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Abstract
The following paper takes as its starting point a posed photograph of the members’ room space within the Architectural Association’s AA125 exhibition. The image is one of the only published traces of this travelling exhibition, a show first installed at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, from April 5 to 29, 1973, to celebrate the AA’s 125th anniversary, which included a full-scale “reconstruction” of the institution’s members’ room at 36 Bedford Square. AA Chairman Alvin Boyarsky’s staging of the AA members’ room, we argue, functioned as an inhabitable exhibition environment that simultaneously reinforced the enduring identity of the AA—one of the most important architecture schools in Europe—as an independent institution, while also signaling its recent reinvention under Boyarksy’s direction. Recent research on the institutional history of the AA has drawn attention to Boyarksy’s role in revitalizing the school through a series of ambitious teaching and publication initiatives. The paper builds on these studies by repositioning this underexplored exhibition and, more specifically, the members’ room installation as an important part of Boyarsky’s political and pedagogical project for the AA during the 1970s.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Edward Bottoms for his assistance with the AA archives and for insightful comments and conversations.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
Notes
1 The exhibition was designed by Archigram and produced by Dennis Sharp, Nikki Hay, Charlene Koonce, Rosario Hanna, Pierre Junod, Dominique Murray, Gail Turner and Cathy de Witt. The school was founded in 1847.
2 AA 125: Architectural Association School 125th Anniversary Exhibition (London: The Architectural Association, 1973), 1. The exhibition catalogue designed by Archigram and researched by Judith Lever.
3 The project was originally drafted by Boyarsky in March 1972 and included an itinerant exhibition, a catalogue, a book mainly focused on the work at the AA in the last 25 years, and a film produced by the BBC. See Manfredo di Robillant, Contro il metodo in architettura. Episodi e temi dell’Architectural Association 1968–1982 (Macerata: Quodlibet Studio, 2019), 133.
4 John Rajchman, “Les Immatériaux or How to Construct the History of Exhibitions,” Tate Papers 12 (Autumn 2009), https://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/12/les-immateriaux-or-how-to-construct-the-history-of-exhibitions.
5 David Grahame Shane, written interview with the authors, July 7, 2018.
6 The authors have further explored this concept in Alexandra Brown and Léa-Catherine Szacka (eds.), “The Architecture Exhibition as Environment,” special issue, Architectural Theory Review 23, no. 1.
7 The AA’s institutional history during the 1970s and 1980s has been the subject of recent work by scholars such as Irene Sunwoo, Igor Marjanovic, Ed Bottoms and Isabelle Doucet. See, for example, Irene Sunwoo, “From the ‘Well-Laid Table’ to the ‘Market Place:’ The Architectural Association Unit System,” Journal of Architectural Education 65, no. 2 (March 2012): 24–41; Irene Sunwoo, ed., In Progress: The IID Summer Sessions (London: Bedford Press, 2017); Igor Marjanovic and John Howard, Drawing Ambience: Alvin Boyarsky and the Architectural Association (St. Louis, MO: Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, 2014); Igor Marjanovic, “Serial Postmodernity: Architectural Association Publications in the 1980s,” in Mediated Messages Periodicals, Exhibitions and the Shaping of Postmodern Architecture, ed. Veronique Patteeuw and Léa-Catherine Szacka (London: Bloomsbury, 2018): 43–60; Isabelle Doucet, “Architecture Wrestling the Social: The ‘Live’ Project as Site of Contestation,” Candide: Journal for Architectural Knowledge 10 (2016): 13–40; and the aforementioned book by di Robillant, Contro il metodo in architettura.
8 Sunwoo, “From the ‘Well-Laid Table’ to the ‘Market Place’,” 24.
9 See Peter Cook, “Alvin Boyarsky (1928–1990),” Architectural Review 28 (September 2012), https://www.architectural-review.com/essays/reputations-pen-portraits-/alvin-boyarsky-1928-1990/8636161.article
10 “The AA NOW, The Architectural Association in 125 years old,” brochure, from personal archive of Alvin Boyarsky, Boyarsky Murphy Architects, London.
11 David Grahame Shane, written interview with the authors, July 7, 2018.
12 See the lecture by Ed Bottoms, “AA Archives, Preserving the Past for the Future,” February 12, 2010, https://www.aaschool.ac.uk/VIDEO/lecture.php?ID=1168
13 For example, the AA archive contains, amongst other things, correspondence between the AA and: L’Institut de l’environment (Ministère des affaires culturelles de France), L’École Speciale d’Architecture, the Museum of Finnish Architecture, the Faculty of Environmental Design at the University of Calgary, the Faculty of Architecture, Urban and Regional Planning and Landscape at the University of Toronto; the School of Architecture at McGill; the School of Architecture at Carlton; the Stowarzyszenie Architektow Polskich (The Association of Polish Architects) and others.
