“Architecture and Freedom,” or How Attitudes Became Form at Trigon 69

Abstract

The topic of this paper is the “Architecture and Freedom” exhibition staged in 1969 at Künstlerhaus Graz as a key example of architectural representation. It was a radical venture into the field of conceptualising architecture, analogous to the contemporary curatorial experiments of Harald Szeemann, who relativised the boundaries between architecture, visual media and critique, counterculture, mass media, and conceptual art. Twenty-seven projects by Superstudio, Coop Himmel(b)lau, Hans Hollein, and other protagonists of radical architecture were submitted in response to an open call to design a hypothetical city in the year 2000, illustrating that exhibiting architecture had indeed become a discipline that accommodated a plurality of platforms, strategies, contexts, and actors. Thus, visitors were invited to record their impressions in a computer system, which projected those recordings into the exhibition space. Using the methodological apparatus of architectural history, critical theory, and cultural studies, the article explores the politics of representation and interpretation of architectural space within the framework of experimental curatorial practices. The aim is to contextualise the exhibition within the framework of radical and experimental curatorial practices and to reinterpret the specific ways in which architectural representation narrated specific cultural values.