Open Access

Van Alen Institute has spent more than 130 years at the intersection of design ambition and civic life. Its archive is one of the most extensive records of American architectural history. But an archive is never neutral. It reflects the priorities, blind spots, and values of those who built it: who was invited in, whose ideas were resourced, and whose were left out entirely.

Open Access: Exploring 130 Years of American Design brings together artists and design teams to interrogate this record. Working with Van Alen’s historic materials, each asks a critical question: what does this archive tell us about who design has historically served, and who has it erased?

Free and open to the public. Gallery hours: Monday–Thursday, 10am–6pm. Select Fridays and Saturdays, 12–6 pm: October 23–24 and 30–31, November 6–7 and 13.

Projects
Haunting Van Alen’s Archive
Annie Barrett, Daniel Pittman, and Paula Vilaplana de Miguel
In Van Alen’s archive, every name preserved implies others who were never entered, never credited, never asked. Haunting Van Alen’s Archive approaches the archive through that absence, making the structurally invisible appear through spectral projections and a sound installation.

Re-grounding the Archive
Friends Making Work
Re-grounding the Archive opens up Van Alen’s history to an archeological examination of its institutional attitudes towards the ground, land, and environment over time. A series of speculative “core samples” made of paper pulp and clay references competition proposals at various moment in the institution’s identity.

Survival—A World Ecological Study Centre
Props Supply
Survival—A World Ecological Study Centre looks back at a 1973 competition to design an ecological center for “the research required to institute a system of monitoring and control of the World’s environment.” Examining the environmental optimism of the 1970s, the project traces the emergence of ecological thinking as a design program and includes a new architectural response to the original brief.

Western Pattern Language
Gillian Waldo
Within the language of archival competition documents, the colonization, domination, or obliteration of others is often implicit. Western Pattern Language draws attention to this grammar through CRT monitors displaying imagery and text from documents and entries of the Paris Prize in Architecture, asking us to consider the role architects play in furthering the objectives of state power.

Whose Land Are You On?
Kholisile Dhliwayo
Whose Land Are You On? asserts that some proposals in Van Alen's archive create a sanitized narrative of the sites at the heart of those competitions. A series of posters place archival programs in direct dialogue with the political landscape of those times and places, recognizing that we are on Indigenous Lands and arguing that the design professions must engage in issues of restitution and sovereignty.

Events
The Architectural Anarchive: Reimagining the Design Archive
Monday, October 19, 6–8pm
Shannon Mattern (Metropolitan New York Library Council) leads a discussion around how archives determine what’s worthy of collection and preservation, and the role of the architectural archive in an age of extractive technologies.

The Accidental Archive: A Community Workshop
Thursday, October 22, 6–8pm
Writer and artist Divya Mehra leads an interactive workshop to explore our own personal archives, asking questions about the value of the mundane and what it means to embrace our own archival practice.

An Archival Séance: The Critical Record
Thursday, October 29, 6–8pm
Architect and researcher Marina Otero Verzier, in collaboration with Paula Vilaplana de Miguel, conducts a séance-inspired performance that tunes into the spirits of those not present in the archives.

Exhibition team
Curators: Andrew Brown, Hayley Eber, Mina Morales / Exhibition design: NOT NOT / Graphic design: Studio Loutsis / Fabrication: Kurt Brosnan, East Hill Digital Fabrication / Public programs: Emily Conklin.

Open Access is made possible by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. Material support is provided by METALSISTEM and TALAS.