The latest offering from the Mori Art Museum lives up to its big name: "Archilab: New Experiments in Architecture, Art and the City, 1950-2005." The first architecture exhibition at the Mori, this is a big show, ambitious in both scale and manner of presentation. Featuring drawings, videos and maquettes of some 220 projects by 90 architects, "Archilab" is being presented in association with FRAC (Fonds Regional d'Art Contemporain du Centre), a radical architecture center located on the Loire in Orleans, France.
Since its inception in 1991, FRAC has amassed one of the world's foremost collections of architectural models. With assistance from the city of Orleans and the French Ministry of Culture and Communication, FRAC has, for the last six years, invited the world's leading visionary architects to participate in its annual "Archilab" event. Charting a sometimes choppy course between pragmatism and utopia, FRAC has brought some of their best (with a few items on loan from the Centre Pompidou as well) to the Mori for a show that puts man and his world into perspectives that are in turn startling and amusing, confounding and breathtaking. The Centre's director, Marie Anjou-Brayer, succinctly describes the FRAC philosophy as follows: "We try to keep an open mind."
In his "Genealogy of Morals," the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that: "Everyone who has ever built anywhere a 'new heaven' first found the power thereto in his own hell." And so it is not surprising that this exhibition opens with visions of utopia born out of the rubble of post-war Europe.