Entourage

Entourage presents the work of contemporary architects who confront and expand the ways bodies serve as units of measure for architecture. The exhibition centers research-based practices and projects across multiple sites: in people drawn by architects, within the political space of restrooms, and through the commercial fixtures of our daily lives. The exhibition presents works and documentations by MOS (Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample), Your Restroom is a Battleground (Matilde Cassani, Ignacio G. Galán, Iván L. Munuera, Joel Sanders), and Strat Coffman.

Alongside the radical visioning of buildings, architects have also re-envisioned the index of people, bodies, figures, and actors that populate their buildings. In Unfinished Encyclopedia of Scale Figures, Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample of MOS indexed over 2000 people found in architectural drawings, collages, sketches, and renders. “It is impossible to represent architecture without representing the human,” writes MOS. Their accompanying work Selfie Curtain is an interactive textile work that gathers these bodies into a playful procession. 

Your Restroom is a Battleground (YRIAB) is a collaboration between Matilde Cassani, Ignacio G. Galán, Iván L. Munuera, Joel Sanders examining bathrooms as sites of protest. Originally exhibited as a dioramic model in conjunction with the Restroom Pavilion in the 2021 Venice Biennale, YRIAB presents seven stories of bathrooms as contested spaces around the globe. Rather than treat restrooms as glorified utility closets, the project insists on acknowledging the entanglement of policy, finance, race, gender, ability, health and environment in those spaces. By examining toilets as technological sites, YRIAB show how design and policy deny, exclude, or overdetermine certain bodies that need to excrete. 

Erotica Generica is an ongoing research project by Strat Coffman that examines commercial fixtures and standard codes of architecture as sites where bodily elements such as bacteria, oils, and heat are transferred. Queering our understanding of generic fixtures, Coffman explores how everyday objects such as stair handles, doorknobs, and grips can be re-envisioned as intimate sites of transfer between one body to another. By accommodating acts of touching, architecture relishes in, rather than represses, its capacity to open pathways for anonymous contact. 

Curated by MAK Center Director Jia Yi Gu, the exhibition takes place in the Schindler House, an early modernist experiment that married the body to the natural environment. By centering new definitions in bodily rights, experiences, and forms, the exhibition brings contemporary practices working on the architectural governance of the body into conversation with early modernist ideas at the Schindler House.