Where does the architecture exhibition go from here?

Last week, Punch List was in Porto to see what turned out to be a rather airless tribute to Frank Gehry at the Serralves Museum. (Modest exhibition title: “Frank Gehry: The Century of Gehry.”) In my review of that show, I lamented the fact that it relied so heavily on certain hoary tropes of the lone (typically, of course, male) architectural genius working in a kind of hallowed isolation, almost ruthlessly severed from time and place, and wondered where the monographic exhibition might go from here:

“The questions I was left with after leaving the show had less to do with Gehry’s work and more to do with the curatorial norms that seem so strictly and unyieldingly to govern certain kinds of architecture exhibitions. Is it even possible to imagine a monographic architecture show that is not, by definition, an exercise in something between cheerleading and hagiography, as this one undoubtedly is? Or does the need to rely on the architectural offices that are the subjects of these shows for access to drawings, models, and other materials preclude a different—more sober, more surprising, more skeptical, or even just more curious—approach? Why is it that museums love celebrating the careers of maverick architects but so often insist on presenting their work in such conventional and hidebound ways?”

For this week’s dispatch, I reached out to a number of curators, critics, and historians and put the same questions to them. Before we get to their responses, a couple of quick overarching points. Yes, this kind of exhibition is not nearly as common as it used to be; and yes, there has been a heartening trend toward architecture and design shows—at places like the CCA in Montreal or CIVA (now Kanal) in Brussels, to name two, or in Lesley Lokko’s 2023 Venice Biennale—that are highly concerned with questions of authorship and collaboration, urbanism, or ecology, and in placing their subjects unmistakably within an intellectual, artistic, or political milieu.

Still, I’ve been at least a little surprised at how hardy the Great Man exhibition has turned out to be, how unwilling to go away for good, perhaps because a focus on biography and personality is one reliable way to help demystify architectural practice for a broad audience. Another recent example was “Norman Foster” at the Pompidou, in 2023, which I reviewed for Metropolis. A third, in the view of some critics, was “Materialized Space: The Architecture of Paul Rudolph,” which ran at the Metropolitan Museum of Art from Sept. 2024 to March 2025.

There are sure to be more. So what does the future of the monographic show look like? How might it be made more relevant and less worshipful? And how else should we be thinking about the state of the architecture exhibition? Here’s what my esteemed group of correspondents had to say: