The unseen of the visible: an exhibition of architecture and design

Abstract

The exhibition How Should we live? organized by the department of architecture and design of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, chosen as a case study, aims to reveal how the visible in a show requires a long and invisible work. A brief history of the museum and speccially about the architecture and design collection is necessary to understand how the curatorial labor could expand new meanings, different points of view and learnings about the collection. This paper aims to: show off the female presence on the modern moviment, unrevealed by the traditional historiography, and contextualize the works on view, attenuating the status of a masterpiece, to reinsert it on a broad social, economic and tecnological context, aproaching it to the purpose stand up by the first museum director Alfred Barr