14 AA 125, 2.
15 AA 125, 2.
16 Bottoms, “AA Archives, Preserving the Past for the Future.”
17 Marjanovic and Howard, Drawing Ambiance, 37.
18 Andrew Higgott, letter, Architectural Research Quarterly 14, no. 3 (2010): 186.
19 Letter from Alvin Boyarsky to Peter Prangnell, 1974, Architectural Association Archive, box 2008: 41, ag. number: 2342.
20 AA 125: Architectural Association School 125th Anniversary Exhibition, 2nd ed. (London: The Architectural Association, 1974), 11.
21 Julius Posener, “Swischen Club und Schule: Die Londoner Architectural Association Stellt Sich Vor,” Tagesspiegel, January 17, 1976. In Architectural Association Archive, box 2008: 41, Ag. number: 2342.
22 Marjanovic and Howard, Drawing Ambiance, 36.
23 Although it is clear that the members’ room installation did not travel to all of the AA 125 exhibition locations, it was included in numerous versions of the show.
24 The exhibition was designed by Archigram and produced by Dennis Sharp, Nikki Hay, Charlene Koonce, Rosario Hanna, Pierre Junod, Dominique Murray, Gail Turner and Cathy de Witt.
25 AA 125 (orig. ed.), 1.
Rajchman, “Les Immatériaux.”
26 Negative copy of the wall text in photo archive AA, Architectural Association Archive, box 2008: 41, ag. number: 2342.
27 Trevor Keeble, “Introduction,” in The Modern Period Room: The Construction of the Exhibited Interior 1870 to 1950, ed. Trevor Keeble, Brenda Martin and Penny Sparke (London: Routledge, 2006), 4.
28 Amy Milne-Smith, “A Flight to Domesticity? Making a Home in the Gentlemen’s Clubs of London, 1880–1914,” Journal of British Studies 45 (October 2006), 797.
29 Cook, “Alvin Boyarsky (1928–1990).”
30 Cook, “Alvin Boyarsky (1928–1990).”
31 La reforme de l’enseignement de l’architecture, Architectural Association Archive, box 2008: 41, ag. number: 2342.
32 “Swiss Exchange Programme” and “French Exchange Programme” n.d. In Architectural Association Archive, box 2010: 43, Ag. number: 2342.
33 Jessica Harris, “On the Buses: Mobile Architecture in Australia and the UK, 1973–75,” Architectural Histories 4, no. 1 (2016): 1–14.
34 Marjanovic, “Serial Postmodernity.”
35 Doucet, “Architecture Wrestling the Social.”
36 Cook, “Alvin Boyarsky (1928–1990).”
37 The Boeing 747 was first flown commercially in 1970. See also di Robillant, Contro il metodo in architettura, 118 (quoting Graham Shane, “Alvin Boyarsky (1928–1990),” Architese 21, no. 1 (January 1991): 78–80).
38 Letter from Alvin Boyarsky to Norbert Schoenauer, May 9,1974. In Architectural Association Archive, box 2008: 41, ag. number: 2342.
39 Letter from Alvin Boyarsky to Australian schools of architecture, July 16,1975. In Architectural Association Archive, box 2010: 43, ag. number: 2342. Later correspondence suggests that an Australian opening of the exhibition was planned in Sydney, coinciding with the dates for the Australasian Student Architecture Congress, June 17–19, 1977.
40 See Alex Brown and Léa-Catherine Szacka’s editorial for Architecture Theory Review 23:1, The Architecture Exhibition as Environment, 2019.
41 See Marjanovic, “Serial Postmodernity.”
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Alexandra Brown
Alex Brown is an Architect and a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Architecture at Monash University. Brown’s research explores twentieth-century and contemporary art—architecture relationships, as well as architecture and radicality from the 1960s onwards. Her current research focuses on commissioned content in architectural exhibitions as a form of alternative practice. Brown’s writing has been published in both architecture and art journals, including Cultural Studies Review, Lucida, and the Electronic Melbourne Art Journal. She has also contributed chapters to the edited volumes, On Discomfort: Moments in a Modern History of Architectural Culture (2017) and Spaces of Justice: Peripheries, Passages, Appropriations (2017).
Léa-Catherine Szacka
Léa-Catherine Szacka is a Lecturer in Architectural Studies at the University of Manchester and Lecturer in Architecture at Harvard GSD, Rotterdam studio abroad program. Szacka’s work focuses on the history of architecture exhibitions and the history and theory of postmodern architecture. She is the author of Exhibiting the Postmodern: The 1980 Venice Architecture Biennale (Marsilio, 2016) (winner of the 2017 SAHGB Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion), co-author of Le Concert: Pink Floyd à Venise (B2, 2017), and co-editor of Mediated Messages: Periodicals, Exhibitions and the Shaping of Postmodern Architecture (Bloomsbury, 2018), and Concrete Oslo (Torpedo, 2018). She sits on the editorial boards of Footprint: Delft Theory Review and Architectural History, the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain (SAHGB).