The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture presents Agrest and Gandelsonas: Fabric Object II, an exhibition of drawings, models, photographs, and ephemera, on view in the Arthur A. Houghton Jr. Gallery from Thursday, April 10 through Friday, May 2. The exhibition features work by Diana Agrest and Mario Gandelsonas, the principals of Agrest and Gandelsonas Architects, and is an expansion of Fabric Object, an exhibition that originated at Princeton University’s School of Architecture in 2024 by architect, educator, and curator Michael Meredith. Agrest and Gandelsonas are known for their collaborative work and their distinctive approach to architecture and urbanism. Together and separately, they have made lasting contributions to architectural theory, particularly in their development of a critical framework that addresses the intersection of architecture and urban form with broader sociopolitical and environmental issues. 

Meredith explains that the exhibition aims to show the architects’ rich exploration of contradiction: “Agrest and Gandelsonas have always played with oppositional binaries. Individual-Collective. Building-City. Memory-Amnesia. Fabric-Object. Like the flip-flop reversibility of their axonometric drawings (think El Lissitzky Proun), architecture appears as something and an inversion of that thing.” Meredith was intrigued with how the two work together in constant dialogue, subverting the notion of a single creator of architecture. 

The materials on view reveal how the architects use non-linear representations of space to explore how architecture interacts with human behavior, memory, and society. The show includes the architects’ “intersection” drawings, which depict a building and its inverted, mirror image, and some drawings from the 1980s done by Gandelsonas with early computing software yet conveying the subjectivity of hand drawings. The show includes commentary from architecture faculty at Princeton University and The Cooper Union. 

“Our work comes out of a conversation that Diana and I have had for many decades,” says Gandelsonas. “Our drawings are not necessarily representations; they are subjects in and of themselves. We wanted to develop new ways to express the urban forces into architecture. The drawings are part of our critical work, together and individually.”

The title of the exhibition refers to an essential approach of the architects’ work: seeing architecture as the constant interaction of existing and new spaces and formal configurations. “There’s a problem in Le Corbusier’s Urbanism—the simplistic opposition between object buildings versus urban fabric that has permeated projects like Hudson Yards, erasing fabric and replacing it with object buildings,” Agrest says, pointing to the proliferation of towers as the representation of market forces that have no awareness or consideration of history, culture, or uses. “Fabric is the locus of the social, an ‘other’ architecture generated by the city itself. Our work complicates the relation between fabric and object, blurring the opposition and proposing ‘object as fabric and/or fabric as object.’ In fact, it’s very hard to develop fabric. It requires a radically different approach.” Gandelsonas adds: “While there is an idea that architecture is about buildings, we are saying that the field should think on a larger scale.” Agrest concludes: “Focusing on the city generates this ‘other’ architecture. Ours is a critical stance against an architecture of monuments that ignores the city as urban place.” 

A fellow of the American Institute of Architects, Diana Agrest is an internationally renowned architect who serves as The Irwin S. Chanin Distinguished Professor at The Cooper Union. She has been involved in the design and building of architecture, urban design projects, and master plans in the United States, Europe, South America, and Asia since 1975. At Cooper, she developed the seminal studio course Reading the City, where students, through drawing, reveal forces and narratives at play, an original approach to reframing urban discourse by reading the city through film, and has developed critical studios focused on nature relative to science, architecture, and representation. Mario Gandelsonas is a practicing architect who is currently a professor at the Princeton University School of Architecture and the director of Urban Studies. His work, which includes residential, institutional, and commercial urban design projects, has received numerous design awards and was honored for advancing the science and art of planning by advancing the standards of architectural education.

The Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) has acquired the Agrest-Gandelsonas archive; Fabric Object II is the last exhibition in the United States of their work before their drawings become part of the permanent collection of the CCA.