Open call for 13 White Houses

Open call: Architecture has long been enlisted to give spatial form to political ambition. Its capacity for monumentality, symmetry, and spectacle has made it a reliable instrument of authority—particularly for regimes invested in permanence and control. Yet architecture also carries another, less concrete history: one in which designers, artists, and collectives have worked to unsettle these logics, producing counter-images, counter-spaces, and alternative civic imaginaries.

13 White Houses takes this tension as both subject and structure.

Rather than returning to the singularity of the White House—an overdetermined emblem of American governance—the exhibition multiplies it. The project assembles thirteen distinct “White Houses,” each understood not as a fixed building, but as a civic construct: a spatial apparatus through which power is staged, negotiated, naturalized, or contested.

The exhibition will be hosted by Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning and will bring together invited works, juried architectural proposals, and a broader image-based call to form a composite field of speculation, critique, and repair.

Exhibition structure
13 White Houses is organized through three interrelated components:

13 White Houses: propositional works (models + drawings)
The exhibition presents thirteen speculative architectural propositions that reconsider the White House as a civic and spatial instrument. A group of invited international practices will produce new work, supplemented by participants selected through this open call. Developed as models and drawings, these projects examine the White House and its grounds as a site of ongoing negotiation—between governance and representation, permanence and revision, authority and public life. Together, invited and selected contributions will constitute the exhibition’s core.

Expanded field: juried image exhibition
In parallel, a juried image exhibition will extend the project’s discursive reach. Comprising single images—drawings, renderings, collages, diagrams, photographs, or other visual propositions—this section expands the exhibition’s discursive field and introduces a broader range of spatial, political, and disciplinary approaches. Submissions will be considered both for inclusion in the image-based exhibition and as the basis for identifying additional participants to develop full propositional works.

The thirteenth condition
For critical contrast, the exhibition acknowledges a thirteenth condition already underway: the demolition of the East Wing and construction of a White House ballroom. Presented as documentation rather than design, this ongoing intervention functions as a real-time case study in how architecture mediates authority through spectacle, speed, erasure, and unilateral transformation.

Provocations
Submissions may engage the White House through any of the following lines of inquiry, or propose others:

Adaptive reuse as institutional reprogramming; Democratic deep retrofit of spatial and procedural systems;  unbuilding, subtraction, and architectural refusal; proto-constitutional architectures and draft forms of governance;  ritual and protocol reconsidered beyond spectacle; architectures for plural, distributed publics; ecological and infrastructural recalibration; pedagogical architectures of civic reorientation; pop reinterpretation and mediated form; iconoclasm without substitution; architecture as capital display, development instrument, and spectacle economy; preservation as an active political practice.

Submission
The open call solicits single-image submissions for inclusion in a juried image exhibition. Individuals and collaborative teams are encouraged to apply. The call is open to practitioners, researchers, and scholars working across architecture, landscape, art, design, and related spatial fields, independent of professional licensure.

Image: One image per submission / Format: JPG or PNG / Resolution: 18 inches × 12 inches  (or equivalent) at 300 dpi minimum / Text: Statement (max. 150 words).

Images should function as complete visual propositions—capable of standing alone as arguments rather than illustrations.

Submissions may operate at the scale of the building, the landscape, the campus, the city, the territory, or the diagram. We welcome speculative, critical, poetic, and rigorous approaches alike.

All submissions must be made via the project website. Questions may be directed to: info@whitehouses.us.

Curators: Sharon Haar, Olivier Peyricot, Anya Sirota
Digital Scenography: Ishan Pal Singh
Research: Nayana Durga Naik, Brianna Manzor, Thomas Goumarre