Architecture works hard to keep up to speed. In environments that are quickly changing, on borders that are stealthily shifting, and among publics that are increasingly more than human, the discipline swings between representation and agency until it becomes hard to see. A quick look around suggests that its oscillation has either sped up beyond useful limits or ceased altogether. In other words, architecture is somehow both too fast and too slow.

To help architecture find its rhythm again, AWP asks 11 designers: can architecture be made to move lithely with the present in an effort to remain an agile and relevant agent of social and cultural production?

In the search for agency, the projects respond to this question by slipping between visual and material contexts, synced to their pace and situated in unusual places—in the middle, along the edge, over water, out there, in the shadows, through the air, amidst data, on unstable ground—in a critical display of architecture's versatility. In the search for representation, the work moves between image and material, circulating through time-consuming genres and formats to slow down—or speed up—architecture's incorporation into visual culture at large.

Following these themes, the exhibition is organized in two parts: Environments and Apparatuses.

Environments bring exterior worlds into the gallery, simulating the effects and affects of sites and atmospheres. They are built up and take you places. Apparatuses sample, mediate, and image materials to demonstrate that the difference between architecture and environment is not a thin line, but a space held wide open for interaction. In a field with differences too uncoordinated to make a difference, AWP asks 'when' rather than 'how' in the search for shared criteria.

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01 Ece Yetim
Balancing Act: Social Piling

An interactive and tactile chair that induces fast intimacy

02 José Ibarra
Uncertain Grounds: Rethinking Settlement in the Anthropocene

A soft cave where one experiences the fastness of geological change in the Anthropocene

03 Zhonghui Zhu
Clip-on Urbanism: A Maker's Survival Guide to Shenzhen

A suitcase of curiosities that unpacks fast and reveals slow urban interventions

04 Kenny Chao
Indefinite Boundaries: Projections of Immaterial Space

A fast unfolding of shadows that leave their slow trace behind

05 Sophia Zhu
A Floating Urbanism

A floating drawing depicting a slow alternative habitat that rethinks postcolonial identity


06 Deborah Garcia
THERE IS NO MIDDLE

Three fast-talking consoles that show us a long and slow building

07 Zherui Wang
Climate as Medium

Three slow-breathing artifacts for environmental stipulation

08 Jessica Leung
Turning the Last Page: Knowledge Exchange and Political Crossings in Hong Kong 2046

A fast-forwarded pictorial that slowly narrates the transcendence of knowledge

09 Ece Emanetoglu
Watermelons and Walls: Building Infrastructure in Sur

A transforming topography that introduces slow infrastructure to bring back lost cultural practices

10 Erik Tsurumaki
Visual Guide to A House, Museum

A surface with several formats for looking at some slow and fast house museums

11 Rami Kanafani
this tower was reconstructed on the Green Line

A slow ramp for the viewing of a monumental fragment that resists political divide