Institutional Knowledge

This issue’s survey of game changers in architecture and design would hardly be complete without a look at the new generation of young curators, who are redefining how the world’s major institutions collect and present modern and contemporary design. We’ve asked six of these rising talents to pick one particularly intriguing object from a recent or upcoming project. First, a brief introduction to our group and their current activities: At the Getty Research Institute, Christopher James Alexander is cocurating a comprehensive exhibition about the evolution of Los Angeles architecture from 1940 to 1990. James Buresh is working on the exhibition Sweden 1900–1950, which opens in March at New York’s Gallery BAC. Zoë Ryan’s Hyperlinks is on view at the Art Institute of Chicago through July 20. Cynthia Smith is helping develop the Cooper-Hewitt’s groundbreaking 2007 Design for the Other 90% exhibition into an ongoing series. At the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Giovanna Borasi recently curated Journeys: How Travelling Fruit, Ideas and Buildings Rearrange Our Environment (open through March 13). Finally, John Stuart Gordon is working on the complete reinstallation of the Yale University Art Gallery, which reopens in 2012, and writing a book on American modern design, to be published in October by Yale University Press.