The exhibition Impasse des Lilas by MBL at arc en rêve in Bordeaux confirms a feeling I have had for some time: architecture exhibitions are becoming more exciting than art exhibitions. A growing number of architecture shows are drivers of change and spaces of critical resonance. Many of these exhibitions function as media of research and experimentation. And many deal with issues that go beyond architecture as such. Architecture exhibitions seem to look towards the future and to what is beyond their boundaries. Art shows, on the other hand, seem to look backwards and mainly mirror themselves.
Of course, art has a much longer exhibition history than architecture, reaching back to early modern aristocratic collections and the salons of the seventeenth century. It is no wonder that during much of the twentieth century, architecture exhibitions stood in the shadow of art shows. From their modest beginnings in a niche – when the Department of Architecture was founded at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in the early 1930s – to their emancipation around 1980 – marked by the launch of the first Venice Architecture Biennale and the establishment of architecture museums and exhibition spaces in Montreal, New York, Berlin, Vienna, Frankfurt, etc. –, they tended to mimic art exhibitions. To this day, many architecture exhibitions seem to suffer from a minority complex in relation to art shows. But something has changed in the last two decades.
Allegorical impulse
Although Impasse des Lilas features several artworks (for instance, a stone sculpture by Lois Weinberger and an installation by Gustav Metzger), in no way does it resemble an art exhibition. The show rather reminds me of a Wunderkammer, a flea market or an old attic full of objects. Perhaps this is due to the fact that visitors have to climb several stairs in the labyrinthic former warehouse to reach the upper gallery, which is located under an open roof truss. Models, books, documents, artworks, objects designed by MBL, textiles, boxes and devices are laid out on Plexiglas sheets on the floor or placed on transparent pedestals. Like scattered puzzle pieces, they wait to be arranged and ordered in the imagination of visitors. I immediately became curious and felt invited to discover something unexpected. An allegorical impulse aminates the selection of objects and triggers chains of associations and resonances.
The theme of Impasse des Lilas – namely, that urban sprawl and the homogenization of housing driven by the construction industry has transformed the environment in France – might not be particularly new. However, the show doesn’t merely illustrate this thesis. Rather, it takes it as a starting point to articulate a network of ideas, references, connections. It doesn’t define its subject matter. It doesn’t claim that there is a strict relation of causality in architecture but rather demonstrates what architecture could be. There are no labels. Booklets containing all the references and identifying the exposed objects are piled high and can be taken, free of charge, by the visitors. Signage is given by the titles of the various sections of the exhibition that are written on boards leaning against the walls. They contain messages such as “Neither City nor Countryside”, “Neutrality and Eclecticism”, “The Allegory of the Cloud”, “Know Nothing, Discover Everything”. Like the objects on the floor, their meaning is not fixed but open to interpretation. For instance, the title “Know Nothing,Discover Everything” sounds like a motto for the experimental nature of current architecture exhibitions.
I read “Impasse des Lilas” – which quotes the most common name given to new access roads in housing developments in France – as an ironic echo of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown’s famous statement, “Main Street is almost all right ”. In my interpretation, this suggests that the linear trajectory leading from modernism to postmodernism that Venturi and Rauch had located in the Las Vegas Strip has been absorbed by a network of dead-end paths. Or perhaps that the urban artery has moved out of focus and we face a diffuse pattern of connections that are neither urban nor rural.
Twingo
I had expected that a model or documentary photograph of one of MBL’s projects would mark the entrance to Impasse des Lilas. But instead of the model of a house, the architects selected a wind tunnel model of a Renault Twingo. I’ve always liked this cheap and robust car from the early 1990s for both its design and its name, a playful combination of the dances Twist, 229Swing and Tango. I admire the asymmetrically placed triad of tiny air intakes. And I find sympathetic the round headlights which look like twinkling eyes and the plump silhouette which resembles a harmless guinea pig rather than an aggressive predator.
Why did the architects place the car model in their show? Is it an ironic reference to the cliché of a luxury car parked next to a building that features in many architecture photographs since Le Corbusier? Is it an homage to a design which remains contemporary even after thirty years? Or is it, on the contrary, a symbol of self-optimization by the middle-class subject, caught in the spiral of mortgage and commute in a zone that is neither urban nor rural? Is the clumsy vehicle after all the real inhabitant of the countless “Impasses des Lilas” which have been built all over France? The model of a picturesque, standardized landscape by Didier Marcel placed near the car and the map of a suburban road network printed onto the Plexiglas sheet points to the latter interpretation.
