Past + Future Objects believes at least three things:
1: Material conditions and social structures persist, even in a digital (or post-digital) age.
2: Architects should not see their task as merely re-mixing the past, through the reading of precedents, but as actively creating new futures.
3: These speculative futures test the limits of architectural agency, and at their best, expand the realm of the possible within our cultural imaginary.
This exhibition is a retro-prospective. We aim to reframe past projects–many of them temporary and already vanished–as situated within specific moments of time, while seeding other, future moments. By tracing their histories within our own body of work, and imagining possible futures that contain them, Past + Future Objects reanimates prior GLD projects. Included among these are also artifacts from two current research projects, housed within Future Objects at U-SoA, that explicitly engage an all-too-imminent future of rising sea levels and strained resources. The constructed narratives reveal the many connective strands that run through our work, at turns optimistic and pessimistic about our contributions to possible futures.
