Exhibition

  • Making Architecture Available, 2022–23 Program
    BAAG (Buenos Aires Arquitectura Grupal)
    Curator
    Disponible, Buenos Aires
    Oct 2022 to Oct 2023
  • GRANTEE
    Disponible
    GRANT YEAR
    2022

Installation view of the exhibition “Pidgeon Audio Visual: Architects Speak for Themselves,” 2021. Courtesy Disponible, Buenos Aires. Photo: Javier Agustín Rojas

Making Architecture Available is an annual program of architecture and design exhibitions produced by Disponible in their storefront space to invite passersby to stop and establish a direct dialogue between architectural production and the public. The program aims to make the projects, research, and interests of architectural practices accessible to the public. The installations are designed specifically for the space, and the curatorial and design process is a collaboration between Disponible's curatorial team and the exhibitors. The first in the 2022–23 series, Commoning and the City—a new contribution to the ongoing international An Atlas of Commoning project initiated by the German Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen in collaboration with the architecture magazine ARCH—is curated by the collaborative, the Walter Gropius Chair for Architecture and Urban Design at the Architecture Department at the Buenos Aires University. This work situates the importance of urban commons as a set of local everyday practices dealing with the reproduction of material and immaterial collective resources and its spatial implication and impact in the highlight of urban discourse. The second exhibition, Itala Fulvia Villa’s Modern Chacarita, features the research of French architect Léa Namer, and looks at the Pantheon of the Chacarita Cemetery in Buenos Aires, designed by Itala Fulvia Villa (1913–1991), a pioneering woman in Argentinian architecture. Built between 1950 and 1958 in the heart of one of the largest cemeteries in the world, the Pantheon is an early attempt at modern brutalist architecture applied to a funerary environment of this size. The final exhibition in the series, The common architecture, is curated by Fundación Investigación en Diseño Argentino (IDA, Research on Argentinian Design), and presents archival work from its collections by Delfina Galvez and Amancio Williams, Wladimiro Acosta, Antonio Bonet and Ana María Martí Avelló, Colette Boccara and César Jannello, Juan Kurchan, and Mario Roberto Álvarez to recover and enhance the history of Argentine architecture.

BAAG (Buenos Aires Arquitectura Grupal) is an office that conceives architecture as a practice of critical thinking, producing, questioning, researching, testing, and innovating, while enhancing the value of collective work. The office is directed by Gabriel Monteleone and Gastón Noriega, architects from the Architecture, Design and Urbanism Department at the University of Buenos Aires, where they teach. BAAG has carried out institutional and housing projects, research projects, cultural installations, and public competitions. They have been also invited to give lectures, participate in panels and hold workshops at national and international institutions and universities. In 2021, they participated at the 17th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice in the sections As New Households and Future Assembly. They have obtained several awards and mentions among them: the nomination for the Mies Crown Hall Arch Prize (MCHAP) from the Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, the CA`ASI “Young Architects in Latin America” award Collateral Event of the 16th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, the first SCA-CPAU award for work done 2014 and the first national award for sustainable architecture 2015 by the SCA.

The Walter Gropius Chair, curatorial team for Commoning and the City, is funded by the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs via the German Academic Exchange Service and was reestablished in 2019 at the Faculty for Architecture, Design and Urbanism (FADU) at the University of Buenos Aires. A team of young architects, researchers and activists collaborates and understands the Chair as a teaching and learning community and therefore offers an interdisciplinary and international platform of dialogue, knowledge transfer and joint action, through which all collaborating academic partners, architectural practices, municipalities, NGOS and urban activists can engage with current cultural debates from within academia can elaborate diagnoses and propose practices that can address the multi-layered challenges to be considered in the resilient design of our built environment in a global and contemporary local context. The Walter Gropius Chair considers architecture as an appropriate methodology to understand, read and rewrite the social, economic and ecological flows in spaces.

Léa Namer, curator of Itala Fulvia Villa’s Modern Chacarita, is a French architect, trained at the Architecture School of Paris la Villette. In 2011, she participated in a university exchange at the Faculty of Architecture, Design and Urbanism of Buenos Aires and became passionate about the Argentine capital. Since graduation, she has collaborated in several Parisian architecture and landscape studios. In parallel to this activity, Namer carried out exhibition curatorial projects and book publishing. In 2016, she participated in the curatorship of the exhibition Iles de la Seine for the Pavillion de l'Arsenal, in Paris. In 2019, she initiated the research project on the Sixth Pantheon of the Chacarita cemetery and presents the exhibition Chacarita Moderna in Argentina and Europe on several occasions.

Fundación IDA (Investigación en Diseño Argentino) [Research on Argentinian Design] is a nonprofit foundation devoted to research, recover, preserve, showcase, and value Argentine design and materials culture. Through this foundation, the curatorial team of Gustavo Diéguez and Wustavo Quiroga are the organizers of The common architecture. Fundación IDA holds ever-growing collections of documents and objects related to the main fields of design: industrial, graphic, garment and textile, as well as theory and management.

Disponible is an independent nonprofit space directed by Gabriel Monteleone and Gastón Noriega and coordinated by Leticia Virguez Lalli. The space organizes exhibitions, meetings, and conferences to promote research and dissemination of architecture and design. It began in 2019 as an initiative of BAAG (Buenos Aires Arquitectura Grupal) in a vacant storefront in contact with the street. Located on the ground floor of the residential building Aráoz 967 designed by the office, Disponible is inaugurated as an exhibition hall, continues as a showcase and is complemented with activities in the public space in Buenos Aires.