This paper discusses initial experiences with architecture exhibitions as a research tool in critical heritage studies. The project Public Space in European Social Housing explores the publicness of spaces on five post-war social housing estates over time. We study dynamic interactions between people and the physical spaces they share to better understand how cultural encounters happen and how integration can be better sustained. By working with exhibitions, we aim to develop a novel approach to studying and representing public spaces as sites of publicness.
Exhibitions are a well-proven format for communicating architecture and for sparking debate about architecture. Building on this tradition, we work with physical and web-based exhibitions to articulate, communicate and question ongoing research. Importantly, we use exhibitions not only as a tool for knowledge exchange but also for transdisciplinary knowledge development with multidisciplinary researchers (architects, landscape architects, urban planners, architectural historians, anthropologists, and sociologists) in collaboration with many non-academic partners (from an art photographer, to housing associations and national and European NGO’s.
This paper reflects upon the form, content and organisation of the first two exhibitions specifically with regard to 1) using architecture exhibitions as a transdisciplinary research tool and 2) making relational representations of public spaces as sites of publicness.