En Esencia exhibition, via Yanko DesignÂ
In October I participated in the “Multimodal Approaches to Learning” conference at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where I had the pleasure of chairing a roundtable discussion on “multisensory exhibition.” I was also asked by the exhibition coordinators to write a chapter for an upcoming edited volume on the multisensory museum. What follows is an unedited first draft of my chapter:
Animated Spaces: Experience and Context in Interaction and Architectural Design Exhibitions
Acknowledgments: Iâd like to express my appreciation to Eva Franch i Gilabert and Paola Antonelli for making time to speak with me; and to Jim Drobnick, Johannes Goebel, Siegfried Saerburg, and John Weber for stimulating conversation on our âmultisensory exhibitionsâ panel at the âMultimodal Approaches to Learningâ conference at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in October, 2012). Thanks, too, to my research assistant Alex Minton.
According to design theorist Malcolm McCullough, interaction design is defined by its concern with the embodied experience of technologies and the context of that experience.[1] âActivity in context,â he says, âis the heart of interaction design.â[2] Recent exhibitions of interaction design have sought, and often struggled, to capture within the space of a traditional gallery the multisensorial, often performative nature of the user experience and the richness of the contexts within which that experience takes place. In some cases the interactive object is reduced to either a static objet dâart, or a flat screen or graphic. Similarly, many architecture exhibitions have attempted to reinvent the place of architecture in the modern museum â to portray architecture not as yet another objet dâart birthed by a master designer, but as a multimodal, multisensory shaper of the material landscape that impacts peopleâs everyday lives. Yet, again, the âwhite cubeâ complicates curatorsâ and exhibition designersâ efforts to go beyond traditional materials â blueprints, renderings, models, and photographs â to convey the dimensionality and material richness of built space. In this essay weâll examine how interaction design and architecture, both experiential fields, present unique challenges to the exhibition designer. But weâll also consider how these fields, by virtue of the distinctive qualities of their designed objects, offer unique opportunities for us to rethink the relationships between the contexts and contents of exhibition.
EXHIBITING INTERACTION DESIGN: CONTEXT FOR ACTIVITY
Interaction design, according to designer Jonas Lowgren, âis about shaping digital things for peopleâs use.â[3] Fellow designer Jon Kolko expands on what form that âshapingâ might take: interaction design, he says âis the creation of a dialogue between a person and a product, service or system.â[4] This notion of a âdialogueâ between people and designed objects was central to âTalk to Me: Design and the Communication between People and Objects,â a 2011 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Much of the following discussion is drawn from my review of the exhibition, which appeared in Design and Culture in Fall 2012.[5]

Curators Paola Antonelli and Kate Carmody chose the showâs nearly 200 âobjectsâ from among 1500 suggestions solicited since Spring 2010 through a âTalk to Meâ public blog. And while they may have initially planned to organize these objects into format- or genre-defined clusters â computer games, data visualization, interfaces, installations, etc. â they ultimately settled on five categories that emphasized the scale, nature of, and directionality of the objectsâ communicative process or content. Objects focused on things that talk to us about themselves; Bodies examined objects that interact with humansâ physical selves; Life highlighted designs that find patterns in, and help users navigate through, everyday existence; City featured designs that facilitate urban communication and encourage citizen engagement; Worlds looked at designs that can alter humansâ perception of, and help us to comprehend, global phenomena that are beyond empirical observation; and Double Entendre addressed how designers can âscript,â or design for, misunderstanding and complexity in an attempt to call critical attention to the ethics and aesthetics of our communicative practices.
The curators suggested that the various categories represented different ways of characterizing whoâs talking to whom â but the non-parallel structure of these categories (theyâre not all of the same rhetorical register or ontological category) and the tremendous diversity of works on display suggested that the exhibition was actually posing a much bigger question, one of McLuhanesque proportions: what does it mean to say that people and objects âcommunicateâ? What is happening when we interface with an ATM machine, when a sensor monitors traffic flow and alters the timing of our traffic lights, when we implant or ingest sensing technologies into our bodies, or when we rely on Gerard Ralloâs Devices for Mindless Communication, on display in the show, to recognize patterns in our everyday conversation and feed us lines of banter, sparing us the burden of engaging in small talk?
Because visitors werenât permitted to interact with most devices â a necessary but unfortunate limitation, given the nature of the show â the exhibition itself turned into an object lesson on the complexities and complications of human-object communication. In a November 2012 conversation with me, Antonelli explained that one of the exhibits in the show â Sissel Tolaasâs âBerlin, City Smell Research,â in which the artist âworked in various Berlin districts to distill an essential scent for each one, creating an olfactory map of the cityâ â presented an exhibition challenge.[6]Â The scents, which Tolaas conceived of as a source of âinformation that enhances and subverts the physical and symbolic boundaries of the urban ecosystem,â were bottled. We âwanted to let people smell,â Antonelli said, âbut then realized that it would be difficult; we wouldâve had to use pieces of paperâ â similar to those used at the perfume counter in a department store â âbut then where do you throw them [away]?â Antonelli had at one time proposed a âsmellâ exhibition at MoMA, but eventually realized âit wouldâve been impossible to isolate scentâ in the gallery.[7] Using scent is feasible only if âyou have the luxury of space and isolation from other spaces.â
Sometimes it was the objects themselves, rather than the conventions of the space in which they were exhibited, that thwarted their ability to communicate. Few objects in the exhibition were able to âtalk to usâ formally, to tell us, through their shape, size, and materials, what they do. This communication failure was due in large part to the fact that most of the exhibited objects were typological innovations. A display case full of iPod-esque gadgets, metal canisters, and expressionless plastic toys â all âblack boxes,â affording no glimpse of their internal mechanisms â easily could have been reduced to a case full of âstuffâ if the curators hadnât made available a variety of textual and audio-visual support media to interpret what those objects are. Each exhibit had its own substantial label, and many objects were also accompanied by monitors that showed the object in action. Some projects, particularly those that were performative, or that didnât lend themselves to representation through material artifacts, existed solely in video form (the exhibition included roughly 80 flat-screen monitors).
In keeping with the interactive spirit, all objects were assigned their own Twitter hashtag and QR code, featured at the bottom of their wall labels. Smartphone-equipped visitors were invited to scan and save the codes for later reference on the media-rich exhibition website created by Stamen Design. For me, the comprehensiveness and cross-media integration of the website contrasted with the live gallery experience, where I found myself code-switching between wall text, flat-screen video, and QR code in the gallery, and, all the while, dealing with myriad sources of gallery ânoiseâ: other museum-goers blocking my view of wall texts that required a significant investment of time and attention, guards shooing children away from artifacts that begged to be touched.
The making of the Wilderness Downtown. from B-Reel on Vimeo.
Yet in our conversation a year after the exhibition, Antonelli revealed another way of conceiving the relationship between the mediated exhibition and the live, in-person experience. One of her favorite pieces was âThe Wilderness Downtown,â an interactive music video by Chris Milk for the band Arcade Fire. The video, shown on a monitor in the hallway leading into the main gallery, âgives you shivers,â Antonelli said. It embodies the âvery intimate experience you need to have in the middle of a big crowd.â[8] She drew a parallel to the rationalist architectural concept of existenzminimum, or minimum dwelling, which she described as âtaking a volume,â like a small apartment or a boat, âand fitting everything inâ; itâs âdesigning from the outside, in.â Antonelli prefers to think of her work, conversely, as existenzmaximum â designing spaces from the inside, out; creating metaphysical spaces, like those you experience âwhen youâre in the middle of people and you put your headset on, and all of a sudden your space is much bigger than the bubble.â[9] She advocated for the creation of âseveral parallel sensorial universes within [the] physical spaceâ of the gallery, and for the use of technology âin whatever way possible to make that happen.â In an exhibition, you can âcreate several bubbles that are communicating with each otherâ and thereby create a context for experience that is âat the same time separate from social space and also shareable.â
Of course pragmatically this isnât always so easy. Antonelli cited particular artists â Bruce Nauman, Dan Graham, James Turrell, Tino Sehgal â whose work, for various reasons (e.g., its loudness or brightness, or, conversely, its vulnerability to visual or sonic âinfiltrationâ by nearby exhibits) requires that âweâŠcreate a whole chamber around them.â Performance, too, creates interesting problems for exhibition. The various sensory dimensions of artworks or design objects present sense-specific challenges. Antonelli offered a brief âstate of the sensesâ run-down: Sound works fine in the gallery when you can provide appropriate acoustic buffering. âSound cones donât really work, but headsets do.â Touch is often impermissible, âbut if youâre allowed to touch, you can do whatever you want. The problem at that point is maintenanceâ â keeping things in working order. Smell is âstill really complicated.â[10] Taste is of particular interest to Antonelli; sheâs been working on a book on design and food for the past 13 years. âIt would be fantastic if we could eat in the exhibition,â she said, citing Rirkrit Tiravanijaâs food-centric conceptual pieces. While several objects in âTalk to Meâ were activated through touch, and some took smell or eating (or consumption, as in the ingestion of medicines) as their subject, gallery-goers had little opportunity to touch, and no chance to smell or taste. When these âotherâ senses arenât directly experience-able in the gallery, they have to be somehow mediated, or captured through synaesthetic references or metaphor.[11]

â[T]he key to effective and elegant communication,â Antonelli writes in the âTalk to Meâ exhibition catalogue, âis choosing the right [medium or channel], the right interpreter. The most recent technology, in other words, may not be the most appropriate.â[12] âTalk to Meâ employed a variety of channels of communication that, in the end, might not have coalesced into the most âeffectiveâ interpreter of the works on display and the exhibitionâs core concepts. The exhibition of course talked to us formally, materially. Only an on-site viewing of the concrete object â impenetrable black box though it may be â allowed us to perceive its textures and scale, to observe its blinking lights, to appreciate the visceral impact of its beeps and squawks. But all this was just stimulus until we knew what those textures and blinking lights meant. Thatâs where the âcaptionsâ â texts and videos on the wall and on the web â came in, but those captions didnât always lend themselves to easy consumption in the gallery space.
