How do you fit a city in a building? A house in another house? For Professor Bergdoll, the interest of the architectural exhibition lies in the layering of such spaces. It is at once an ongoing challenge for Bergdoll in his own role as curator at the MoMA and, in his most recent research, an archaeological delving into the history of the exhibiting of architecture. Certainly Bergdoll’s art history background in Cambridge is at play here, which he clarifies himself a few moments after we sit down: ‘I am not an architect: I am an architectural historian’.

 

He seems to be exploring a reciprocal relationship between art and architecture, and a transplanting of the civic context of architecture into the cultural realm of the gallery. Though, such a shifting of contexts puzzles me in its practicalities: I still want to know, how do you fit a building in a building? For Bergdoll, as he explains, it is the expansion of architecture to a larger cultural definition that is central to overcoming such a problem. I ask, then, if it is a necessary representational process that must be followed in order to convey architectural ideas and spaces. He nods, describing how, with a few notable exceptions, you can’t actually display the end product of architecture. ‘I think that contrary to art exhibitions, in an architectural exhibition the curator is often an interpreter of things that aren’t there: the buildings, the way they interact with the larger environment’.

Such exceptions are something brought up in Bergdoll’s Slade lecture series stemming from this exploration of architectural exhibitions, wryly named ‘Out of Site: In Plain View’ – when asked about the effect of removing architecture from its original context, he stresses the latter part of his title in positing that ‘there is undoubtedly something that is gained’ in widening the scope of architecture through the gallery context, both in terms of medium and the audience reached. I am enchanted by his description of images of buildings displayed on a scale so large you could almost walk into them, brought about, as he explains, by developments in photographic enlargement and printing. He describes the full-scale model houses constructed in the Great Exhibition of 1851, and tells me of how New York slums were transported at the turn of the 20th century to an uptown gallery, laughingly detailing how even the slum cockroaches too were moved. On occasion, it seems, a building can indeed fit inside another building.

Evidently, then, there are countless curatorial choices that must be made in the construction of an exhibition: not only the medium in which the architecture will be displayed – full scale or otherwise - but the choices to be made in the gallery space itself on lighting, the order in which works are displayed, and any accompanying text. The gallery becomes a simulacrum, a space representing another space. When I ask Bergdoll about this shift in the gallery from the actual to the imagined, it is with an infectious excitement that he explains the capacity of certain extraordinary images of future architecture to have actually more influence on public perception, discussion, and the writing on the history of art and architecture than an actual constructed building. He leans forward and asserts: ‘Ideal architecture is not simply a paper dream; it has incredible power to both catalyse and to focus debate’.

And so the accessibility of an exhibition, I say, must be of central importance in ensuring such debate. The challenge is to overcome the distancing effect that the gallery can have when we walk through the doors of, say, Bergdoll’s own prestigious MoMA, or the Tate Modern over here. He agrees: ‘I feel that if the exhibition is not a medium for assuring a public engagement in the making of architecture then it falls short’. It is a responsibility that he talks about in relation to his own role as curator, and I begin to wonder how far this responsibility extends: does the curator become more prominent than the architect being exhibited? Here, Bergdoll points out the fact that individual architects are extremely famous, giving such examples as Renzo Piano and Frank Gehry as names known to a large educated public – ‘so called starchitects’. But doesn’t this dominance of certain celebrity architects make the role of the curator even more important? Is it not the curator who constructs the status of certain architects? ‘It’s a conundrum, because curators and exhibitions have certainly been in the last couple of decades part of what one might call “the economy of fame”.’ And, I suggest, the economy of cultural capital . ‘Exactly. In my job as a curator I have an incredible position of strength; anything that I do under the rubric of the Museum of Modern Art, I find that I get an incredible amount of attention. It’s an incredible platform. Sometimes I do feel that there’s an enormous responsibility: it is not a prestigious platform to be squandered’.

This power of the curator and the exhibition to reach a huge number of people seems exciting  particularly with the growth of the Internet. We talk about how this has enabled the space of the gallery to expand to not only those who see an exhibition, but those who hear about it are increasingly able to engage: ‘Because of the Internet, an exhibition starts the minute I have an idea about it, and the debate gets going… You can integrate the voices of the people who are seeing the exhibition from the outset’. I ask if perhaps our buildings within buildings become feasible in the disintegration of any real space: simulated architecture exhibited within a simulated gallery. Bergdoll points out: ‘You do have to ask yourself what the purpose of having a fixed physical address is in the 21st century when you can put anything you want in so-called Internet exhibitions’. We agree, however, that while the Internet provides an incredibly powerful technology, it has not overtaken the importance of real space.

I want to know, then, what Bergdoll believes the function of an exhibition is, and if he views the exhibition as a vehicle for social change. I ask him how far he believes that this influences and is influenced by politics. ‘I’ve been experimenting at MoMA with all sorts of different participatory exhibitions: exhibitions that actually pose problems. The curator is very much involved: I don’t just show what’s in the world, I try to make things happen. Yes, that is inevitably political’.

Certainly now more than ever before, the ever-widening expanse of the gallery can accommodate whole cities: buildings can fit within buildings.

 

Professor Bergdoll’s lecture series ‘Out of Site: In Plain View’ continues on Monday at 5pm at The Arts School Benet Street, Cambridge