5 New Architecture & Design Exhibitions for September 2021

According to the 6th century CE antiquarian John the Lydian, “the oracle recommends drinking milk for the sake of good health all through the month of September”.¹

And while milk may have advantages in terms of your physical health, for your spiritual and intellectual health, we’d recommend the following quintet of new architecture, design and art exhibitions opening in September 2021.

Whereby, exhibitions and milk aren’t mutually exclusive, you can partake of both if you so wish……

“Verner Panton. Colouring a New World”, at Trapholt, Kolding, Denmark

Enough said……

……or possibly not, for, as oft discussed in these dispatches, the popular simplification and reduction of design, the popular objectification of design, means that Verner Panton is all too often and all too easily simplified and reduced to the ageometric and the colourful. Is all too often and too easily reduced to, and understood as, the what.

Verner Panton. Colouring a New World at Trapholt, Kolding, should allow us all to better approach the whys and wherefores of Verner Panton.

Promising an exploration of the oeuvre of Verner Panton over some 1,000 square metres, an exhibition space as outrageously expansive as much of the Panton oeuvre, the principle focus, certainly principle visual focus, of Colouring a New World promises to be, and as the title implies, Verner Panton’s use of and understanding of colour; albeit a focus on colour which rather than merely celebrating that use of colour, should help elucidate Panton’s understanding of colour as functional, should help elucidate that there was always a reason for the colour. And that reason had nothing to do with lazy marketing.

Colouring a New World however also promises to look beyond the visually dominant and to undertake a more detailed exploration of the Verner Panton of the exhibition title, “from his first designs to the last, from one-off design elements to furniture and installations”, and for all furniture and installations “that you are free to sit, lie, walk, lounge and fly in”, the latter being of particular importance, as understanding Verner Panton necessitates viewing the world from Verner Panton’s perspective. Physically and philosophically. Via and in conjunction with all our senses and emotions.

Verner Panton. Colouring a New World should allow for exactly that perspective. And thus a fresh perspective on not just Verner Panton but the world around us.

Verner Panton. Colouring a New World is scheduled to open at Trapholt, Æblehaven 2,  6000 Kolding on Thursday September 30th and run until Sunday August 14th. Please check the Trapholt website for current information regarding opening times, ticketing and safety/hygiene regulations.

“Romanticism to Ruin: Two Lost Works of Sullivan and Wright” at Wrightwood 659, Chicago, Illinois, USA

Contemporary building preservation initiatives and their ilk mean that demolishing any building either by a prominent architect and/or considered important in context of a city and/or considered important in the development of architecture, is thoroughly inconceivable. It simply isn’t going to happen. That wasn’t always so, is in many regards a thoroughly contemporary phenomenon.

Thus Wrightwood 659 are forced to present recreations, or perhaps more accurately, approach as best one can in our current age recreations, of two key works by two of the most important protagonists in the development in the development of architecture in late 19th/early 2th centuries America: specifically the Larkin Administration Building in Buffalo, New York, by Frank Lloyd Wright, an early solo project by Lloyd Wright, and, as previously discussed, a milestone of office design in terms of the building’s layout and conception as an active component of the company’s work flows; and the Garrick Theatre in Chicago, Illinois, by Louis H. Sullivan, or more accurately the Garrick Theatre in Chicago, Illinois, by Louis H. Sullivan and Dankmar Adler.

We yield ground to no-one in our admiration of Louis H. Sullivan, but in many of his greater works, such as the Garrick, Sullivan was Sullivan & Adler. But Adler was a civil engineer, and architectural historians famously aren’t keen on civil engineers, because they remind contemporary architects that without engineers architects are 2D visionaries not 3D artists, and t…. but we digress.

Promising a multimedial presentation of the Larkin and Garrick which, and much as with recreations of no longer existent buildings from Antiquity or the Middle Ages, aim to bring to life that which is no longer with us, Romanticism to Ruin should not only allow for some nice insights into the approaches, positions and relevance of Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis H. Sullivan (and Dankmar Adler), but should also pose some pertinent questions on the preservation of buildings, the criteria we use for the preservation of buildings, in how far preservation is always best the option, why we preserve, if we could achieve more for our contemporary urban spaces through redesigning the existing, on the question of contemporary building preservation initiatives and their ilk…..

Romanticism to Ruin: Two Lost Works of Sullivan and Wright is scheduled to open at Wrightwood 659, 659 W. Wrightwood Chicago, IL 60614 on Friday September 24th and run until Saturday September 27th. Please check the Wrightwood 659 website for current information regarding opening times, ticketing and safety/hygiene regulations.

