Review: Archaeology of the Digital: Complexity and Convention

Archaeology of the Digital: Complexity and Convention Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal 10 May–16 October 2016 Archaeology of the Digital: Complexity and Convention was the third and final in a series of exhibitions curated by Greg Lynn, an architect based in Los Angeles, at the Canadian Centre for Architecture. The first was a blockbuster display of four projects by Lynn's mentors and heroes; the second was a more eclectic set of six projects by Lynn's buddies.1 The third exhibition resembled the second in that it presented a diverse set of projects—fifteen, spanning twenty years—by architects roughly Lynn's age.2 A perceptive curatorial move, however, shifted the third show into a different register. Rather than clustering materials by project, the exhibition spread a jumble from all fifteen projects—drawings, models, animations, renderings, and everything in between—throughout the gallery space, with little discernible order (Figure 1). Labels with architects’ names were there if one looked for them, but they were unobtrusive enough that, looking up from the labels and across the room, a visitor might have mistaken the work as the output of a single firm. Such evenness prevailed not only at the scale of the room but also over the six rooms of the exhibition as a whole. The overall effect was to immerse the visitor within the nerdy world of recent architectural production. Figure 1 Installation view of Archaeology of the Digital: Complexity and …