OFFICE 166

Like an OFFICE wunderkammer, Small Museum for the American Metaphor presented a collection of artworks, models and drawings that have been instrumental in defining a specific architectural discourse. These exhibits were scattered around a grid of rooms defined by silver thermal greenhouse curtains. The outer perimeter of the existing gallery walls were covered in a gradient print. While the collection implies a hypothetical project, consciously obscuring the distinction between object and representation, the exhibition ultimately investigates urban strategies in relation to the hierarchy and organisation of the field as the continual interior of the modern project. These fascinations set up a constructed fiction of the American West as seen from a European perspective. The visual narrative of the collected fragments conveys an argument for an architecture on the fringes of the wide open that celebrates the mythicised endlessness and confuses the scale of an object, producing an image that is fertile only if approached with a certain naiveté and, perhaps, misunderstanding.