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Architectural exhibitions, despite their transient nature, have a profound influence in articulating movements, sparking central discussions and marking traces in the field. They act as active agents that represent, culminate, disseminate or project prevailing paradigms in architectural discourse at specific moments, as demonstrated by the 1927 Deutscher Werkbund architecture exhibition, the Strada Novissima at the 1980 Venice Architecture Biennale, and the 1988 Deconstructivist Architecture exhibition at MoMA. Moreover, like architectural competitions, they serve as contact zones (see Footprint, issue 26), fostering confrontation, negotiation and exchange among diverse actors in architecture – a field that is, by nature, multi-authorial.
While architectural exhibitions may serve promotional purposes, they are largely insulated from the market-driven stakes and commodification pressures that often influence art exhibitions, as their exhibitable objects rarely become collectible items. This relative autonomy has preserved their critical edge and has driven the rise of architectural exhibitions. Once a means for showcasing architectural work or scholarly expertise, architectural exhibitions have, in recent decades, evolved into an independent field of study with distinct procedures, methodologies, historiographies and effects. As a medium of its own, the exhibition both produces architecture as an exhibitable object and advances knowledge production, offering a lens to explore how research generates – rather than merely uncovers – its subjects. Today, these curatorial practices have converged, with architects and historians taking on the role of curators. Alongside the proliferation of biennials and research exhibitions, the rise of curatorial programmes within architecture departments across continents situates this historically radical force as a prominent agent of critical inquiry.
As a result, architectural exhibitions have gained further agency with a significant impact, producing what we refer to as the ‘exhibition effect’. This term, playing with the terminology of the ‘museum effect’, which elevates the perceived value and significance of objects simply by placing them in a museum context, and the ‘Bilbao effect’, which refers to the transformative impact of a landmark architectural project on a city’s economy, tourism and global image, refers to the current ubiquitous disciplinary and cultural impact of exhibitions.
Recent journal issues including Log no. 20 (2010), OASE no. 88 (2012), and Architectural Theory Review 23:1 (2019), discuss exhibition as a medium for architecture and knowledge production, an environment, a tool for representing and displaying architecture, and a collective spatial experience. Building on this growing body of contemporary literature, Footprint 39 aims to probe the ‘exhibition effect’ and the uncharted territories beyond with audacity. By re-evaluating definitions of the exhibition as an event, a common ground, an activist agency, a power tool for publicising and legitimising architecture, and a means of collecting and revealing archives, the issue seeks to critically address the status of institutions involved in collecting and displaying, the privilege of visibility essential for exhibiting, the comforts and discomforts associated with possessing or lacking recorded archives, and the dynamics of curatorial networks.
In this pivotal moment, as what was once considered the periphery shifts to the centre of global exhibitions – challenging and diversifying the previously dominant Euro-American model, as seen in prominent venues such as Venice and Sharjah – Footprint 39 invites contributors to explore the following questions: How can exhibitions occur beyond established systems, methods and institutions? What new materialities and methodologies do exhibitions inspire? In what ways can exhibitions become displays of discursivity to debate and adjust our worlds? How might unrecorded historical experiments be brought into the present? What new perspectives do exhibitions offer on unconventional archives? How can curatorship from the ‘periphery’ itself redefine the field? How can we utilise the unique agency of curatorial studies in architectural education? What new roles are emerging for curators in understudied territories and geographies toward a global discourse and inclusive scholarship? Finally, as exhibitions shift from being alternative to increasingly central – yet still arguably radical – practices, how might curatorial acts serve as a fulcrum to address contemporary crises and conflicts? Contributions from underrepresented scholars and researchers working on the thresholds of architectural history and theory and its allied disciplines are particularly welcome.
Authors of full articles (6000–8000 words including endnotes) can submit their contributions via Footprint’s online platform before 1 August 2025, with all submissions undergoing double-blind peer-review.
Review articles and visual essays (unpublished exhibition proposals are also welcome) (2000–4000 words including endnotes) will be selected by editors based on a 500-word summary emailed to the editors before 1 August 2025.
Authors should include a 100-word bio with their submissions and secure permission to use any images or copyrighted materials.