Recall McCulloughâs characterization of interaction design as being centrally concerned with âactivity in contextâ and embodied experience. âTalk to Meâ was itself an extraordinarily complex task of interaction design; its curators designed a context for visitorsâ interactions with exhibits that in turn represented how objects created communication experiences. The exhibitionâs various channels of communication â on-site and online; material, textual and audiovisual â collectively constructed its context for communication. But the âmedia mix,â as they say in the advertising world, cultivated a not-so-interactive experience. Visitors we able to touch a few objectsâ control screens and play with a few robots, but for the most part, our âtalking toâ the objects was limited to tweeting and reading about the objects on the exhibition website.
Communication is an experience, a context â itâs âfeedback or dialogue between the mechanism and its environment,â an âorganic unity of interprocess,â McLuhan said â not a thing.[13] The âvitrine and wall-textâ-centric museological culture lends itself to a focus on things. Perhaps a series of live performances or demonstrations of these objects talking, communicating, responding in real-time to user feedback and contextual cues, mightâve better suited the ethos, the experience, of interaction design. The challenge is to develop exhibition practices that provide appropriate contexts and experiences for art and design that emphasize multisensorial experience, the âactivity in context,â over product.
Antonelli mentioned two past exhibitions at MoMA that prioritized the visitorâs multisensorial experience. Her first examples was Terence Rileyâs 1999 âUnprivate Houseâ show, which featured recreated domestic interiors. Second was her own first show at the museum, âMutant Materials in Contemporary Designâ (1995), which placed, on a ledge near many of the exhibited pieces, âcopies that people could touch.â Of course itâs one thing to allow visitors to handle samples of woods, fabrics, and plastics, and quite another to allow them to experiment with expensive prototype electronic kiosks and medical devices. But these concerns will become even more pressing now that MoMA has begun acquiring video games, and the museum staff is considering how to exhibit this interactive art form.[14] Depending on the duration and complexity of the game, users may be able to play a game in its entirety in the gallery, or they may need to engage it through an interactive demonstration or a guided tour; and depending on the condition of the original game cartridges, software platforms, and consoles, the user may need to experience a game through an emulator, which may result in slight changes in the embodied experience of play.

In our efforts to better facilitate these multisensorial, embodied experiences in the gallery, Antonelli suggests, we might also draw inspiration from recent âunsightedâ exhibitions, like âInvisible: Art About the Unseenâ at Londonâs Hayward Gallery (2012), which included works that use bathwater, chilled air, and electromagnetic waves as their media; and the âDialogue in the Dark,â program, in which âvisitors are lead by blind guides in groups through specially constructed dark rooms in which scent, sound, wind, temperature and texture convey the characteristics of daily environments.â[15] She recalled another exhibition in Italy, âwhere they gave you a flashlightâ to explore in the dark; such a show would be âimpossibleâ at MoMA, she admits, âbecause of regulations.â âI donât think the public would have any problemâ with being invited to use other senses, or their whole bodies, to engage with an exhibition. âThe problems are all on ourâ â the institutional â âside, and theyâre all pragmatic. Our [main] challenges have to do with the perceived safety of our audiences and our (gallery) spacesâ and exhibited objects. Curator-scholar Jim Drobnick agrees that the institution presents many barriers to multisensory experiences. At the âMultimodal Approaches to Learningâ conference at the Metropolitan Museum in October 2012, on a âmultisensory exhibitionsâ panel that I chaired, Drobnick acknowledged that curators and exhibition designers have to contend with HVAC systems, with ubiquitous deodorization, and with the fact that galleriesâ open plans and permeable walls promote the intermixing of senses. Exhibition designers are thus commonly left to convey different senses through different technologies.[16]
But unlike Antonelli, he suggested that the audience presents challenges and poses resistance, too. He wonders how to pull museum- and gallery-goers out of their uncritical (and often unconscious) adoption of ocularcentric ways of encountering the world; and how to get them to recalibrate their senses, or to use them in different ratios, particularly when they arenât likely to have either training in âcontrolledâ sensation or a discourse to talk about it. Drobnick advocated, too, that we consider the critical possibilities of designing unpleasant sensation â bad smells, rough textures, etc. â that compel us to question our values and ideologies, including those embodied in our ocularcentrism. Exhibition designers also have to be conscious of visitorsâ potential for âsmell fatigueâ or anosmia (inability to smell) â and of the ethical implications of sensory engagement; visitors usually come to a museum or gallery, he said, with particular expectations regarding how theyâll interact with the work on display, and with one another.
EXHIBITING ARCHITECTURE: ATMOSPHERE AND DYNAMICS
MoMAâs 2008 âHome Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwellingâ exhibition gave visitors the option of exploring full-scale models of pre-fabricated housing, commissioned specifically for the show, in a vacant lot next to the museum. I visited the show one hot summer day, and I recall that, after exploring the indoor portion of the exhibition in air-conditioned comfort, some of my companions â particularly those with children â chose not to wander out to the side lot and expend the effort to climb the modelsâ multiple flights of stairs in order. They were willing to forgo an opportunity to engage with the exhibition in an âimmersive,â âembodiedâ fashion.


