The Lives of Ephemeral Form examines how architecture persists, changes, and disappears through its records, and what happens when those records are themselves unstable.
Developed as part of the Architectural Institute of Japan’s 140th anniversary program, the exhibition is the first phase of a two-year project devoted to the act of documentation. It brings together installations, archival research, photography, moving images, screenings, talks, guided programs, and work carried out publicly in the gallery.
Architecture is often associated with permanence. Yet buildings depend on unstable conditions: economic circumstances, technologies, changing patterns of use, material resources, and the less visible forces that transform cities. The media through which architecture is documented are no less precarious. Film and videotape deteriorate; playback technologies become obsolete; photographs, drawings, models, and documents are dispersed, reproduced, restored, digitized, reclassified, or forgotten.
