Architecture forms a seemingly immovable and durable presence, immutable to display and collecting. Buildings and building parts have for centuries constituted material for a lively curatorial practice, however, where buildings are disassembled and reassembled, collected and displayed. From the collecting practices of the renaissance, through the establishment of modern public museums, once site-specific art forms such as sculpture and painting have slowly found their place within cultural, economical and spatial exhibition conventions. Architecture has represented numerous challenges in the modern world of collecting. While most art works can be presented as “the real thing,” whether dislocated or produced for a versatile market, exhibited and collected architecture most often concerns the oeuvre rather than the ouvrage: the design, the model, the drawings, the photos, the intellectual work, as opposed to the built work.

Through a set of case studies (Norwegian and international) and working with archives, models, full-scale buildings, drawings, publications, photography and digital collections, the seminar studies historical and contemporary practices of collecting architecture.