The Endless Pavilion

Can architecture activate lost sites, forge alternate futures and engage multiple publics? The three built museums of Le Corbusier are nearly identical and have their inception in his unbuilt proposals for Endless Museums, which through acts of endless building were to offer a critique of the museum as a lifeless repository of the arts. Today these buildings have become precisely the conventional, finite museum entities Le Corbusier so heavily criticized.

The Endless Pavilion is a traveling exhibition of both a historiographic and a proposed project. The exhibition traces the connected modernist histories of these museums in the early unbuilt projects of Le Corbusier. It also unravels the stories behind the collections and local histories of these museums that remain buried under the weight of the Corbusian hagiography. Simultaneously, the traveling exhibition makes the case for an iterative and speculative pavilion that will serve as a temporary attachment to each of these museums.

DEPLOYMENT

Through endless acts of building and unbuilding, The Endless Pavilion exhibit will be transported and reassembled each time in a ritual of making and unmaking, evoking a formative agenda of the Endless Museum. In doing so it will stimulate the futures of the museum sites toward projective, open-ended possibilities. The project makes the case for as an agent provocateur activating key constituents, local stake holders, and offers a platform for new experiments in museum practices.