Curating in teaching and research: ‹The Institute gta and its role in architectural discourse since 1967› as exhibition project

Is it possible to exhibit architecture? What are the objectives behind architecture exhibitions? What impact do they have on the architect’s creative process and how architecture is perceived in the context of society as a whole? What roles do exhibitions play in the scientific system? What opportunities do they have for knowledge? How are these brought about?
The questions about curatorial practice in the architectural environment are central to current architectural discourse. They are to be integrated into the university teaching with the help of an interdisciplinary exhibition project to promise both epistemological reflection and complex, situational learning through applications-based teaching with a broad societal impact.
Innovative to the concept is the combination of research and teaching that conveys information about architecture and therefore research, teaching and society. Students research the history of the gta institute, one of the world’s most renowned institutes of its kind, extending into the present and pinpoint it within the international discourse on architecture. However, key to this is also the question about conveying the students› research outcomes in a public exhibition, which makes the constant investigation of the relevance of the researched context and therefore permits responsible action of the students in an environment beyond the artistic learning arrangement. The project pursues an interdisciplinary approach to be able to reasonably pursue the scientifically relevant background of the mediatisation in the form of exhibitions. It is precisely in this way that it satisfies the fundamental interest of MAS students for a theoretic grounding in design practice of which the curatorial practice part forms, especially today.

The focus project builds on the experience of MAS ETH gta and the institute gta in teaching and research, but also contributes to strengthening existing skills and developing new ones. With its committed, forward-thinking students MAS offers the unique opportunity to establish structures and processes that may be made productive for further teaching at MAS ETH gta, but also, in the medium to long term, for an architect’s basic training , and even more so, as student involvement in the physical development of exhibitions and tours is already an established part of teaching at the institute. This should now be extended to include the important area of the content design of exhibitions. Through their involvement in such an exhibition project, students understand research as a free and independent, yet socially relevant undertaking that also includes the communication of research questions and results with a broad impact.

Besides the integration of students in the discourse of a collective research practice their introduction into the issues of dissemination of research questions and -results to a wider audience stands at the center of the project. This is done not by means of a constructed model object, but by the cooperative and interdisciplinary processing of a specific, highly relevant (and due to the importance and the international reputation of the Institute gta highly publicized) research and exhibition project.