Architecture of Life, the inaugural exhibition in BAM/PFA's landmark new building, explores the ways that architecture—as concept, metaphor, and practice—illuminates various aspects of life experience: the nature of the self and psyche, the fundamental structures of reality, and the power of the imagination to reshape our world. Occupying every gallery in the new building, designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the exhibition comprises over two hundred works of art in a wide range of media, as well as scientific illustrations and architectural drawings and models, made over the past two thousand years. International in scope, Architecture of Life includes work by artists David Chalmers Alesworth, Noriko Ambe, Yuri Ancarani, Ruth Asawa, George Ault, Lee Bontecou, Louise Bourgeois, James Castle, Marcel Duchamp, Léon Ferrari, Suzan Frecon, Brent Green, Ganesh Haloi, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Johannes Itten, Stephen Kaltenbach, Kimsooja, Paul and Marlene Kos, Fernand Léger, Bernard Palissy, Avery Preesman, Qiu Zhijie, A.G. Rizzoli, Ben Rivers, John Robson, Till Roeskens, Dieter Roth, Tomás Saraceno, Hedda Sterne, Al Taylor, Rosie Lee Tompkins, and John and James Whitney; architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Buckminster Fuller, Frederick Kiesler, Toyo Ito, and Lebbeus Woods; scientists Wilson Bentley, Otto Lehmann, Santiago Ramón y Cajal, and Viktor Schauberger; and composer Iannis Xenakis, among many others. The exhibition also presents Mbuti bark cloth paintings, Pomo baskets, Micronesian navigational charts, Tibetan meditation mandalas, and tantric drawings from Rajasthan. Boundary-breaking, innovative, and radically interdisciplinary, the exhibition presents visually exquisite, rarely seen works in ways that suggest new connections and meanings.Architecture of Life is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog with essays by Sabrina Dalla Valle, Padma Maitland, Lawrence Rinder, Lisa Robertson, and Rebecca Solnit.The exhibition is organized by BAM/PFA Director Lawrence Rinder and supported in part by Ann Hatch and Paul Discoe, Dr. Rosalyn M. Laudati and Dr. James Pick, The John and Natasha Boas Art Fund, and anonymous donors.
