Architecture in Museums / Palm Springs

The  Architecture and Design Council of the Palm Springs Art Museum hosted a lecture by Henry Urbach:

Exhibition as Atmosphere or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Architecture in Museums

Urbach's resume is impressive.  He just started his position as director of Philip Johnson’s Glass House. 

Prior to that he was the was the curator of architecture and design at SF MoMA. He also ran a gallery 

of contemporary architecture in New York.

Museum courtyard

Exhibition as atmosphere and the complexities of showing architecture in museums and galleries was the focus of the lecture.

The traditional means of handling architecture exhibits has been models on pedestals and photographs on the walls.

 The slide above is hard to make out but it's the Marcel Breuer house that was built in the MoMA sculpture 

garden. This was an early example of installation architecture. Urbach is writing a book on installation architecture.

The House in the Garden, Marcel Breuer, 1949 MoMA brochure

"In Heat", Jürgen Mayer-Hermann, installation at the Henry Urbach Architecture Gallery in 2005. 

Moistscape, Freecell

The Henry Urbach Architecture Gallery (1997-2006) held exhibitions that blurred the lines between art and 

architecture and explored space and technology to create spatial experience. 

At SF MoMA Urbach curated an exhibition on Para Design, a term he coined.

Para Design questions "the norms, habits and conventions of design."  

Urbach now refers to this as the "post-object" approach to exhibitions.

Image: Dwell

Though he's only been director for two weeks Urbach sounds like he has some exciting plans for The Glass House.  

A benefit of the position is that he gets to live in one of the 14 buildings on the property. Not a bad place to think about architecture.  

Image: Melody Kramer, via ArchDaily