The Institution is a Proposition

The Institution is a Proposition is a publication project exploring the histories, ideas, philosophies, and economies of small and unconventional architecture spaces. The term “small architecture institution” is used to designate a type of space that presents architectural ideas and work to a public audience, even if the nature of the work is ambivalently addressed as an “exhibition,” “project,” “installation,” “publication,” or “program.” 

Borrowing from the container of the “artist-run space,” these extra-institutional environments are set apart from more established institutions such as museums, commercial galleries, and research institutes. They are typically small in both audience and accounting and often organized by architects who rarely have opportunities for formal exposure to curatorial or organizing work. Small architecture spaces are often self-initiated, founder-dependent, or run by substantial volunteer labor. They are more likely to be a network of people-with-jobs, rather than persons-on-the-job, who may or may not answer your email, pick up the phone, or host regular viewing hours. Roles and responsibilities are not separate, the Executive Director is also the janitor, and no one knows where the key to the gallery might be. Their headquarters may exist in the window sill of an office, or in the digital cache of Google Drive. What connects them all are the circumstances of their production: their precarity and their flexility. 

Few resources are available for those interested in organizing work in small-scale architecture programming. While many opportunities are available for artists and art-centric organizing, architectural organizing and cultural work are distinct from the arts and deserve their own forms of inquiry. Such opportunities are missing in professional degrees and curatorial programs are few and far between. Architectural cultural workers are often working alone. The publication offers a tool kit for uncovering basic ideas, philosophies, workflows, and strategies for starting or maintaining organizations in ways that influence culture. The publication includes a presentations of 20 small project spaces working in transdisciplinary and transformative ways.  Participants are invited to reflect on their institutional or organizational work, organizing as a form of labor, local and regional conditions of production, and how to situate such labor within articulated value systems. Through critical essays by invited contributors, oral histories, archival excavations, protocol workflows, and visual essays, The Institution is a Proposition offers autotheoretical institutional reflections (blending memoir, autobiography and critical theory) with exportable models for those interested in small organizing work.