AA Gallery, 36 Bedford Square, London
Friday 19 January – Thursday 8 March
Monday to Saturday, 11am–7pm
On Friday 15 December 1933, the German steamship Hermia arrived in London from Hamburg with a cargo of 531 crates containing the entire contents of the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg. The pioneering German art historian Aby Warburg had established this library and research institute as part of a lifelong endeavour to decipher the past by interpreting the production of visual art throughout history. Following his death in 1929, the library and institute emigrated to England to escape the policies of the Third Reich.
Architecture and interiors were crucial to Warburg’s interrogation of culture, and between 1923 and 1958, designs were commissioned for buildings, interiors and exhibitions as the Warburg Institute moved through a series of homes. This AA Gallery exhibition sheds new light on Warburg’s involvement with architecture through an itinerant archive of models, drawings and documents portraying the seven different spaces in Hamburg and London that the Warburg Institute has occupied. The models on display here developed out of a postgraduate seminar at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO) and were first exhibited as Warburg Models at Blaker in Norway in 2021, before being installed as Warburg Models: Buildings as Bilderfahrzeuge at the Warburg-Haus, Hamburg in November 2023. The exhibition then travelled to London to be exhibited ‘in-transit’ at Judith Clark Studio in December 2023, coinciding with the 90th anniversary of the library’s initial arrival in England.
Now in the AA Gallery, the Warburg Models refer not only to architectural models of buildings that contained images, ideas and insights, but also to the frameworks of pedagogy and Bildung – individual enlightenment and orientation – that remain Warburg’s most influential legacies. The exhibition is set in conversation with another weighty itinerant archive: the AA’s collection of lantern slides, established in the 1890s. This strand of the exhibition was developed from an AA x Warburg Open Seminar and interrogates the ways knowledge is ordered within our archives.
In nearby Senate House, where some of the Warburg Institute is temporarily housed, a simultaneous exhibition of Charles Holden’s Masterplan celebrates Holden’s vision of what a modern university could be. The masterplan spans his University of London project, with Senate House (1937) as the centrepiece of the scheme; the Warburg Institute at Woburn Square was the last building to be added in 1958.
Overall, this multifaceted project traces the interconnection of two very Warburgian themes – Bildung and building. It looks at the construction of knowledge through spaces that contain archives and which were designed to make those archives speak; it examines the combination of architectonic and bibliographic ordering systems within archives; and it explores the movement of these itinerant archives themselves across temporalities and geographies.
Read more about the exhibition on the AA website. For more information about the exhibition or to arrange an interview, please email publicprogramme@aaschool.ac.uk.
Curators: Tim Anstey and Mari Lending, AHO
Exhibition realisation: AA Public Programme
Exhibition build and install: Install Archive
Panel photography: Max Creasy
Graphic design and image reproduction: AA Communications Studio
Printing: AA Print Centre
Video and Sound: AA Audio Visual
Models and drawings: AHO students Pernille Boye Ahlgren, Christian Tømmeraas Berg, Amalie Elvegård Utigård, Nora Kilstad, Anne Lise Ladegård, Pål Luis Sanchez-Paredes, Silje Ekornrud Seim, Cathrine Tønseth Sundem, Maximilian Svendsen, Karina Tang, Mara Trübenbach, Paul Fredrik Winkler
Model plinths: Max Svendsen
Facsimile material courtesy of: Archive Nicholas Chinardet; Archive ouvert HAL; Archive Uwe Fleckner; Flensburger Schifffahrtsmuseum; Hamburgisches Architekturarchiv, Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) Drawings Collection; Warburg Institute Archive.
Lantern Slides courtesy of the AA Archives
Lantern Slide scanning by Lou-Adelaide Feliu and Amalia Pantazopoulou
Lantern Slide reproduction by Gavin Martin Colournet
With thanks to: Judith Clark, Katie Mooney, Bill Sherman, Claudia Wedepohl, Uwe Fleckner, Dag Erik Elgin. Grateful thanks to the Warburg Institute and the Hamburg Science Foundation for their support of this project.