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At the center of SAH Celebrates is the Charnley-Persky House (1891–1892), a National Historic Landmark and a Chicago Landmark designed by Louis Sullivan with assistance from Frank Lloyd Wright, that serves as SAH headquarters. SAH Celebrates highlights the importance of fostering a supportive community whose efforts ensure the stewardship of architectural gems like the Charnley-Persky House.
Proceeds benefit the ongoing maintenance and care of the Charnley-Persky House and SAH's educational programs and publications, including SAH Archipedia and Buildings of the United States.
T. Gunny Harboe, FAIA Founder, Harboe Architects
Michelangelo Sabatino, PhD Professor, Director of Ph.D. Program in Architecture, Inaugural John Vinci Distinguished Research Fellow, Illinois Institute of Technology
Laurence O. Booth, FAIA Booth Hansen Architects
Rebekah Coffman Chicago History Museum
Stuart Cohen, FAIA Cohen-Hacker Architects
Thomas M. Dietz
Jaeger Nickola Kuhlman & Associates
Alison Fisher Art Institute of Chicago
Scott Fortman Institute of Classical Architecture and Art, Chicago-Midwest Chapter
Keith Goad The Keith Goad Group, Berkshire Hathaway Home Services Chicago
Chandra Goldsmith IIT CoA Board of Advisors
Barbara Gordon Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy
Eleanor Gorski Chicago Architecture Center
Stuart Graff Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation
Julie Hacker, FAIA Cohen-Hacker Architects
Sarah Herda Graham Foundation
Harry Hunderman, FAIA Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates, Inc
Lisa Key Driehaus Museum
Nancy and Thomas Klein SAH Chicago Chapter
Thomas Leslie University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Jen Masengarb AIA Chicago
Bonnie McDonald Landmarks Illinois
Justin Miller Docomomo US/Chicago
Ward Miller Preservation Chicago
Heather Hyde Minor University of Notre Dame
Keith N. Morgan, FSAH SAH Past President
Sarah Rogers Morris University of Illinois at Chicago
John K. Notz Jr. SAH Benefactor Member
Keith Olsen Olsen Vranas Architects
Abby Persky
Chicago, IL
Laurie Petersen Charnley-Persky House Board Member
Charlie Pipal School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Deborah Slaton Wiss, Janney, Elstner Assocites, Inc.
Chris-Annmarie Spencer, AIA, NOMA
AIA Chicago Foundation
Cynthia Vranas Mies Van der Rohe Society
Cynthia Weese, FAIA Weese, Langley, Weese Architects and Charnley-Persky House Board Member
Ernie Wong Commission on Chicago Landmarks
Download the prospectus for information about sponsorship and advertising opportunities. Please contact Ben Thomas at 312-573-1365 if you have questions.
Submit abstracts to one of the 54 thematic sessions, the Graduate Student Lightning Talks, or the Open Sessions for the Mexico City conference, April 15-19, 2026.
Featuring archival articles and reviews spanning 1970 to today, this limited-time collection explores the host city and region for #SAH2025 Conference.
"Community-led" or "participatory" architecture invites users to help plan and design their built environment. Who gets to tell the story of that participation afterward — and how? Join SAH for a free webinar on February 21 at 9AM CST.
With your participation and encouragement, we developed new opportunities for scholars, expanded our annual conferences, and increased support for researchers.
Graduate students and emerging scholars in architectural history and adjacent fields are invited to discuss new, alternative, and reconsidered methodological approaches to research.
The 79th Annual International Conference will take place in Mexico City from Wednesday, April 15 to Sunday April 19, 2026. This event marks the first time the conference will be held in Mexico.
Through October 15, 2024, read the September issue of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians for free. Includes research articles, roundtable, and book and exhibition reviews.
Explore the history of buildings, landscapes, and curated spaces — as well as their authors and occupants — at the Society's 78th annual international meeting in Atlanta, April 30–May 4.
Time is running out! Register today for our premiere virtual gathering September 19–21. Can't make it live? Sign up to receive videos of all 20 sessions to enjoy later.
