Critical Broadcasting Lab

The exhibit of the thirteen New York participants in the Ordos 100 project contends with two key issues: the participation in and the perpetuation of Ai Weiwei’s work on one hand and the contemporary predicament of a young architectural practice on the other hand. We wanted to separate judgments made on the site plan — its reproduction of an overblown suburban layout — from the judgment passed on the projects and on the role of the architects in the Ordos 100 project. In order to do that we disassociated the narrative of the trip, the actual site plan, and the invitation of the one hundred architects (what we see as the narration of Ai Weiwei’s master plan project) from the presentation of the work by the thirteen New York Architects. We treated the gallery as that space in which the viewer — through an intimate encounter and study of the work — becomes complicit with the architects.

The exhibit is defined by a series of formal constraints, and although that move fundamentally parallels Ai Weiwei’s initial invitation, we hoped that the constraints we provided would allow for a closer look at each individual project, while laying bare the relationship between the apparatus of unifying formal constraints and the difference and individuation performed by the architects.