Didactic Demonstration Spaces

This text defends the thesis that in the wake of the post-revolutionary Soviet avant-gardes and the Modern Movement in architecture, a new paradigm of exhibitions conceived as demonstration spaces was created. This form of exhibition flourished in the context of the political paradigm offered by the German and Viennese social democracies. The primary aim of this work is to build a genealogy of this form of demonstrative exhibition in the fields of architecture and urban planning, under the impetus in particular of the Wirtschafts- und Gesellschaftsmuseum in Vienna, the Bauhaus, the International Congresses of Modern Architecture, the Milan Triennale and also the new States born at the end of the Second World War and their policy of Reconstruction. A number of exhibitions (held in Germany, Austria, France and Italy) have been rediscovered and reconstructed. This work is intended as a critical contribution to a debate on the history of exhibitions and curatorial practices in architecture.