Architecture exhibitions havenât always been so physically demanding or interactive. Barry Bergdoll, MoMAâs chief curator of architecture and design, and creator of the âHome Deliveryâ exhibition, claims that â[A]ll too rarely in the history of architectural exhibitions has the salonlike presentation of the seminal 1932 âModern Architecture,â the so-called International Style exhibition of Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, been broken with in any fundamental way.â[17] Fellow curator Henry Urbach concurs: âarchitectural projects were sublimated to conventions of exhibiting art in order to enter the modern museum⊠Johnson placed the models on tablecloth-covered bases, as if small sculptures, and instructed the installation crew âto hang the photographs as if paintings.ââ[18] The International Style show foregrounded the âindividual geniusâ of the architects above the designsâ social and political contexts â and when the museum launched its Department of Industrial Art, later called Design, the existing Department of Architecture was further distinguished as being primarily concerned with âarchitecture as a fine art,â unlike Design, which concerned itself with âfunction, cost, and building.â[19] Through this museological âframing,â architectureâs âcapacity to produce atmosphereâ â what Urbach describes as a âvibe,â a multisensory spatial context for its embodied experience â âwas lost.â
At the same time, though, even in the International Style exhibition, the museumâs âaestheticizing visionâ was challenged, notably by Lewis Mumford, in a section of the exhibition that critiqued the current housing conditions in New York and thereby proposed the exhibition âas a form of social and political engagement.â[20] MoMA also began to âembrac[e] the technique of full-scale demonstration houses employed for so long in worldâs fairs and building exhibitions and even â most pertinently â in the marketing strategies of home builders.â[21] In 1940 curator John McAndrew planned to exhibit a full-scale Usonian house as part of the Frank Lloyd Wright retrospective, and in 1941 Buckminster Fuller presented his Dymaxion Deployment Unit. In 1949 Marcel Breuer brought to the museum a model home, the first in MoMAâs highly influential House in the Museum Garden series, which, Bergdoll says, helped âto break down the distinction between the practice and the display of architectureâ â and, I would add, allowed for a reintegration of what Urbach calls âatmosphere.â[22] Bergdoll regarded âHome Deliveryâ as a renewal of the House in the Garden legacy.

Since the 1960s, there has been a surge of scholarly interest in architectural exhibitions and in the number of such exhibitions. Weâve also seen the rise of dedicated architecture museums and the Venice Biennale of Architecture. With these increased opportunities for exhibiting architecture has come a reconsideration of the purposes and audiences of exhibition, and an exploration of various approaches to exhibition design. Curator Fleur Watson distinguishes between (1) exhibitions that ârecordâ the work of individual architects or practices and tend to adopt a documentary style, making use of photographs, drawings, and other archival material; (2) those that âresearchâ âthe action and activity of designing and building,â and can make use of sketches, prototypes, models, samples, etc., to study the hands-on process of design; or utilize installations as a means for âtesting spatial propositionsâ; and (3) those that âreflectâ on larger conceptual concerns, global themes, or âmovements,â frequently through the form of group shows or bienniales.[23]
These various exhibitionary functions, as Watson suggests, call for appropriate modes of presentation, which in turn encompass distinctive exhibition media. Jonathan Hale and Holger SchnÀdelbach propose a typology:
- The âbook-on-the-wallâ model makes use of photos, drawings, and panels of text. While we have to acknowledge the âexperiential limits of a mainly two-dimensional presentation format,â we can also appreciate the âbenefit of graphical abstraction, allowing a specific focus on thematic issues without the real-world âdistractionsâ of the building programme, contents, and context.â
- The âsalvage yardâ approach makes use of âfull-size building fragments â material samples, components and constructional assemblies â in order to provide some degree of real-life spatial experience while also referring to the temporal process of construction.â
- The âoffice/studio/workshopâ model âtries to sidestep the problem of capturing experience of built space and instead focuses on the story of its creation.â It presents materials produced during the process of design â drawings, sketches, mock-ups, models.[24]
Felicity Scott, Director of the Critical, Curatorial and Conceptual Practices in Architecture Masters program at Columbia University, recognizes that there are âmultiple operating platformsâ for architectural representation, display, and engagement. She sees the exhibition platform in particular â in part because itâs typically removed from real-world practice and allows for a ââsuspensionâ from utilityâ â as âcentral to opening new lines of research, testing new formats, technologies, and programmatic investigations, and launching new polemics and conceptual claims for where architecture might head.â[25] The founding of Scottâs program in 2009 signaled the presence of much critical thinking about the architecture exhibition itself as a medium â or, rather, a meta-medium that incorporates other media, ranging from drawings, photos, and animations, to building fragments, scale models and even workshops or performances.[26]

Curator and design writer Carson Chan points out a paradox inherent in the exhibition-as-medium: âHow can architecture be at once the object and the context of display?â[27] Architecture exhibitions do, after all, exhibit architecture inside architecture. Equally confounding, notes architectural historian and curator Kurt Forster, is âthe impossibility of showing what architecture is really like rather than merely elaborating the means of its representations.â[28] In other words, the architecture exhibition typically exhibits not architecture, but the many modalities through which itâs represented or mediated.[29] Hale and SchnĂ€delbach say that this âabsence of the work itselfâ â of architecture as it exists, whole and complete, in the world â means the âabsence of the multi-sensory and dynamic experience of a real three-dimensional architecture space unfolding in time.â[30]
