The Exhibition as an Archive

Abstract

There has recently been a wide-ranging resurgence of international interest in the radical architecture of the 1960s and 70s, but the experimental publications that were the engine of that intensely creative period have been neglected. The exhibition Clip/Stamp/Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines 196x -197x, which opened in New York in 2006, researched, exhibited, and documented the remarkable outburst of new forms of publication that echoed yet transcended the avant-garde publications of the 1920s, launching a whole spectrum of activist practices. The research was the basis for an exhibition that travelled to numerous venues in North America, Europe and Latin America, steadily building up a new kind of archive, an interactive archive that grows as it travels around the world. Clip/Stamp/Fold investigates how an internationally diverse group of architectural little magazines informed the development of postwar architectural culture. These publications were not simply representing architecture but were a site of architectural production in its own right, challenging building as the primary locus of experimentation and debate. Little magazines developed a serious of horizontal strategies to undermine the borders between disciplines, schools, countries, etc. and established an activist network. This raises the question of new strategies today in blogs, tweets, youtube, facebook, etc. Whether they are a continuation of the activist techniques of the little magazines or whether the contemporary political climate is now built out of such networking systems and therefore whole new techniques will need to be developed.