Architecture represents numerous challenges in the modern world of collecting. Exhibited and collected architecture most often concerns the oeuvre rather than the ouvrage: Collections deal with models and plaster casts, drawings, documents, and photography, as opposed to the built work. Allegations of decontextualization abound in cases of displayed architectural objects, due to buildings’ scale, heaviness and inexorable groundedness in their intended site or place of origin, but also in relation to authorship and ownership
The Art of Collecting Architecture investigates various mechanisms of displacement involved wherever architecture is turned into collectibles. The book draws on a set of case studies including the contemporary practice of auctioning architectural works, historical model collections, 19th century plaster cast displays (London, Paris, Pittsburgh), and museum installations of architectural fragments. An obvious fact to be gleaned from the history of art and architecture is that objects change value and significance by being moved – an insight valid for ancient structures as it is for modern architecture. The promotion of architecture as a collectible art worthy of the same consideration as painting and sculpture, marks the rise of a new economical approach to architecture as a collectible item – a change that harbors profound aesthetic, museological, curatorial and preservationist implications. Perspectives of metonymical displays, authenticity and historicity, the role of the scale model in fiction (Stendhal, Proust, Sebald), museum ambivalences and collection history are central for the study. The historical scope reaches back to Quatremère de Quincy’s critique of decontextualization and the collecting and exhibition practices of Alexander Lenoir at the turn of the 18th century.
Duration: Runs from 2011 trough 2014.