But if, as Chan acknowledged, architecture also serves as the context for the display of architecture, exhibition visitors can still enjoy a âmultisensory and dynamic experienceâ as they traverse the three-dimensional gallery space. And perhaps exhibition designers can promote experiences that enable visitors to translate their embodied experience of the architectural gallery context into an understanding of the architectural objects on display. âThe exhibitionary setting is,â after all, âboth representation and experiential,â notes museum studies scholar Jennifer Carter.[31] She continues:
The appropriation of architectural tropes of maps and labyrinths in exhibition design, the heightened attention paid to creating immersive environments through installations, and the role of sensory aesthetics that transcend the visual to incorporate the olfactory or haptic senses within this practice provide these sites with the means to come to life not only as didactic exercises but as highly developed sensorial environments as well. Thus beyond fulfilling a certain documentary or informational imperative, when designed well, the content and form of the architectural exhibition are capable of expanding upon the didactic representation of material (such as wall texts and objects) to allude to what is endemic to the subject itself: building in space.[32]
In his own work, Urbach has consistently created immersive installations and attended to sensory aesthetics. Much of that sensory environment is provided by the architectural context, âthe frame, the containerâ â in other words, the gallery and all its exhibitionary variables, which include:
the architecture of the gallery; lighting and décor; furniture; interpretive elements; the activity and comportment of people, including security guards and other visitors; the ideas and affects that fill the air; the museological, curatorial, and artistic practices that discursively support the objects; the interpretive practices that support the activity of the viewers, and so forth. Smells and sounds, too.[33]

Together these elements construct the âatmosphere,â the âvibeâ of an exhibition, which is âsomething to be felt and inhabited,â rather than merely looked at from a critical distance. Urbach regards the production of atmosphere as one of his jobs as a curator. In 2004, in his former New York gallery, he hosted Freecellâs âMoistscapeâ installation, in which a three-dimensional steel frame supported a garden of moss. Underfoot, a rubber floor created a particular buoyancy and generated a distinctive smell that permeated the galleryâs cool, damp air. The galleryâs final show, by JĂŒrgen Mayer H., involved coating the roomâs surfaces with heat-sensitive paint, which served as a record of visitorsâ physical contact with the exhibition.[34] In this case, the architectural context of the gallery was simultaneously the architectural object on display.


Urbach identifies a number of additional precedents from which architectural exhibition designers and curators could draw inspiration: Lina Bo Bardiâs installation design work at the Sao Paulo Museum of Art in the 50s and 60s; Philip Ursprungâs âHerzog & de Meuron: Archaeology of the Mindâ at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in 2003; Olafur Eliassonâs 2003 âWeather Projectâ at the Tate Modern; and Mike and Doug Starnâs Big BambĂș installation on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2010. In a similar vein, I would also add, are the Whitney Museumâs 2003 âScanning: The Aberrant Architectures of Diller + Scofidio,â and the architectsâ Blur Building, an inhabitable cloud of water vapor constructed for the Swiss Expo 2002.[35]

Also instructive is 2005âs âBeauty and Waste in the Architecture of Herzog & De Meuronâ at the Netherlands Architecture Institute. The exhibition contained design media in a variety of formats â all the âaccumulated wasteâ of the architectsâ design process. One of those material artifacts was a fragrance. Creating a scent, the designers said, enabled them to capture the âelusive emotions that define the aura of a place,â and which âpla[y] a role in our perception of architecture.â[36] On occasion of the exhibition the architects created a limited edition perfume, âRotterdam,â with characteristic hints of Rhine water, dog, hashish, algae, vin chaud, fur and tangerine.[37]
Carter holds up the Canadian Centre for Architectureâs 2000 âShaping the Great City: Modern Architecture in Central Europe, 1890-1937â as exemplary, too. She regards it not only a departure for the CCA from their previous shows, which kept with the âfine arts paradigmâ of exhibition design; but also as an exemplar of immersive, engaging exhibition design in which form echoes content. With its modular, grid construction, âit was the infrastructure to an exhibition on infrastructure, borrowing in form, function, and materiality from that which it intended to exhibit.â[38] âOne progressed through the exhibition in the manner of a promenade â stepping over steel bars, dodging between modular unitsâ; the exhibition thus constituted âan itineraryâŠthat unfolds as the visitors progress through the installation, and the sensorial effect of the environment as a whole.â[39]
This embodied, dynamic experience of an âunfoldingâ program also characterized a Fall 2012 exhibition at New Yorkâs Storefront for Art and Architecture, where I met with director Eva Franch i Gilabert. âPast Futures, Present, Futuresâ featured 101 âalternative visions for the present and future of the city,â each represented on an informational sticker affixed to the back of reflective panel in a curved wall of vertical blinds.[40] Franch explained that âthe exhibition is breaking the entire site of displayâ; it deconstructs the visitorâs experience âconceptually, sensorially.â[41] The walls break up the gallery into various âroomsâ (including one where visitors can sit and inscribe their own visions for the urban future), which one can access by passing through the maze of blinds. At the same time, the individual panels break up the wall plane â and the information itâs presenting â into discrete units. When you move through the space,â Franch explained, on each panel âyou see a new fragment of the knowledgeâ represented in the show. QR codes on the panels allow visitors to âsee in the digital space how all these things come togetherâ; thus, what is sensorially and conceptually fragmented in the gallery, coalesces online.
