Christophe Van Gerrewey

Christophe Van Gerrewey - École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

A Large, Finite Permutation of Specific, Discrete Variants: Dan Graham’s Children’s Pavilion at Chambres d’Amis (1986)

Artist Dan Graham is well known for the pavilions in glass and steel he has constructed all over the world since the late 1970s. While all these small buildings seem incidents, they are often closely related. One example is Children’s Pavilion from 1986, Graham’s contribution to the experimental exhibition Chambres d’Amis in Ghent, Belgium. Children’s Pavilion is not only a striking example of what Peter Osborne has called the ‘architecturalization’ of contemporary art, it is also a variant of both earlier and later works by Graham.

Christophe Van Gerrewey is assistant professor of architecture theory at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). He is a member of the editorial board of «OASE» and of Dutch-Belgian art journal «De Witte Raaf». In 2019, he published Choos- ing Architecture: Criticism, History and Theory since the 19th Century (EPFL Press) and OMA/Rem Koolhaas: A Critical Reader from Delirious New York to S,M,L,XL (Birkhäuser). He writes on developments in contemporary and 20th-century architecture, in journals and magazines such as «The Journal of Architecture», «Architectural Theory Review», «A+U», «Log», «L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui», «AA Files», «The Journal of Landscape Architecture», «The Architectural Review», «Archithese» and «Arch+». He is working on a recent history of architecture in Belgium, and on an essay concerning the events of 1989 in Western-European architecture.