Future Archeology, Los Angeles, USA, 2009

The exhibition “Future Archaeology” curates our work at the LA Forum for Architecture and Urban Design on Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles, California. The show featured the studio’s recent projects displayed in various ways, in collaboration with a number of artists including Iwan Baan, Corinne van der Borch, Sean Capote, and Paula Hayes. The exhibition positions these projects in the larger context of their times.

Society’s systematic relocation to the virtual realm has greatly affected a traditional sense of social space. While architecture shaped the social realm in a pre-network culture, it now carries the risk of becoming a friction-less, 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 representing a new modernity in slick forms.

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