Inside the gallery are also eight speakers that broadcast the titles of the 101 projects. The speakers arenât synchronized; theyâre meant to âwork as a kind of [sonic] rainbow,â and the implied movement in the sound is compels you to move through the space. The sound is also âtransgressing the inside and outsideâ of the gallery, which is known for its multi-paneled exterior walls that are often thrown open to the street. The sound â if not the sparkly blinds â pulls you in from the street. Franch proudly declares that âthere is no code that tells us we cannot be shooting sound outside the façade.â Sheâs clearly inspired by soundâs â rather, any âsensorially based and physically disruptiveâ gestureâs â radical potential. The senses,â she says, are âmore connected to our instinctual, basic devices or communicative processes,â than to our âeducated, cultivated pleasuresâŠ. They are more radical tools of action than [those] in a space of rational action.â
Smell, for instance, has tremendous potential in ânew spaces of radical marketing.â Franch discussed how KFC restaurants reach out into the street by strategically positioning their ventilation shafts to lure customers with the smell of frying chicken. What might be the âradicalâ potential for smell in architecture, and how might it fit into the architecture exhibition? Franch asked: âHow do we architecturalize our own smell? Think about how new cars smell. That smellâs trademarked⊠Now, how does a new building smell, and how does an old building smell?â Furthermore, âwhatâs the smell of the [architectural] future?… Maybe the smell of the future is neutralization⊠There are already offices where you canât wear perfume. Maybe the future is odorless.â Storefront is itself an interesting olfactory case study: âwhat is fascinating about this locationâŠis that in itself is already provokes.â With the galleryâs permeable facades, the smells and sounds and weather of the street flow readily inside. Thus, the designers, speakers, and artists presenting their work know that it âneeds to be a lot louder [and stronger], because this place is already loud.â Franch said Storefront is collaborating with folks from engineering firm Ove Arup (through the galleryâs tech committee) to develop an âolfactory laboratory.â Sheâs not yet sure what form such a project would take.

Franch, whoâs known as a skilled cook, has achieved Antontelliâs vision of integrating food â with its attendant tastes, smells, and sounds â into the gallery. Her âPaella Seriesâ of events, which involve Franch cooking for her guests in the gallery, are intended to âintroduce intense public conversations and debate into spaces of quotidian action, in this case cooking and eating.â[42] It allows participants to ruminate on âarchitecture in a state of distraction⊠When people are brought into the most visceral element of what we do as human beings â that is to eat and share â one can start thinking about things differently.â Debating over food also serves a critical function: âThe idea of the sensorium has always been something [considered] much more feminine⊠The paella series for me is a ways to bring those [feminine] things more value.â[43]
Of course Storefront, with its history of experimentation and its flexible gallery space that literally opens itself up to the New York Streets, is perhaps more capable of taking risks than more traditional institutions. Yet Franch suggested that more âstandardized museumsâ can perhaps use more âperformance-based installationsâ â exhibitions that unfold over time â to better convey the multisensoriality of the architectural âobject,â and to promote embodied user experience. Yet she cautions against regarding multisensoriality as an imperative: âThe problem of big institutions is that they are interested sometimes in making something that is not tactile, tactile; making something that is not visual, visual⊠The important thing is to understand what is the real space of communication and action that each medium requires and demands.â Thereâs no point in gratuitously employing smell vaporizers or sound in the gallery if those media fit neither the space, the context; nor the content of the exhibition. Johannes Goebel, a participant on my âMultimodal Approaches to Learningâ panel, agreed that designing exhibitions to engage as many senses as possible isnât always advantageous, because it runs the risk of Disney-ifying the experience.â âOne needs to always find the way,â Franch says, ânot to thematize things without knowing how to bring them into relevance. Because if one just simply starts talking about smell, taste, [etc.]⊠then one just starts taking those things and codifies themâŠ, capitalizes them.â
CONCLUSION
While distinct fields of design, interaction design and architecture both deserve to be represented in a way that does justice to their multisensory, dynamic nature. Traditional exhibition spaces complicate such efforts. But by examining these myriad exhibitions and learning from the experience of diverse curators and exhibition designers, weâve identified a number of challenges and opportunities that apply to exhibitions not only of interaction design and architecture, but to exhibitions of all sorts:
- The Exhibition Space: We need to ascertain and acknowledge â and, if possible, seek to overcome â the limitations our museums and galleries present to multisensory exhibition. We need to understand how various senses âoccupyâ space and design our exhibitions accordingly. Sound and smell, for instance, tend to âbleedâ into nearby spaces, and therefore commonly require isolation or dedicated sensory âchambers.â We also have the potential to work with our gallery architecture, or perhaps even compensate for its shortcomings, by manipulating all the variables â lighting, furniture, security, didactic materials, etc. â that together comprise the âatmosphereâ of an exhibition. Finally, when designing exhibition spaces, we need to take sensory experience into account from the very beginning of the design process. Acoustics in particular canât be easily fixed after the fact.
