Studio Offshore/Alexander Eisenschmidt, Lakeshore Hut Project, part of “Inscriptions: Architecture Before Speech” exhibition at Druker Design Gallery, Harvard Graduate School of Design, January 23 – March 11, 2018. Curated by K. Michael Hays and Andrew Holder.
Exhibition photographs are courtesy of Justin Knight / Harvard GSD
From the exhibition text:
If recent theory has highlighted architecture’s turn to evident resemblance and signification, we argue this tendency has also produced its other: The landscape of contemporary practice is filled with work whose motivating interests are anterior to meaning and averse to thematization; they are, in a way, pre-speech. Projects in this mode are born of the original human postulate to claim a place in the world, to confirm having been there, to make and mark a difference. Inscriptions is a broad survey of work that problematizes, resists, and exceeds signification by appealing to other kinds of cultural engagements, agreements, and fantasies of architecture’s origins. Important projects by Harvard University Graduate School of Design faculty spanning more than 35 years of practice are interspersed as conceptual keystones among works from emerging architects across the American academy, offering a theory of the structural relationships that bind and organize even the apparent delirium of the contemporary field.
Press:
Philip Stevens, “Inscriptions’ Exhibition at the Harvard GSD Surveys Architecture Before Speech,” DesignBoom, March 1, 20018.
For more information about the project, see Studio Offshore.