"It is a huge compliment to curators Nicholas Olsberg and Markus Lähteenmäki
that architecture suddenly seems a doddle to display."
–Edwin Heathcote on the exhibition Land Marks
in The Financial Times
24.5.2015
Paperwork: What drawings do
An exhibition executed with a group of art history students as part of a course taught at the University of Helsinki.
Architecture and Design Museum,Helsinki, November 2024–February 2025
Instruments of Occupation: Sounding the Helsinki Archipelago
Installation by Dan Dubowitz, Tuomas Toivonen & Markus Lähteenmäki
at National Archives of Finland, June 2023
An installation with photographer Dan Dubowitz and musician Tuomas Toivonen that combined newly created lense-based and sound work with archival materials.
"Enacting horizontal historiographical practice in the context of architecture requires being on the ground, situating structures and their architects in a specific political, cultural, social (and so on) context. Most importantly, in horizontal history, the center shifts to wherever the work is, and the horizon line of this perspective is the eye level of the historical protagonists. In this spirit, Instruments of Occupation occupied the ground of the former occupiers, inscribed the site with tracks, reconstructed the conditions of the objects’ emergence, tracked their traces in official documentation, and captured them diachronically and synchronically, as Piotrowski recommends. In other words, the exhibit unabashedly centered the Helsinki archipelago, situating it within a new category of postness: the postperipheral."
–Christina Crawford´s review in Architectural Histories
Planetarium
OLEG KURRYASHOV AND PETER MÄRKLI PRESENTED BY ALEXANDER BRODSKY
Curated by Markus Lähteenmäki
April 16 – May 17, 2019, gta Exhibitions, Zurich.
"The best exhibition of architecture I have seen"
– Evgeny Asse, Founder of MARCH
101st km: Further Everywhere
October-November 2017 – Pushkin House, London
An Exhibition of Russian poetry in exile featuring a pavilion and installation by Alexander Brodsky built on Bloomsbury Square.
Curated by Markus Lähteenmäki
"It's rare and important to make monuments to the victims of authoritarianism that are not themselves authoritarian." – Owen Hatherly in Dezeen
"101st km – Further Everywhere is a pavilion by Alexander Brodsky – one of the ‘paper architects’ who rose to prominence in Moscow in the 1980s, and became famous in the West for challenging the uniformity of Soviet cityscapes with whimsical postmodern designs, never intended for realisation – brought to the UK by Pushkin House (the curator is Markus Lähteenmäki). A windowless train carriage of wood and sand-flecked rolled roofing raised up on stilts, it blends in with the muddy backdrop of a London square in mid-autumn as comfortably as a bird hide in a nature reserve. There’s no text to explain what it’s doing there, and visitors tend to circle it warily a couple of times before ducking inside, once they realise there’s no door."
– Sam Kinchin-Smith in London Review of Books
Thist Was Tomorrow: Reinventing Architecture 1953–1978
March – May 2016, SAM – Swiss Architecture Museum, Basel.
An exhibition presenting over 250 drawings and models to explore the post-WWII rethinking of architecture's basic cultural and social foundations, featuring work of Le Cobusier, James Stirling and James Gowan, Superstudio, Alvaro Siza, Louis Kahn, Aldo Rossi and others.
Curated by Markus Lähteenmäki, Nicholas Olsberg & Manuel Montenegro
“Over the course of four impeccably assembled rooms … we are presented with a series of encounters between twelve of the period’s key protagonists.”
– Ellis Woodman in Architectural Review
Drawing Matter: Sheds – Palaces of Nothing
October 2016, at Hauser & Wirth Somerset, Bruton.
A daring curatorial concept I proposed and saw through. Exhibition executed with architects Alexander Brodsky and Robert Mull in collaboration with the Drawing Matter Collections and Hauser & Wirth.
"The exhibition is a jewel of a show and rethinks all the parameters of architecture exhibitions that have been overly discussed … over the past years."
– Architectural Review
Practice in Display: Alvaro Siza´s Social Landscapes
August 2015, at Alvar Aalto Symposium, Jyväskylä
A curatorial concept of a daily chaning selection of drawings to display the evolvement of a design process.
Curated by Markus Lähteenmäki & Manuel Montenegro
Land Marks: Structures for a Poetic Universe
March – June 2015, Hauser & Wirth Somerset.
An exhibition presenting over 100 drawings and models, exploring the boundaries between architecture and sculpture.
Curated by Markus Lähteenmäki & Nicholas Olsberg
More info on Drawing Matter website
Curated by an esteemed pairing ofyouth and experience - MarkusUihteenmaki, an accomplished youngart historian, and Nicolas Olsberg,curator and former director of theCanadian Centre for Architecturein Montreal - Land Marks assemblesa stunning selection of drawings andobjects looking at interventionsbetween land and structure.
–Shumi Bose in Blueprint
"It is a huge compliment to curators Nicholas Olsberg and Markus Lähteenmäki that architecture suddenly seems a doddle to display.”
–Edwin Heathcote in Financial Times
A Critic´s Pick in Art Forum