- The Exhibitionâs Publics: We need to consider the capacities, desires, and limitations of our exhibitionsâ various publics. What perceptual impairments might they bring to the gallery? How willingly will they accept our encouragement to think critically about their standard modes of sensation? What are the ethical implications of expecting our publics to engage exhibitions with their full sensoria?
- Exhibition Modes and Media: We need to think about the wide variety of exhibition modes and media, and their unique affordances and limitations. How might we use technology to mediate various senses, particularly when those senses canât be experienced first-hand in the gallery? How might we use these technologies to promote critical forms of sensory perception? What media and modes of presentation â e.g., full-scale models, manipulable copies of items on display, performances, demonstration of exhibition material â are best equipped to allow for embodied experience? How might we create dynamic spaces that âunfoldâ the curatorial âvisionâ? These questions imply that we also need to carefully consider the unique capacities of the exhibition itself as a mediumâŠ.
- Thinking Context + Content Together: How might we design exhibitions that embody the qualities â including the sensory registers â that we regard as central to the material on display? As Carter acknowledges,â the content and form of theâŠexhibition are capable of expanding upon the didactic representation of materialâŠto allude to what is endemic to the subject itself.â In other words, our exhibitionary contexts and contents can better inform one another. We need to listen more carefully for echoes â sensorial, conceptual, formal echoes â between the objects on exhibit, and the atmospheres in which we exhibit them.
[1] Malcolm McCullough, Digital Ground: Architecture, Pervasive Computing, and Environmental Knowing (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004).
[2] Malcolm McCullough, Invited Presentation at Usability Professionalsâ Association, Minneapolis, Minnesota, June 10, 2004.
[3] Jonas Lowgren, âInteraction Designâ In Mads Soegaard and Rikke Friis Dam, Eds., Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction (Aarhus, Denmark: The Interaction Design Foundation, 2008).
[4] Jon Kolko, Thoughts on Interaction Design: A Collection of Reflection, 2nd Ed. (Burlington, MA: Elsevier, 2011): 13.
[5] Shannon Mattern, âTalk to Me: Design and the Communication Between People and Objectsâ [exhibition review] Design and Culture 4:3 (2012): 369-373.
[6] Paola Antonelli. Personal Interview. November 8, 2012; Museum of Modern Art, âBerlin, City Smell Research,â âTalk to Me,â Museum of Modern Art (n.d.).
[7] MoMA collaborated with Parsons The New School for Design (along with International Fragrances and Flavors, Coty, and Seed magazine) on âHeadSpace,â a 2010 conference exploring scent as an âuntapped medium that presents a remarkable opportunity for designâ (Jamer Hunt, âHeadSpace: On Scent as Design,â Parsons MFA Transdisciplinary Design [October 2, 2010]; see also HeadSpace: On Scent as Design).
[8] I must admit: I found it difficult to experience that intimacy with myriad museum-goers jostling me and obstructing my view. I had seen this video months earlier, at home on my computer, and found the intimacy of that experience better suited for the nostalgic themes of the video.
[9] See the work of sound scholar Michael Bull.
[10] In a panel discussion at the Multimodal Approaches to Learning International Conference at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in October 2012, curator and sensory historian Jim Drobnick acknowledged the challenges of exhibiting smell and taste when the entire fragrance and flavoring company is controlled by a handful of major companies who jealously protect their recipes. The proprietary nature of this âraw materialâ complicates any attempts to integrate smell and taste into the gallery.
[11] See Shannon Mattern, âSilent, Invisible City: Mediating Urban Experience for the Other Sensesâ Mediacity: Situations, Practices and Encounters (Berlin: Frank & Timme, 2009): 155-76.
[12] Paola Antonelli, Talk to Me: Design and the Communication between People and Objects (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2011): 9.
[13] Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, [1967] 1997): 348, 354.
[14] Paola Antonelli, âVideo Games: 14 in the Collection, for Startersâ Inside/Out (Museum of Modern Art: November 29, 2012).
[15] âInvisible: Art About the Unseen, 1957-2012â e-flux; Dialogue in the Dark. Available on line at http://www.dialogue-in-the-dark.com/
[16] Multimodal Approaches to Learning International Conference, October 26-28, 2012, Metropolitan Museum of Art.
