Besides, History, an exhibition in Canadian Centre for Architecture, examines the role that history plays in contemporary architecture practice. The invited architects reread, redraw, translate, and appropriate from the past and from each other in order to construct relationships and meaning out of a constellation of references. Collected from many historical periods and geographies, these references -Andrea Palladio, John Hejduk, Aldo Rossi, Kazunari Sakamoto, and others- reveal a very different attitude of inquiry, more directly related to the architects’ aesthetic research without becoming strictly operational or literal.
Rather than adopting a postmodern attitude or evoking past discussions and historical architectural forms, Go Hasegawa, Kersten Geers, and David Van Severen address contemporary issues in their work while remaining in dialogue with history. Even with distinct pasts and contexts, affinities emerge in shared concerns and approaches.
In this exhibition, the architects reread, redraw, translate, and appropriate from the past and from each other in order to construct relationships and meaning out of a constellation of references. History becomes something that can be used rather than just studied.