Who Defines Architecture?
Karolína Plášková is a curator and cultural producer with a background in architecture, spatial planning and social design. Her practice approaches architecture through its social, political and ecological dimensions, framing it as a public matter rather than solely a professional discipline. Working through exhibitions, public programmes and texts, she moves between public institutions, independent initiatives and unconventional spaces. Between 2023 and 2024, she led the transformation of the Jaroslav Fragner Gallery, an architecture gallery in Prague, into a more open civic space through a new curatorial programme and new spaces for reading, learning and gathering. She co-founded the independent platform Občina and teaches Contemporary Architectural Discourses at UMPRUM in Prague. Through different curatorial projects, she has explored topics including housing, labour conditions in architecture, the role of architecture in documenting violence and environmental destruction, and is currently developing new projects on extraction, decolonisation, material flows and landscape transformation. Increasingly, she is interested in how cultural institutions produce, circulate and legitimise architectural knowledge, and how these processes shape public understandings of architecture.
Over the past decade, architecture has increasingly been understood as a way of addressing broader social, political and ecological questions. At the same time, these shifts have challenged more traditional understandings, raising questions about what architecture is, what institutions should do, and which topics they can legitimately address. While some projects are criticised for being "too political", others are dismissed as "not architecture". Rather than treating these moments as isolated controversies, this project understands them as situations in which institutions negotiate how they define architecture, their public role and the limits of curatorial autonomy.
The project grew out of my curatorial practice and experiences with exhibiting socially and politically engaged architecture, as well as observing similar debates across different contexts. It focuses on two interconnected questions: who defines what belongs within architecture as a discipline, and how institutions negotiate professional, public and political expectations when architecture is presented as a social, political and ecological practice rather than solely a design discipline.
Combining interviews with directors, curators and other institutional actors with analysis of governance structures, institutional documents, public statements, open letters and debates surrounding selected exhibitions and public programmes, the project examines how these negotiations unfold across institutional, political and geographical contexts. Particular attention will be paid to institutions with a public mandate, whose formally defined missions and responsibilities make them especially visible sites of negotiation. Many of these processes remain undocumented or disappear once public attention fades. Ultimately, the project asks how organisations navigate competing expectations, negotiate autonomy and legitimacy, and what these moments reveal about the production and legitimisation of architectural knowledge.