“Noguchi” at The Barbican Art Gallery, London, England

As oft noted, for all that Isamu Noguchi is popularly considered a product designer, of all the things Isamu Noguchi was, he was arguably least of all a product designer. And whatever else Isamu Noguchi was, he was always a sculptor.

Something that the Barbican Art Gallery should help make very clear.

Promising a presentation of works from across Noguchi’s career, and for all from across Noguchi’s canon, including examples of his stage design, public space design, playground design, lighting design, furniture design and sculpture – whereby regardless of what else it is, it is all sculpture – Noguchi should allow not only for a probable and sustainable introduction to both the Isamu Noguchi biography and the development of his understandings and positions throughout that biography, nor only allow for a better understanding of Isamu Noguchi’s place in and relevance to the development of architecture, art, scenography, design in the 20th century, but for all should help place sculpture, Noguchi’s understanding of sculpture, at the heart of what he was and what he achieved.

And which in doing so should only help improve popular understandings of Isamu Noguchi, but popular understandings of sculpture.

Noguchi is scheduled to open at the Barbican Art Gallery, Barbican Centre, Silk Street, London, EC2Y 8DS on Thursday September 30th and run until Sunday January 9th. Please check the Barbican website for current information regarding opening times, ticketing and safety/hygiene regulations.

“The Architecture of Staged Realities” at Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam, Holland

If, as William Shakespeare once opined, “all the world’s a stage”, then the scenography in which we move is critical in shaping our understanding of that world

As are those responsible for that scenography.

With The Architecture of Staged Realities Het Nieuwe Instituut aim to explore the scenographies both developed by and inspired/informed by Walt Disney – man and corporation – and for all aim to explore the understandings engendered and positions advanced in contemporary global culture and society by those scenographies.

Promising an exploration of not just Walt Disney – man and corporation – but for all a presentation of projects by artists, designers and architects which both directly and indirectly reference Walt Disney – man and corporation – The Architecture of Staged Realities should not only allow for differentiated understandings of the inter-relationships between popular culture and society, nor only allow for differentiated understandings of how our world as we experience it relates to how we approach our world, if one so will the cause and effect relationships in contemporary society, but should also allow for some differentiated understandings as to how our contemporary staged social media realities could, must?, will? shape our near future world.

The Architecture of Staged Realities is scheduled to open at Het Nieuwe Instituut, Museumpark 25, 3015 CB Rotterdam on Sunday September 5th and run until Sunday March 27th. Please check the Het Nieuwe Instituut website for current information regarding opening times, ticketing and safety/hygiene regulations.

“Work it Out” at Kunsten, Aalborg, Denmark

The future of work is a most contemporary subject.

Or more correctly the future of office work. Most people who spend their working days considering the future of work, work in (home) offices and tend to consider the future of (home) office workers and not of the future of factory, healthcare, transportation, retail, education, hospitality, etc workers. And as such over recent years, and particularly during the Covid pandemic, (home) office work has become one and the same as “work”, as in the only form of work humans undertake in the 21st century, that factory, healthca… but, again, we digress……

The future of work is a most contemporary subject, and a discussion Kunsten Aalborg seek to contribute to in Work it Out not via the understandings, propositions, visions of the architects or designers who are normally asked to contribute to such a discussion, but via the understandings, propositions, visions of artists, that group of creatives who can’t directly change realities, but who have an enviable freedom that enables them to approach contemporary questions from otherwise unseen, unseeable, perspectives and who thus are in a unique position to inform and guide not only ongoing discourses but the work of the architects and designers who can directly change realities.

And aims to do so, if we’ve understood correctly, via an exhibition concept that takes the discussion out of the museum and into both downtown Aalborg and also a number of “arbejdspladser“, workplaces, one presumes offices, and therefore a juxtaposition of the theoretical with the practical.

Which, again if we’ve understood correctly, should help reinforce a parallel theme of Work it Out, the relationships between art museums and contemporary/future society. Or perhaps more accurately the highlighting that art museums have a relationship with contemporary/future society. Or can have.

Work it Out is scheduled to open at Kunsten Museum of Modern Art Aalborg, Kong Christians Allé 50, 9000 Aalborg on Friday September 24th and run until Sunday January 16th. Please check the Kunsten website for current information regarding opening times, ticketing and safety/hygiene regulations.

1. John the Lydian, De Mensibus