The Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) presents Lab Cult: An unorthodox history of interchanges between science and architecture. On view in the CCA?s Octagonal Gallery, the exhibition is curated by Evangelos Kotsioris, CCA Emerging Curator 2016?2017 and investigates the concept of the laboratory as a pervasive and recurring metaphor for experimentation in both science and architecture. As a place for the conduct of rigorous research, the lab has been an incredibly productive concept for both of these fields. But at the same time, this exhibition provocatively argues, the laboratory has developed into a cult ? its seeming credibility has been repeatedly mobilized in order to normalize social behaviours, discipline the performance of bodies, regulate our environments, standardize the ways we live. Photograph: Marvin Minsky, MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, 1968.
Courtesy MIT Museum
Kotsioris conducted his research during a three month residency at the CCA and developed the curatorial approach of the exhibition by juxtaposing archival material from the CCA collection with models, scientific instruments, photographs and films on loan from more than twelve international archives, museums, collections and scientific institutions. The majority of these interrelated objects will find themselves sharing the same space for the first time at the CCA.
Today, after many decades of questioning science?s capacity to provide answers to architecture?s social mandate, architects ...