Architectural exhibitions, despite their transient nature, have a profound influence in articulating movements, sparking central discussions and marking traces in the field. They act as active agents that represent, culminate, disseminate or project prevailing paradigms in architectural discourse at specific moments, as demonstrated by the 1927 Deutscher Werkbund architecture exhibition, the Strada Novissima at the 1980 Venice Architecture Biennale, and the 1988 Deconstructivist Architecture exhibition at MoMA. Moreover, like architectural competitions, they serve as contact zones (see Footprint, issue 26), fostering confrontation, negotiation and exchange among diverse actors in architecture – a field that is, by nature, multi-authorial.
While architectural exhibitions may serve promotional purposes, they are largely insulated from the market-driven stakes and commodification pressures that often influence art exhibitions, as their exhibitable objects rarely become collectible items. This relative autonomy has preserved their critical edge and has driven the rise of architectural exhibitions. Once a means for showcasing architectural work or scholarly expertise, architectural exhibitions have, in recent decades, evolved into an independent field of study with distinct procedures, methodologies, historiographies and effects. As a medium of its own, the exhibition both produces architecture as an exhibitable object and advances knowledge production, offering a lens to explore how research generates – rather than merely uncovers – its subjects. Today, these curatorial practices have converged, with architects and historians taking on the role of curators. Alongside the proliferation of biennials and research exhibitions, the rise of curatorial programmes within architecture departments across continents situates this historically radical force as a prominent agent of critical inquiry.
As a result, architectural exhibitions have gained further agency with a significant impact, producing what we refer to as the ‘exhibition effect’. This term, playing with the terminology of the ‘museum effect’, which elevates the perceived value and significance of objects simply by placing them in a museum context, and the ‘Bilbao effect’, which refers to the transformative impact of a landmark architectural project on a city’s economy, tourism and global image, refers to the current ubiquitous disciplinary and cultural impact of exhibitions.
Recent journal issues including Log no. 20 (2010), OASE no. 88 (2012), and Architectural Theory Review 23:1 (2019), discuss exhibition as a medium for architecture and knowledge production, an environment, a tool for representing and displaying architecture, and a collective spatial experience. Building on this growing body of contemporary literature, Footprint 39 aims to probe the ‘exhibition effect’ and the uncharted territories beyond with audacity. By re-evaluating definitions of the exhibition as an event, a common ground, an activist agency, a power tool for publicising and legitimising architecture, and a means of collecting and revealing archives, the issue seeks to critically address the status of institutions involved in collecting and displaying, the privilege of visibility essential for exhibiting, the comforts and discomforts associated with possessing or lacking recorded archives, and the dynamics of curatorial networks.
In this pivotal moment, as what was once considered the periphery shifts to the centre of global exhibitions – challenging and diversifying the previously dominant Euro-American model, as seen in prominent venues such as Venice and Sharjah – Footprint 39 invites contributors to explore the following questions: How can exhibitions occur beyond established systems, methods and institutions? What new materialities and methodologies do exhibitions inspire? In what ways can exhibitions become displays of discursivity to debate and adjust our worlds? How might unrecorded historical experiments be brought into the present? What new perspectives do exhibitions offer on unconventional archives? How can curatorship from the ‘periphery’ itself redefine the field? How can we utilise the unique agency of curatorial studies in architectural education? What new roles are emerging for curators in understudied territories and geographies toward a global discourse and inclusive scholarship? Finally, as exhibitions shift from being alternative to increasingly central – yet still arguably radical – practices, how might curatorial acts serve as a fulcrum to address contemporary crises and conflicts? Contributions from underrepresented scholars and researchers working on the thresholds of architectural history and theory and its allied disciplines are particularly welcome.
Authors of full articles (6000–8000 words including endnotes) can submit their contributions via Footprint’s online platform before 1 August 2025, with all submissions undergoing double-blind peer-review.
Review articles and visual essays (unpublished exhibition proposals are also welcome) (2000–4000 words including endnotes) will be selected by editors based on a 500-word summary emailed to the editors before 1 August 2025.
Authors should include a 100-word bio with their submissions and secure permission to use any images or copyrighted materials.
