This Was Tomorrow is an exhibition about architectural imagination and the power, processes and poetics of creation and invention. It presents a series of twelve episodes—beginning in the 1950s—that look at the ferment of new ideas as architects began to re-conceive space in response to the conditions of a newly affluent society and the emergence of the electronic age.
Each of these investigations—from Le Corbusier’s late new harmony of form, to Aldo Rossi’s evocations of the force of history—looks into the basic elements, open futures and varied possibilities of architectural thinking, proposing fundamental new ideas and examining the potential of the built environment to reform the relations of humans to each other and to their environments.
Curated by Markus Lähteenmäki, Manuel Montenegro and Nicholas Olsberg, with works selected from the Drawing Matter collection, This Was Tomorrow is part of Drawing Matter’s broader enquiry into the theme of reinventions in architecture during the era of experiment that followed post-war reconstruction.
This Was Tomorrow includes over 250 drawings, models and printed works, created by the new generation of designers coming of age in the post-war years and those of the previous generation who were re-thinking the foundations of their practice. Presenting the architectural sketch and drawing as the essential vehicle for conceiving, evolving and communicating the new ideas of that period, the exhibition contains works from thirteen architects, artists and practices from the Czech Republic, Switzerland Great Britain, Austria, the Netherlands, Italy, United States, Portugal and Estonia, working around Europe, United States and Asia. These are:
Works are arranged across the three main galleries of S AM to convey specific experimental moments in the work of these seminal figures. These variously express the querying of inherited orthodoxies; extend the boundaries of the discipline into new terrain; engage architecture in wider contemporary debates and enquiries; and demonstrate how some of these new ideas could be translated into the built world. The final room serves as epilogue, centring on the studio and intellectual world of Aldo Rossi – and particularly on his teaching at the ETH in Zürich in the 1970s – recapturing in one critical example the passage of new thinking to the next generation.
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