“Tendencies – Recent Architecture in Ticino” from 1975 is one of those exhibitions whose impact was far greater than the exhibition design at the time would have suggested. Like the 1932 MoMA show, which coined the term “International Style.” The “Tendencies” show has now been reconstructed on a 1:4 scale as a massive model that dominates the exhibition space of the gta at ETH Zurich. And suddenly, an auratic force emerges that the dull partition walls—on which sober project posters were attached as if for any ordinary final crit—certainly lacked back in 1975. No, the great resonance of “Tendencies” was certainly not due to the exhibition design. Instead, it derived from a bold statement: That there in Ticino, the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland, a fresh generation of architects had taken the stage. The young curator Martin Steinmann, who was then pursuing his PhD at the gta on CIAM, gathered works by Flora Ruchat-Roncati, Luigi Snozzi, Bruno Reichlin & Fabio Reinhart, Giancarlo Durisch, Mario Botta, and others. A new movement was born: “The School of the Ticino,” as Kenneth Frampton labeled it. This gave rise to one and a half starchitects. Many other positions await rediscovery. Curators Irina Davidovici and Frida Grahn have arranged numerous documents from the gta archive in display cases. They frame the large reconstruction model that ‘performs’ the original exhibition rather than just offering a replica. Credit goes to Christ Gantenbein Studio for building it. 

Simultaneously, “Women Writing Architecture 1700–1900 (WoWA)” is on display as a much smaller exhibition (why not larger?), presenting the results of a five-year research project led by Anne Hultzsch, who also launched an eponymous book (edited with Sol Pérez Martínez). Quotes by female authors who wrote about architectural topics between 1700 and 1900 are printed on postcards that visitors can collect, and in doing so, one realizes: There were so many different female perspectives to be explored here. The sources are partly shown in cases, partly as props in an oversized scale.

oe.