MQArchitecture: An Archive of Impossible Futures
New York, NY
Exhibition
September 17 - October 10, 2025
With this exhibition, we are questioning the idea of Architecture portrayed only as a finished product, a series of images that appears in industry magazines, with retouched images, seductive renderings, and idealized sketches and drawings. An Archive of Impossible Futures wants to move away from that picture perfect idea by opening our hard drive to reveal what is usually hidden behind the close doors of architecture practice: the projects that never made it beyond a conversation or a site visit, those that stopped at some point before construction, and finally those which crystallized into built architecture.
Our purpose is to reveal the disproportion that exists in architectural practices, applying this question to our own firm. Only a fraction of the 鈥渄esign thinking鈥 is built, while the rest may seem wasted at first, but it is not. Those unbuilt projects train our imagination and shape the soul of our practice. They carry emotional weight; we develop attachments to them, and they live only in our collective memory and in our archive folders. With this compilation, we are creating a library of possibilities for the future. Finally, the built projects are the survivors of a long process. They endured shifting budgets, changing clients, circumstances, construction challenges, and contractors until they became physical reality. They define the public image of MQArchitecture, but they stand on the shoulders of all the rest.
This exhibition unfolds across three acts: lost, unbuilt, and built, a balance between the original idea, the expectation, and the final materialization. Nothing is wasted. The lost and unbuilt projects leave an imprint; we see them with nostalgia for the impossible future that never was, and with hope for the possible future yet to come.
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