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RECORD’s monthly list of upcoming and ongoing exhibitions, events, and competitions. 

Ongoing Exhibitions

Towards a Newer Brutalism: Solar Pavilions, Appliance Houses, and other Topologies of Contemporary Life
Cambridge, Massachusetts 
Through October 20, 2024
In the early 1950s, British architects Alison and Peter Smithson put forward a theory for a “new Brutalism,” based on material economy, spatial flexibility, structural expression, and disregard for prevailing aesthetic conventions. An exhibition at the Harvard Graduate School of Design recontextualizes this latent architectural "ethic," originally formed in response to the changing needs and desires of postwar society, for contemporary practice. The exhibition puts early projects and text from Alison and Peter Smithson in conversation with projects built since 1988, including contributions from Shigeru Ban, Andrés Jacque, and OMA. See gsd.harvard.edu.

Beatriz Morales: Capisayo
Plano, Illinois
Through December 8, 2024
Mexican artist Beatriz Morales graces the Mies Van der Rohe–designed Edith Farnsworth House with a site-specific textile installation that enters traditional craftwork into conversation with the house’s history. Morales’s fiber-based works extend throughout the 1951-built building, including the titular Capisayo, named after a Mexican rain cape woven from palm leaves, and Quimera, an agave-fiber installation piece dyed with natural ink. The large-scale installations are accompanied by works merging painting with embroidery, as well as a number of abstract portrait paintings. See edithfarnsworthhouse.org.

Design Agendas: Modern Architecture in St. Louis, 1930s–1970s
St. Louis
Through January 6, 2025
Beginning in the 1930s, St. Louis’s urban landscape was transformed with the works of internationally known architects such as Erich Mendelsohn, Eero Saarinen, and Minoru Yamasaki, ushering in a new period of urban renewal and cementing the city’s legacy in the history of modern architecture. The Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis presents a major exhibition contextualizing the city’s most celebrated works of modern architecture within the regional developments of the mid-20th century such as New Deal urban planning, the Great Migration, and the civil rights movement. Bringing together architectural drawings, models, photographs, films, digital maps, and artworks from local archives and institutions, the exhibition explores the complex and contradictory story of modern architecture that reshaped the city in an era marked both by architectural innovation and large-scale urban destruction and racial segregation. See kemperartmuseum.com.

Germane Barnes: Columnar Disorder
Chicago
Through January 27, 2025
In his first solo museum exhibition at The Art Institute of Chicago, Germane Barnes challenges the Western canon with an architectural counternarrative rooted in the Black experience and African diaspora. The Chicago-born architect centers his project on recasting the enduring legacy of Classical forms, particularly the Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian, with designs for three new columns. Presented in the exhibition through drawings, collages, and commissioned sculptural works, they include the Identity Column, which celebrates Black beauty, the Labor Column, which considers the role of slavery in America’s economic growth, and the Migration column, which meditates on the transcontinental journey of enslaved Africans, using water as a site of Black memory, loss, and selfhood. See artic.edu.

Pantheon II (2023) by Germane Barnes. Photo by Greg Carideo, courtesy the artist and Nina Johnson, © Germane Barnes

Materialized Space: The Architecture of Paul Rudolph
New York
Through March 16, 2025
The Metropolitan Museum of Art presents the first major museum exhibition dedicated to the career of Paul Rudolph, the influential second-generation Modernist who came to prominence in the 1950s and ’60s, alongside peers such as Eero Saarinen and I.M. Pei. The wide-ranging exhibition surveys a large swath of Rudolph’s architectural contributions, from early experimental houses in Florida to concrete civic commissions and lushly detailed interiors, as well as utopian visions for urban megastructures and mixed-use skyscrapers. Works on display include a selection of over 80 artifacts at a variety of scales, from the small objects that he collected throughout his life to a mix of material generated from his office, including drawings, models, furniture, material samples, and photographs. See metmuseum.org.

Events

A Greener Path: Adaptive Reuse & Sufficiency 
Chicago
October 16, 2024
The Goethe Institute convenes a panel discussion about sustainability and decarbonization in architecture, moderated by RECORD deputy editor Joann Gonchar and featuring architect Andrés Jacque, gmp architects partner Tobias Keyl, and engineer Dan Bergsagel. Part of a series of programming accompanying the exhibition Umbau: Nonstop Transformation, which explores the adaptive reuse work of gmp architects, the discussion will delve into the core themes of sustainable architecture, including the concept of "sufficiency" as a framework for the building industry. See goethe.de/en.

Big Build
Washington, D.C.
October 19, 2024
The National Building Museum opens its Great Hall for an annual free event that allows children and adults to learn hands-on skills with roofers, plumbers, designers, artisans, and more. Highlights include dozens of booths that allow children to use real tools, an outdoor truck "petting zoo," and a tech room with augmented reality demonstrations, virtual reality experiences, and other immersive digital activities to engage older children and teens. See nbm.org.

Big Build at the National Building Museum.Photo © Elman Studio

E-mail information two months in advance to schulmanp@bnpmedia.com.