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This fall the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis will present Metabolic City, an exhibition surveying work by the British collective Archigram; the Japanese Metabolists (whose members include Fumihiko Maki, architect of the Kemper Art Museum); and the Dutch painter Constant Nieuwenhuys, an early member of the Situationist International.
Curated and designed by Heather Woofter, assistant professor of architecture in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, Metabolic City will feature approximately 70 drawings, plans, models and conceptual projects, including rarely seen materials drawn from private archives and a sampling of work by influential predecessors.
Organized thematically, the exhibition explores theoretical and conceptual overlaps between these groups, all of which came to view the city as a kind of living organism, in which civil infrastructure forms the basis for social interaction and individual liberty. At the same time, though they articulated their views in explicitly political terms, each pioneered distinctive — and remarkably prescient — means of architectural representation, often employing techniques and processes that are only now entering mainstream practice.
Public Opening Celebration
Friday, September 18, 7-9 pm
Metabolic City
Sept. 18, 2009 - Jan. 4, 2010
Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum
Washington University
One Brookings Drive, Campus Box 1214
St. Louis, MO 63130
Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum
The Kemper Art Museum features cutting-edge special exhibitions, exceptional educational resources, and an outstanding collection of 19th-, 20th-, and 21st-century European and American art. A stimulating and unique site to experience art, culture, and education in St. Louis, located on Washington University's Danforth campus. FREE and open to the public 11-6 every day except Tuesday, open 11-8 on Friday.
Image: Peter Cook
Plug-in City Study – Overhead view, 1964
Print off ink on tracing drawing with added color
40 1/8 x 28 3/8"
Courtesy of Archigram Archives