of modern architecture existed through practitioners like Richard Neutra in California and Howe & Lescaze in Philadelphia, but these were viewed as exceptions rather than part of a broader architectural shift. The MoMA exhibition fundamentally changed this perception by bringing these disparate works together under the newly coined label of the "International Style."
Johnson and Hitchcock presented modernism as a unified architectural language rather than a series of disconnected practices. Their accompanying book, "The International Style: Architecture Since 1922," distilled the movement into three core principles: volume over mass, regularity over symmetry, and the deliberate avoidance of ornament. These criteria served as curatorial tools as much as theoretical definitions, providing a framework for understanding and evaluating modern architecture.
However, this influential framing came at a significant cost. By privileging rationalist and purist examples, the exhibition downplayed the rich diversity of early modernism. It neglected expressionist architecture in Germany, regional experiments in Scandinavia, and the socially driven modernism of Eastern Europe. The curatorial lens effectively flattened a heterogeneous architectural landscape into a single, seemingly coherent style.
Despite this reductive approach, the simplification proved remarkably powerful. Through the cultural authority of the museum, an avant-garde architectural tendency was transformed into established cultural orthodoxy. The exhibition's impact was immediate and far-reaching, providing American architects with a canon that would inform both architectural education and practice for decades to come.
By the early 1970s, architectural modernism was experiencing a profound crisis. The optimism of the postwar decades had significantly waned, the promises of functionalist architecture were increasingly questioned, and younger generations of architects were turning to history and urban form in search of renewed meaning and relevance.
Aldo Rossi's intervention at the 1973 Triennale di Milano marked a crucial redirecting of architectural discourse toward memory, continuity, and typology. Italy had become a particular laboratory for this critique, where the evident failures of modernist housing projects and the political turbulence of 1968 created fertile ground for theoretical and cultural debate about architecture's role and methods.
Alongside collaborators from the Tendenza movement, including Carlo Aymonino and Giorgio Grassi, Rossi presented drawings, models, and theoretical projects that emphasized the persistence of architectural types throughout history. Their curatorial approach deliberately resisted the dominant narrative of modern architecture as linear progress, proposing instead a cyclical conception of architectural history in which buildings were fundamentally bound to collective memory and cultural continuity.
This curatorial stance was decidedly not nostalgic or backward-looking. By reasserting the continuing relevance of typology, Rossi challenged the reduction of architecture to mere function or technology, insisting that architectural meaning resided in formal permanence and cultural memory. The exhibition functioned as a laboratory of architectural theory, where spatial arrangements were treated as intellectual arguments and curatorial choices operated as theoretical propositions.
The implications of Rossi's curatorial strategy extended far beyond Italian architectural debates, influencing international discussions on what would become known as postmodernism. Prominent figures such as Rafael Moneo, Oswald Mathias Ungers, and later Peter Eisenman engaged with his emphasis on typology and memory, often through their own exhibitions and theoretical writings.
By the end of the 1970s, architectural modernism had lost much of the aura of inevitability it once possessed. Its functionalist doctrines had been systematically challenged, its universal claims exposed as reductive and culturally insensitive, and architects across Europe and the United States were actively experimenting with irony, symbolism, and historical reference in their work.
Paolo Portoghesi's exhibition "La Presenza del Passato" (The Presence of the Past), which served as the first officially recognized Venice Architecture Biennale in 1980, crystallized these emerging tendencies into a single, coherent cultural event. More than simply an exhibition, it staged a new intellectual and cultural condition for architectural practice: the definitive arrival of postmodernism as a legitimate architectural movement.
The centerpiece of Portoghesi's groundbreaking Biennale was the "Strada Novissima" (The New Street), an elaborate installation inside the Corderie dell'Arsenale composed of twenty distinct facades designed by internationally recognized architects. Each facade functioned as an architectural statement, deliberately employing quotation, eclecticism, and historical references that directly opposed the formal austerity and historical amnesia of the International Style.
This installation was far more than mere scenography or architectural theater. It functioned as a built manifesto that dramatized Charles Jencks's famous claim that "modern architecture died in St. Louis, Missouri, on July 15, 1972, at 3:32 p.m." – referring to the demolition of the infamous Pruitt-Igoe housing project, which had become a symbol of modernism's social and architectural failures.
Where architectural modernism had sought universality and cultural homogenization, Portoghesi's curatorial approach celebrated multiplicity and cultural difference. Where Johnson's influential MoMA exhibition had worked to canonize a single architectural approach, Portoghesi's Biennale deliberately theatricalized architectural diversity, exposing the discipline's internal debates and elevating postmodernism to global recognition and legitimacy.
By the early 2010s, the Venice Architecture Biennale had become increasingly associated with architectural spectacle and celebrity culture. Each successive edition seemed to compete in displaying the most spectacular projects by the most internationally recognizable architectural names, inadvertently reinforcing the "starchitecture" system that had come to dominate professional practice and public perception.