The Twingo model resembles the small yellow plastic duck exhibited nearby which was signed and given to the architects by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. In fact, besides representations of MBL’s own work, the show does contain several historical references: for instance, reproductions of Kazumasa Yamashita’s Face House and Lacaton & Vassal’s Maison Latapie. But the references are diverse and eclectic. They go beyond architecture and extend towards product design, science, literature and pop culture. They recall souvenirs collected during the years of learning, travelling and working, and contain, for instance, a coffee cup by Jasper Morrison and a collection of BIC pens.
Stagnation of the art exhibition
Impasse des Lilas raises questions but doesn’t claim to have all the answers. Each of the sections lays out another set of fragments of thought, speculation, play. This brings me back to the above observation of architecture exhibitions as being more innovative than art shows. Of course, there is no doubt that art exhibitions today are booming, that they are successful and popular. They attract millions of visitors and are drivers of the tourism industry. However, the set-up of art exhibitions has hardly evolved in the last fifty years. Since the 1960s, the white cube, the empty loft and, to some extent, the environment of the inner city remain the privileged backdrops for the display of artworks. Art shows, unlike during the period from the mid-nineteenth to the late-twentieth century, have lost their normative significance.
How can one explain this stagnation? On the one hand, it is a function of the overarching power of the art market and the tourism industry. The mainstream of art exhibitions is fixated on the presentation of collectible artworks and on spectacular accumulations of valuable objects, masterpieces, trophies. In terms of both content – what is exhibited – and display – how it is exhibited –, these exhibitions adhere to a canonical system of values rooted in the art market. Unlike in the realm of art, in architecture there is no substantial market for collectibles. There is no such value system in architecture. After a brief boom around 1980, the market for architecture models and drawings today has almost disappeared. Unlike in the realm of art, collectors and dealers have no influence on the selection of exhibition contents. The price of architectural documents is negligible in comparison to the prices of artworks.
Another reason for the conceptual standstill of art exhibitions is the power of the “contemporaneity” of art. “Contemporary art” – a basically ahistorical conception of art as a self-referential, autonomous phenomenon – has replaced what was understood as “modern art” – an art which is legitimized through the relationship to its own history. Historicism and autonomy are the pillars of both modern and contemporary art. In the realm of architecture, there is no such thing as “contemporaneity”. There might be something which can be called “modernist architecture” and something which could be labelled “postmodernist architecture”, but what comes after this is unrelated to the contemporaneity of art. In fact, the system of periodization and stylistic difference is crumbling and architecture’s temporal horizon keeps broadening. It spans a time horizon from the present to the pre-historical and a spectrum reaching from the man-made to the more than human, from the artifice to the geological. Architecture is not isolated from the rest of the world, nor from history.
Compensation for an absent architecture theory
The standstill of art exhibitions contrasts with the dynamic changes of architecture shows. Since the millennium, the Venice Architecture Biennale and many other such events, including arc en rêve in Bordeaux, FRAC Orléans and the Triennale di Milano,have evolved to become testing grounds for news ideas, formats and themes. They are closely linked to academia, to higher education, to specialized journals and scholarship. And they are attracting more and more visitors. Initially a humble appendix to the Art Biennale, the Architecture Biennale in Venice today attracts almost as many visitors as its older sister, founded in 1895. Numerous architecture biennials and triennials – from Sharjah to Chicago, from Tbilisi to Rotterdam – are a sign of a growing demand.
My hypothesis is that this momentum is related to the fact that there is no theory of architecture today. Exhibitions have, to some extent, taken over the role of theory; in other words, they have become the vantage point from which phenomena can be critically observed, negotiated, described and modified. In retrospect, it seems that architecture exhibitions began to come alive and achieve a critical impact precisely around the time when architecture theory faded out – around 1980, as symbolized by the iconic Strada Novissima at the Venice Arsenale. One could call this the ‘end’ of modernist architecture theory or the “beginning” of postmodernism. But these notions have been hollowed out with the fading of a theoretical horizon.
My hypothesis is thus the following: The stronger the theory, the weaker the exhibitions. The more succinct the conceptual grip, the more exhibitions merely illustrate and document what is already clear. On the other hand, the weaker the theory becomes, the stronger the exhibitions get. It seems that exhibitions have a compensatory function, that they stand for, articulate, make visible, show something which cannot be said adequately and which eludes the existing concepts. The relevance of shows like Impasse des Lilas is that they enable us to perceive this openness and freedom. They function like the beginning of a play, full of possibilities. Impasse des Lilas makes dead-end streets visible. But as an exhibition, it is anything but an impasse.
Excerpt from Impasse des Lilas, MBL architectes, 2025.
Published by par Accattone (Bruxelles) and arc en rêve (Bordeaux) with contirbutions by Carlo Menon, Orfée Grandhomme, Sophie Dars, Ismaël Bennani, Alexandra Midal, Thomas Daniell and Philip Ursprung.
English, with French translations, 252 pages.