D.A.C.

cRITIC

Eduardo Rega

TEAM

Cheyenne Yamada, Liujie Lu, Kelvin Vu, Peilin Liao

PROJECT STATEMENT

“It’s not a question of being against the institution...it’s a question of what kind of institution we are, what kind of values we institutionalize, what forms of practice we reward, and what kinds of rewards we aspire to. Because the institution of art is internalized, embodied, and performed by individuals, these are the questions that institutional critique demands we ask, above all, ourselves.”

Andrea Fraser, “From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique” (2005)

As part of a critique of art and education institutions, we hope to use this platform to highlight labor issues in architecture and architectural education.

These pavilions are products of teamwork, research, craft, and instruction. But they are also products of time, labor, and capital. While we are part of a privileged creative class, we are fundamentally laborers. As students, we are also caught between roles—consumer/producer, critic/critiqued,

student/worker—entangled in relations that follow us into the profession.

Responding to this position, we designed a double agent. Our pavilion participates in this event, but it also performs different agendas through its materials and program. We transformed recycled drawings, chicken wire, and glue so that they are elegant and aggressive, refined and rough, controlled and unpredictable, harmless and hostile. Programmatically, the pavilion is a shelter, bunker, strategy room, and communication tool, while also fitting into the cocktail party of a typical gallery exhibition.

The second part of our project aims to collect data and narratives from colleagues and visitors through an online survey and an invitation to add to the pavilion’s surface. We want to record and display the costs of architecture education, the costs of this project, and the conditions of our labor.

We ultimately hope that our project leads to greater transparency and understanding about what and how we spend so that we might recognize cycles and relations that permeate the broader profession and our participation in the realities we sign up for, create, and reproduce.