Atelier Markgraph, photograph for cover of Nouveau Plaisirs d’architectures catalog (1984)

Oliver Elser, historian and curator, will present his lecture Models of Postmodernism–Postmodernisms Models. Elser will examine the founding of the Deutsches Architekturmuseum in Frankfurt in 1984. His lecture focuses on German architectural collector and founder Heinrich Klotz, and architect Oswald Mathias Ungers and their collaboration to produce a model museum in a historic villa.

Oliver Elser is a curator at the Deutsches Architekturmuseum (DAM) in Frankfurt, Germany. His practice includes criticism, teaching, and archival based exhibition making. After studying architecture at the Technical University of Berlin, Elser worked in Vienna as an architecture critic and journalist, publishing often in Der Standard, Architectural Digest, and profil. He has taught scenography at the University of Applied Sciences in Mainz and has shown work at the 2013 Venice Biennale in the exhibition Il Palazzo Enciclopedico. Exhibitions that he has curated include: The Architecture Model: Tools, Fetish, Small Utopia, DAM (2012); The 387 Houses of Peter Fritz, Venice Art Biennale (2013); Mission: Postmodern. Heinrich Klotz and the Wunderkammer, DAM (2014); Making Heimat. Germany, Arrival Country, German Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale (2016); and SOS BRUTALISM – Save the Concrete Monsters!, DAM (2017).

This program is presented in partnership with the 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial.