Future Archeology is the title of an exhibition of SO-IL’s work held at the LA Forum for Architecture and Urban Design on Hollywood Blvd. in Los Angeles, between 09/18/09 - 10/18/09. The show features the studio’s recent projects shown in various ways in collaboration with a number of artists (Iwan Baan, Corinne van der Borch, Sean Capote, Paula Hayes). Through its theme it positions these in the larger context of our times.

LA Forum.

Society’s systematic relocation to the virtual has greatly affected a traditional sense of social space. Where in a pre-network culture, architecture shaped the social realm it now risks becoming the frictionless, temporary carrier of the virtual. This shift delaminates ‘value’ from the physical world, allowing it to flow and mutate freely, leaving behind millions of acres of boarded up homes, dead malls, rejected icons, shrinking towns and piles of expired ‘value-carriers’. In these fraught conditions we search for an architecture that can re-invigorate our sensibilities and offer constructive resistance that appropriates latent frictions rather than merely represent a new modernity in slick forms.

The exhibition is an exploration of an architecture with intrinsic value; one which shifts away from the flat qualities of the virtual - the graphic, the explicit, the sterile, the mechanic - toward the full characters of the tactile, the spatial, the sensorial and multi-valent. Through models, projections and collaborations with various artist and photographers the exhibition tries to convey an overall mood rather than a set of facts.

download curatorial statement and content of here

Generous support for the show comes from the Stimuleringsfonds voor Architectuur and the Consulate General of the Netherlands.