2020 ADA EXHIBITION DESIGN

As winners of the 2018 ADA Awards for Emerging Architects, which recognize the work of young architects in Taiwan, we were invited to design the exhibition for the award's fifth edition, working together with a Taiwanese team. Postponed by the pandemic, the exhibition opened in 2020 at the Museum of National Taipei University of Education (MoNTUE).

By the time we began, the locations and contents of the eight finalists' displays (models, full-scale mock-ups, panels, and so on) had already been decided. The projects varied widely in scale, program, and character. The exhibition had to bring them together as a single show while conveying both the breadth of the award's vision and the diversity of Taiwan's young architects. At the same time, the eight projects were the stars, and the exhibition design must never upstage them. With only about two weeks to design and a limited budget, we had to meet all of this with minimal intervention. Our answer was a concept called Critical Lines (關鍵界線): a space loosely, ambiguously structured by lines floating in the air.

As the anthropologist Tim Ingold observes in "Lines: A Brief History", lines do countless kinds of work in human civilization. They guide, connect, separate, enclose, pierce, blur, diverge, and converge. We wanted to harness this power, one every architect draws on daily, to give the whole room a soft structure without any clear hierarchy. The room would stay open and free, yet speak in some way to the bodies and minds of the people moving through it.

From the gallery's grid ceiling, we suspended lengths of unfinished Taiwan cypress, some straight and some gently curved, and on the floor we laid corresponding lines in adhesive film. Like construction lines in a drawing, the floating lines loosely enclose, separate, and link the works while guiding visitors through the space. Yet we deliberately gave none of them a fixed meaning. One might read them as simplified traces of the lines architects wrestle with in real projects, lines of thought, constraint, and desire that so often pull against one another.

Because of the pandemic, we were never able to visit the site. The members of the Taiwanese team handled all communication with the organizers, the exhibitors, and the builders. Our main role was to send them, remotely, the overall composition along with the ideas and rules needed to realize it in a short time. Each line is made of a single material. Each floats in the air, so that it reads as a line rather than a wall. And the layout is never fixed precisely but treated as a "system" that can shift with conditions on site. These simple rules let the local team adjust positions and shapes on the spot while staying true to our intent.

We regret never having felt the atmosphere of the exhibition in person. Still, the design, grounded in a clear idea yet flexible and easy to build, earned the appreciation of the organizers and the Taiwanese team, and the exhibition closed after a well-attended run. Looking back, it was also our first project carried out entirely remotely.