Architectural exhibitions, despite their transient nature, have a profound influence in articulating movements, sparking central discussions and marking traces in the field. They act as active agents that represent, culminate, disseminate or project prevailing paradigms in architectural discourse at specific moments, as demonstrated by the 1927 Deutscher Werkbund architecture exhibition, the Strada Novissima at the 1980 Venice Architecture Biennale, and the 1988 Deconstructivist Architecture exhibition at MoMA. Moreover, like architectural competitions, they serve as contact zones (see Footprint, issue 26), fostering confrontation, negotiation and exchange among diverse actors in architecture – a field that is, by nature, multi-authorial.
While architectural exhibitions may serve promotional purposes, they are largely insulated from the market-driven stakes and commodification pressures that often influence art exhibitions, as their exhibitable objects rarely become collectible items. This relative autonomy has preserved their critical edge and has driven the rise of architectural exhibitions. Once a means for showcasing architectural work or scholarly expertise, architectural exhibitions have, in recent decades, evolved into an independent field of study with distinct procedures, methodologies, historiographies and effects. As a medium of its own, the exhibition both produces architecture as an exhibitable object and advances knowledge production, offering a lens to explore how research generates – rather than merely uncovers – its subjects. Today, these curatorial practices have converged, with architects and historians taking on the role of curators. Alongside the proliferation of biennials and research exhibitions, the rise of curatorial programmes within architecture departments across continents situates this historically radical force as a prominent agent of critical inquiry.
As a result, architectural exhibitions have gained further agency with a significant impact, producing what we refer to as the ‘exhibition effect’. This term, playing with the terminology of the ‘museum effect’, which elevates the perceived value and significance of objects simply by placing them in a museum context, and the ‘Bilbao effect’, which refers to the transformative impact of a landmark architectural project on a city’s economy, tourism and global image, refers to the current ubiquitous disciplinary and cultural impact of exhibitions.
Recent journal issues including Log no. 20 (2010), OASE no. 88 (2012), and Architectural Theory Review 23:1 (2019), discuss exhibition as a medium for architecture and knowledge production, an environment, a tool for representing and displaying architecture, and a collective spatial experience. Building on this growing body of contemporary literature, Footprint 39 aims to probe the ‘exhibition effect’ and the uncharted territories beyond with audacity. By re-evaluating definitions of the exhibition as an event, a common ground, an activist agency, a power tool for publicising and legitimising architecture, and a means of collecting and revealing archives, the issue seeks to critically address the status of institutions involved in collecting and displaying, the privilege of visibility essential for exhibiting, the comforts and discomforts associated with possessing or lacking recorded archives, and the dynamics of curatorial networks.
In this pivotal moment, as what was once considered the periphery shifts to the centre of global exhibitions – challenging and diversifying the previously dominant Euro-American model, as seen in prominent venues such as Venice and Sharjah – Footprint 39 invites contributors to explore the following questions: How can exhibitions occur beyond established systems, methods and institutions? What new materialities and methodologies do exhibitions inspire? In what ways can exhibitions become displays of discursivity to debate and adjust our worlds? How might unrecorded historical experiments be brought into the present? What new perspectives do exhibitions offer on unconventional archives? How can curatorship from the ‘periphery’ itself redefine the field? How can we utilise the unique agency of curatorial studies in architectural education? What new roles are emerging for curators in understudied territories and geographies toward a global discourse and inclusive scholarship? Finally, as exhibitions shift from being alternative to increasingly central – yet still arguably radical – practices, how might curatorial acts serve as a fulcrum to address contemporary crises and conflicts? Contributions from underrepresented scholars and researchers working on the thresholds of architectural history and theory and its allied disciplines are particularly welcome.
Authors of full articles (6000–8000 words including endnotes) can submit their contributions via Footprint’s online platform before 1 August 2025, with all submissions undergoing double-blind peer-review.
Review articles and visual essays (unpublished exhibition proposals are also welcome) (2000–4000 words including endnotes) will be selected by editors based on a 500-word summary emailed to the editors before 1 August 2025.
Authors should include a 100-word bio with their submissions and secure permission to use any images or copyrighted materials.