Voices for the Future
A dialogue between leading architects from Europe and China through an immersive exhibition that combines intellectual discussion with videography into an engaging spatial experience. The exhibition juxtaposes a fresh contemporary discourse onto a historic venue, as likewise also the echoes of interviews taking with the same participants from 10 years ago are played alongside recent takes. As such the installation crosses boundaries of culture, discipline, place and time.
Immersive Dialogue
’Echoes for the future’ is a collaboration between 3 entities from the field of media, education and research who seek to provide a platform for a wide audience to interpret a collective voice for the future of architecture and the built environment through a series of video interviews with leading architects of their generation.
With interviews conducted from around the globe, the physical reality of the exhibition space creates a spatial dialogue, or rather assembles the echoes from architects of their past experiences combined with present contemplations, future optimism and the visitor seeing this all at once. The audience can thus interpret the information in various ways, and establish their own connections about key trends and occupations. The curation of the interviews are grouped into regionally relevant questions while being dispersed throughout a physical space, arranged as an open journey that will take the visitor through manufactured conversations between architects producing intriguing and provocative interactions which may otherwise never occur.
The interviews have been conducted separately as a part of the following two parallel research projects, and site-specifically combined for the purpose of this exhibition.
Juxtaposing Past, Future and Present
The interviews are split into 3 themes of Past, Present and Future. Past takes a look at their early careers by questioning which paths lead to their success, with each interviewee revealing personal memories and anecdotes from the very beginning. Present explores the particular characteristics of each studio, helping us to understand the ways in which they currently function, and how they have grown over time. Future opens up a conversation of speculation, discussing about some of today’s most pressing architectural topics, and attempting to anticipate future concepts and trends.
Team: Martijn de Geus, Han Shuang, Victor Tee, Winnie Wu, Han Zhang
Project Year: 2018
Location: Beijing, China