Vienna’s Museum of Applied Art—also known as MAK—has just raised the curtain on a new exhibition that reveals the mutual influence and interplay between contemporary art and architecture. Titled “Envisioning Buildings: Reflecting Architecture in Contemporary Art Photography,” the show examines the image of the modern city not through the lens of conventional architectural photography, but through the work of artists whose practices confront the nature of architectural space in a manner that’s not merely pictorial. “Barely any domain affects our lives in such an enduring way as do architecture, urbanity, and urban planning,” MAK Director Christoph Thun-Hohenstein says. “When contemporary art turns its gaze to the built environment… alternative readings of [architecture] are engaged.”

Joachim Koester, “The Kant Walks #2” (2003–2004). Photo: Joachim Koester; courtesy Sammlung Verbund, Wien.

Focusing on well-known buildings by some of the most prominent designers of the last century (Gehry, Wright, Le Corbusier), the 28 participating artists put photographic values in the foreground, exploring the shared problems of space- and image-making through the exhibition’s eight thematically organized sections. John Massey’s “Action in Change,” for example, featuring an austere Mies van der Rohe–like interior punctuated by a discarded red bikini, plays on the similar frustrations of narrative in both modernist design and in photography. Jose Avila’s series “Buildings You Have To See Before You Die,” meanwhile, presents the viewer with a wall of postcard-like photos of familiar monuments from which the actual buildings have been excised, gesturing at the empty signification of the architectural icon in a media-saturated world.

Of the international group of photographers whose work is included, several will be familiar to American audiences, among them Andreas Gursky, Allan Sekula, and Thomas Ruff. The show will also be the debut of a new MAK initiative, the MAK Learning Lab, an experiment in museological education that will extend MAK’s public programs and more fully integrate them with its exhibitions. New audience feedback cards, an interactive display, and architect/artist conversations will all serve to make the show, Thun-Hohenstein says, “a foundation for a new enduring dialogue between art and architectural culture.”

"Envisioning Buildings" at MAK
Title image: Candida Höfer, “Zoologischer Garten London III 1992” (1992). Photo: Candida Höfer, Köln / VBK, Wien 2011.

James Welling, “8067” (2008). Photo: James Welling; courtesy Galerie nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder.

Candida Höfer, “Schindler House, Los Angeles VII 2000” (2000). Photo: Candida Höfer, Köln / VBK, Wien 2011.