Old things, historic things, smelly dirty things, all the things that were considered the very opposite of "contemporary," have suddenly irrupted forcefully into architecture and art, blurring their bound- aries. This book takes stock of the emerging generation behind this turn, and examines their experimental engagements with the preservation of culturally charged objects. Structured around a series of interdisciplinary dialogues among practitioners and thinkers, and illustrated with recent projects, the book provides a window into the unfolding intellectual frameworks, aesthetic modes, cultural ambitions, and political commitments that are the basis of experimental preservation.

Seemingly immobile and durable, architecture remains a challenge in the modern world of collecting and exhibiting. From the late eighteenth century onward, divergent conventions of display have been conflated with urgent discussions of how material culture is handed down, distributed, appropriated, and evaluated. Place and Displacement: Exhibiting Architecture investigates historical and con temporary practices of displaying architecture, whether in full scale or as fragments, models, or two-dimensional representations. Exploring questions of circulation and temporality, issues of institution and canon, and the discourse and politics of architectural spaces on exhibit, the book's essays discuss the ambiguous status of architecture as an object of display. Contributions from leading scholars in the new research field of architectural exhibitions reveal the centrality of the exhibition in defining and redefining the notion of architecture and its history.