The platform and implementations of Biennales, Triennials and Exhibitions have become a name stay in the contemporary architectural discipline. These platforms have served as a means for architectural movements and inclinations to take a step forward, or change direction from previous manifestoes or movements and yet the current climate has turned these platforms into the end all be all for many architectural discoveries and inclinations. These Biennales, Triennials, and Exhibitions were means and methods for current inquiries, and a place for out of reach topics of the ongoing discipline to be injected into Architecture, capital A and yet, these platforms were never to be the end all and be all for such investigations as they are today.

With the endless stream of ideas, epiphanies and revolutions coming into existence, being overridden and proven wrong reaching a chaotic and maddening pace, the time to question the role of Biennales, Triennials and Exhibitions as potent, efficacious and compelling platforms for the dissemination of knowledge to the discipline and greater public has come. These platforms once served the purpose of allowing the discipline to analyze, gather, regroup and produce a moment of reflection and yet currently, they seem to be more of a delayed response to already settled fights, a continuous ‘late to the party’ symptom of their obsolescence and unadaptable rigid structure. 

Biennales, Triennials, and Exhibitions were conceived as a response to the slowness and steadiness of time and allowed for an immediate dialectic and questioning of preceding themes versus contemporary inquiries while producing a safe arena for conceptual and formal rethinking and reestablishing of norms. Their strength was their ability to foster and realize projects that were not possible within the conventional architectural institutional setting and then using such settings as platforms for explosive injections into the discipline.

These Biennales, Triennials, and Exhibitions were means and methods for current inquiries, and a place for out of reach topics of the ongoing discipline to be injected into Architecture, capital A and yet, these shows were never to be the end all and be all for such investigations as they are today. 

Influential and distinguished Biennales, Triennials, and Exhibitions such as MOMA's Modern Architecture: International Exhibition, Salon des Refusés of 1863, IBM Pavilion and This is Tomorrow produced immediate arenas of discussion, debate and explosive creativity. These shows were the initial questions and initial declaration of non-fully formed trajectories. These platforms granted creativity the space to escape from the dominant and at points inescapable momentum of history and allow for a rupture to nudge such an energy in a new direction.

Today’s critiques of Biennales, Triennials and Exhibitions have zeroed in on their inability to establish a valuable connection to the public or architecture at large, and as such, it is possible, that in today’s disciplinary status, Architecture itself is a spectator of its own existence and that today’s Biennales, Triennials, and Exhibitions are not meant for the Architecture discipline itself but are instead a series of frivolous attempts to imply any sense of authority over a discipline which no longer recognizes any or itself. The Salon de Refuse has been replaced with a 5-minute sampling from Instagram, the Surrealist Manifesto by the 40 character manifestos of twitter and the critical support of contemporary movements by the thumbs up of Facebook, and MOMA's Modern Architecture: International Exhibition replaced with daily trending themes and hashtags.

Today’s Biennales, Triennials, and Exhibitions have developed into a visual explosion of half empty rhetorical displays of signs of architecture. With the inability to tap into the dormant potential of their purpose, they have become a never-ending guise of legitimacy within the discipline, the bestower of contemporary-ness and legitimacy. 

The afterlife of these Biennales, Triennials, and Exhibitions then become two-fold, one positive with the participant stating immediate relevance, and one negative, an abundance of production with the shelf life shorter than milk, waiting to be thrown to the curb allowing space to be made for the next curatorial breakthrough only months away. 

Biennales, Triennials, and Exhibitions such as MOMA PSI, Venice, Chicago and countless others have become the ambition of many young firms as a platform to declare their arrival. The afterlife of these Biennales, Triennials, and Exhibitions then become two-fold, one positive with the participant stating immediate relevance, and one negative, an abundance of production with the shelf life shorter than milk, waiting to be thrown to the curb allowing space to be made for the next curatorial breakthrough only months away. It should come to no surprise that recent endeavors into Biennales, Triennials, and Exhibitions have continuously fallen onto deaf ears and critical pens for consistently using the same old rhetoric, histories, theories, and visuals while attempting to present the 'New.' 

With curators declaring ostentatious and seemingly empty and nonconsequential manifestoes disguised as curatorial abstracts, the participants are left to their wits and fetishized production. With contemporary means of production themselves under investigation, how are these public displays to evolve? With no slowing of Biennales, Triennials, and Exhibitions coming into existence, and with no limit of eager participants eager to fill these curatorial calls, what effect will this have on our ability to produce any significant or consequential action? What curatorial call can take hold when the podium they are declaring from no longer exist when the call is answered? How can these platforms be used to investigate contemporary issues or agendas if in between the time the show gets announced and its curators declare their desires and when the doors open, all relevant production is already outdated? Are the Biennales, Triennials, and Exhibitions of today more closely related to a series of stabs in the dark, looking for something, if not anything and not yet knowing what?

Contemporary Biennales, Triennials and Exhibitions consist of the top talent within the discipline, and with such talent looking for a place within a discipline which has never been more open, it is their responsibility to investigate these issues and discover the platforms of tomorrow, not merely declare that tomorrow is here.

This Cross-Talk series presents a selection of four contributors focused on Biennales, Triennials, and Exhibitions. These contributions come from those that have participated, curated and studied Biennales, Triennials, and Exhibitions. The interest of Cross-Talk is not to position an antithesis of Biennales, Triennials, and Exhibitions but to understand their current effects and begin to contemplate their future relevancy in a discipline that is changing at the pace of hashtags. 

Cross-Talk is a new recurring series on Archinect that endeavors to bring architectural polemics and debate up-to-date and up-to-speed with the pace of cultural production today. Each installation will feature four responses by four writers to a single topic. For this week's iteration, the topic is 'Biennales, Triennials, and Exhibitions'.