Architecture Demonstrated: The Protests of the Milan Triennale and the Whitney Biennial

Abstract

As a medium of communication, exhibitions are events of disciplinary engagement across political and geographic divisions. In particular, spaces of architectural exhibition have inadvertently become sites protest, becoming physical loci of embodied engagement as well as ideological loci of intellectual engagement. Looking into the protests of the XIV Triennale di Milano in 1968 and the 79th Whitney Biennial in 2019, this thesis examines the multiplicities of ideas behind the protests and comes to terms with the complications of their modes of institutional critique. It conducts an analysis of the Palazzo dell’Arte, as well as of archival photographs of protest aesthetics. It also considers the motions of the Whitney protest and how these actions operate as institutional critique. It asks how critique can operate within the apparatus of architecture, and how the physical space of exhibition becomes a physical host for this process.