Architecture & Disaster

Description:

This group exhibition explored invention and failure, the fetishization of fear and disaster through the built environment, and tragedy and catharsis.

In The Russian Ending, Tacita Dean created fictional endings to historical photographs. Written over the images are their potential finales—possible tragedies, failures, and disasters. Her endings made reference to the early days of film screening in Russia: it is said that Russian audiences only enjoyed tragedy forcing studios to craft new, sad conclusions for each of their films.

Adriana Kuiper took plans from contemporary underground storm shelters as a starting point for her sculptural works. The shelters, reminiscent of those built in the 1950s and 1960s to shield from potential nuclear disaster, are also marketed as a safe haven from terrorism. Constructed to protect from the unknown, the structures that Kuiper referenced become underground monuments for a hollow promise of safety. In a poetic response to the idea of bunkers as devices for hiding and security, Kuiper reconfigured the shelter plans into kites—objects evocative of lightness, freedom, and play—made from common building supplies. 

The exhibition also featured archival photo documentation of Project Habakkuk, an aircraft carrier prototyped by British inventor Geoffrey Pyke in 1942. In a gesture similar to Kuiper’s sculptures, Pyke presented the British military with an idea for a new kind of architecture built in reaction to potential war and disaster: a floating island made of ice. Pyke intended to use the island as an airfield that could be built larger than conventional aircraft carriers at that time, enabling it to hold fighting planes like spitfires and possibly even larger bombers. The project was abandoned after the first prototype was built in Patricia Lake, Alberta, where it remains as a wreck. 

Helmut Weber and Sabine Bitter produced a poster series titled Boulevards, Banlieues #3 (2006) that stitches together photographs of two buildings: the Vancouver Public Library and the Western City Gate in Belgrade, Serbia. The multiples featured an essay by Clint Burnham titled “The Return of Postmodernism,” commissioned by Western Front.

The exhibition opening took place on Sep 7, 2009, and an artist talk followed on Sep 9, 2009.