Against this problematic backdrop, Rem Koolhaas's curatorship of the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale marked a radical rupture with established expectations. Under the comprehensive title "Fundamentals," Koolhaas deliberately refused to stage yet another celebration of contemporary architectural projects and celebrity architects. Instead, he sought to strip architecture back to its essential elements, systematically dismantling the myths of individual authorship and constant novelty to expose what he considered the discipline's basic DNA.
The ambitious exhibition was organized around three interconnected components. "Absorbing Modernity 1914-2014" invited national pavilions to reflect critically on a full century of architectural homogenization and modernization, highlighting how local cultural identities had been transformed, and often entirely erased, by the global spread of modernist paradigms and building techniques.
"Monditalia" used Italy itself as a complex lens, deliberately blending architecture with politics, cinema, and performance to narrate the contradictions and complexities of a country often described as a laboratory of the modern condition. Meanwhile, "Elements of Architecture," developed in collaboration with Harvard Graduate School of Design, focused intensive attention on fifteen fundamental architectural components – wall, floor, ceiling, door, window, stair, and others – with each element examined through detailed historical, cultural, and technological analysis.
This systematic structure revealed that Koolhaas's curatorial strategy was fundamentally about deconstructing the architectural discipline by fragmenting it into constituent parts. Instead of asking what architecture "is" in the contemporary moment, he posed the more fundamental question of what architecture is "made of" across cultures and throughout history. This focus on elemental components deliberately moved attention away from individual architects and iconic buildings, placing analytical spotlight on the shared grammar of construction that transcends both geography and individual authorship.
The intellectual stakes of "Fundamentals" were remarkably high. Koolhaas argued convincingly that the twentieth century represented not only the story of modernism's global triumph but also of modernity's systematic cultural erasures: the widespread loss of local building traditions, the relentless standardization of architectural form, and the comprehensive commodification of spatial experience. By methodically dismantling the architectural discipline into its component parts, he invited architects and the broader public to confront what had been forgotten, suppressed, or rendered invisible in architecture's relentless pursuit of progress and novelty.
Lesley Lokko's curatorial project for the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale represented another decisive departure from traditional architectural narratives. Her exhibition, "The Laboratory of the Future," marked a systematic effort to decolonize architectural discourse by foregrounding African and diasporic voices and placing urgent questions of identity, race, and climate change at the very center of architectural discussion and debate.
Lokko expanded the established role of architect-curator into that of cultural critic and political activist, using the prestigious international stage of the Venice Biennale not merely to showcase contemporary projects but to fundamentally challenge the structures of power and privilege that have historically shaped architectural discourse, education, and practice.
Overlapping global crises defined the broader context for Lokko's curatorial intervention: the accelerating and increasingly visible effects of climate change, the persistent realities of global economic inequality, and the growing urgency of rethinking architecture's historical complicity in colonial and extractive systems of power and resource exploitation.
While previous Venice Biennale editions had typically privileged Euro-American perspectives and well-established architectural practices, Lokko insisted on a radical rebalancing of voices and viewpoints. More than half of the exhibition's participants were from Africa or the African diaspora, and the exhibition systematically framed the African continent not as a marginal territory requiring development assistance, but as a dynamic site of architectural experimentation, cultural resilience, and innovative spatial production.
Exhibition sections such as "Force Majeure" gave unprecedented visibility to architects, artists, and activists whose work directly addressed spatial realities often completely excluded from mainstream architectural discourse – from the design challenges of informal settlements to innovative approaches to climate adaptation and the spatial expression of cultural identity and community resilience.
The curatorial concept of a "laboratory of the future" fundamentally redefined the temporal framework of the Biennale itself, presenting the exhibition as a space of ongoing experimentation and collaborative research rather than a venue for presenting definitive conclusions or finished architectural products. This approach deliberately privileged open-ended questions over predetermined answers, emphasizing process over product and collective inquiry over individual achievement.
From Philip Johnson's canonical modernist exhibition to Lesley Lokko's decolonizing curatorial practice, these architect-curators have demonstrated that exhibitions function as more than mere displays of architectural work. They operate as active constructors of discourse, shapers of professional consciousness, and definers of disciplinary boundaries and possibilities. Through their curatorial interventions, these figures have ensured that architecture remains fundamentally a practice of ideas and cultural engagement, not merely a technical service or aesthetic pursuit.
The figure of the architect-curator has thus become essential to architecture's continued vitality as an intellectual discipline. By constructing not only buildings but also the cultural and theoretical infrastructures through which architecture understands itself, these curatorial practitioners have maintained architecture's capacity for self-reflection, cultural critique, and imaginative speculation about alternative spatial futures.