[17] Barry Bergdoll, âAt Home In the Museum?â Log 15 (Winter 2009): 37. Bergdoll also addresses the history of architectural exhibitions outside of MoMA, and prior to the 20th century. This deeper, more global history is beyond the purview of this essay. For more on the history of architecture exhibitions, see Barry Bergdoll, âCurating Historyâ The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 57:3 (September 1998): 256-7, 366; Jennifer Carter, âArchitecture by Design: Exhibiting Architecture Architecturallyâ Media Tropes 3:2 (2012): 32-33; Phyllis Lambert, âThe Architectural Museum: A Founderâs Perspectiveâ The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 58:3 (September 1999): 308-315.
[18] Henry Urbach, âExhibition as Atmosphereâ Log 20 (Fall 2010): 13. We find precedents in the late 18th century at the MusĂ©e des monuments français, where Alexandre Lenoir âdismantled the parts of buildings confiscated from ecclesiastical and aristocratic settings, deploying them as both picturesque and didactic fragments, but effectively elevating them to works of sculpture rather than dealing with the complex organism of the building of which they were so many momento moriâ (Bergdoll 2009: 35). Itâs important to note that some of these fragments were âthe scale of buildings,â and thus potentially inhabitable (36).
[19] Urbach 13; Bergdoll 2009: 40.
[20] Bergdoll 2009: 39; see also Terence Riley, The International Style:Exhibition 15 and the Museum of Modern Art (New York: Rizzoli and Columbia Books on Architecture, 1992).
[21] Barry Bergdoll and Peter Christensen, Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2008): 9-10. Bergdoll (2009) describes many historically significant precedents: Miesâs Weissenhofsiedlung housing estate, completed in 1927; the Werkbundâs exhibition of full-scale rooms at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1930; MoMAâs 1930 Bauhaus exhibition; and the Berlin Building Exhibition of 1931.
[22] Bergdoll 2009: 40.
[23] Fleur Watson, âBeyond Art, The Challenge Of Exhibiting Architectureâ D*Hub, Powerhouse Museum:
[24] Jonathan Hale & Holger SchnĂ€delbach, âMoving City: Curating Architecture on Siteâ In Sarah Chaplin & Alexandra Stara, Eds., Curating Architecture and the City (New York: Routledge, 2009): 51-2.
[25] Felicity D. Scott, âOperating Platformsâ Log 20 (Fall 2010): 66-7.
[26] See Jean-Louis Cohen, âMirror or Dreamsâ Log 20 (Fall 2010): 49-53; Sylvia Lavin, âShowing Workâ Log 20 (Fall 2010): 5-10; Aaron Levy and William Menking, Eds., Venice New York London Chicago: Four Conversations on the Architecture of Discourse (London: Architectural Association 2012); Felicity D. Scott, âOperating Platformsâ Log 20 (Fall 2010): 65-9; Mirko Zardini, âExhibiting And Collecting Ideas: A Montreal Perspectiveâ Log 20 (Fall 2010): 77-84.
[27] Carson Chan, âExhibiting Architecture: Show, Donât Tellâ Domus (September 2010).
[28] Kurt W. Forster, âShow Me: Arguments for an Architecture of Displayâ Log 20 (Fall 2010): 62.
[29] Of course there is much debate over what constitutes architecture, and whether architectural mediation itself constitutes a form of architectural practice. I discuss these issues in Shannon Mattern, âClick/Scan/Bold: The New Materiality of Architectural Discourse and Its Counter-Publicsâ Design and Culture 3.3 (November 2011): 329-354.
[30] Hale & SchnÀdelbach 52.
[31] Jennifer Carter, âArchitecture by Design: Exhibiting Architecture Architecturallyâ Media Tropes 3:2 (2012): 30.
[32] Carter 31.
[33] Urbach 14.
[34] Urbach 15.
[35] Some museums have long offered special tours for visitors with various handicaps â e.g., Antonelli mentioned in our conversation MoMAâs special programs for visitors with Alzheimers â but the Newark Museum of Art seems to offer an early example of architecture-specific programming for the blind. In the 1960s the museum began to hold âTouch and Seeâ exhibitions for the blind; the tenth edition, in 1974, was dedicated to âForms of Architecture,â which explored, through various senses, the different available forms and materials of spatial enclosure (Sally OâC Townsend, âTouch and See â Architecture for The Blindâ Curator: The Museum Journal 18:3 (September 1975): 200-205).
[36] Quoted in Philip Ursprung, Ed., Herzog & De Meuron: Natural History (Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2002): 365.
[37] Also noteworthy is the wine âsmell wallâ in Urbachâs 2011 âHow Wine Becomes Modern: Design + Wine, 1976 to Nowâ exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
[38] Carter 41, 44.
[39] Carter 43.
[40] âPast Futures, Present, Futuresâ Storefront for Art and Architecture.
[41] Eva Franch i Gilabert. Personal Interview. October 10, 2012.
[42] âPaella 01 â Architecture on Displayâ Storefront for Art and Architecture.
[43] Franch.