Show and Tell
Architecture at the beginning of the 21st century is undergoing radical change. For centuries, architectural design has been shaped and supported by manual processes involving various media, such as drawing and modelling, which left behind physical evidence of the processes behind the architect’s work. Sketches, plans and models from archives and personal estates have been the basis of architectural-history research and presentation to date. With the digital revolution, computer-aided design is rapidly transforming the essential processes of drafting and realising an architectural project and this trail of physical evidence is now mostly digitised too, i.e., it exists purely as columns of data in bits and bytes that can only be read by specialised software, whose durability is not yet known. In this light, what will the future bring for architectural collections that until now have relied on real, tangible objects?
The Architekturmuseum der TU München is one of the largest collections dedicated to architecture in Europe and contains enough materials in its archives to inspire new research and presentations for a long time to come. Its value for the public is further enhanced by the fact that the history of each object housed at the museum has been recorded and documented.
The exhibition SHOW AND TELL – Architectural (Hi)stories from the Collection illustrates the historical richness of the collection with a selection of outstanding exhibits. Hand-drawn sketches, models, letters, books, invoices, manuscripts and plaster reliefs – every object in the collection refers to a process that is in some way related to architecture, but also has its own story to tell: be it the history of a building and its creation, how it was documented, the physical and cultural context or the biography of its creator, complemented by the voices of the architects themselves, whose theories, approaches, concepts and ideas are revealed in letters, books, audio recordings and videos.
A museum collection has to be continually expanded and explored from different standpoints to keep it alive and create a vibrant place for the past and the present, for research, teaching and displays. For this reason, contemporary architects have been invited to contribute their own personal stories to the exhibition. SHOW AND TELL thus provides a glimpse behind the scenes as well as new outlooks with the aim of finding answers through the dialogue on historical and contemporary materials to questions on the position, direction and future perspectives of the practice of collecting.