This dissertation examines the exhibition Painting and Sculpture of a Decade: ‘54–‘64 at the Tate Gallery in 1964, designed by the architects Alison and Peter Smithson, as a case study of exhibition-making as a form of architectural practice. While the Smithsons are widely recognised for their role in shaping post-war British architecture and the discourse of New Brutalism, their installation design for the ‘54–‘64 exhibition remains underexplored within architectural history. For the Smithsons, exhibitions and installation designs were fundamental to their practice, as they expressed in a series of writings from the 1980s.¹ This perspective opens a framework for understanding exhibitions as provisional architectures: representations of spatial and conceptual ideas that often lay the ground for or run parallel to build work, but whose significance is frequently overlooked due to their ephemeral nature. Consequently, this vision raises certain questions that become the central theme of the dissertation. What are the implications of designing the display for an art exhibition in the practice of architecture? And at the same time, can an exhibition design be a synthesis of the intention that carries architecture?

Painting and Sculpture of a Decade: ‘54–‘64 (1964) was organised and sponsored by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, a Portuguese institution that established a UK branch in 1956, dedicated to helping artists and stimulating public interest in the arts. The initiative and selection of works were led primarily by Alan Bowness, Lawrence Gowing, and Philip James.² Conceived as a comprehensive survey of artistic developments in Britain and abroad over the preceding decade, the exhibition brought together 366 works by 170 post-war artists such as Pollock, Kline, Rothko, Dubuffet, Correll, and Paolozzi. Its scale and ambition required an equally rigorous and carefully conceived design, a responsibility entrusted to the Smithsons, which took over two years to develop.

The role of the museum’s architecture, as well as the selection of artworks to be exhibited, marked three completely different stages of the project, which are expressed very clearly through the drawings of the floor plan of the installation. For the architects, the intention behind the design of the installation for the exhibition ‘54–‘64 was to highlight the relationships between the artists’ different works, leaving the architecture of the installation and the Tate itself in the background.³ This allowed the Smithsons’ design to constitute a strategy for creating a space that would distance itself from the conventional museum environment.

From their first curatorial and installation project, Parallel of Life and Art (1953), Alison and Peter Smithson revealed their conviction that architecture develops in dialogue with history and cultural reminiscence. By collapsing disciplinary and cultural hierarchies through images in an exhibition, the Smithsons suggested that each generation of artists and architects learns from and reworks what has come before. Crucially, their first exhibition design established an approach that would shape the Smithsons’ later work, positioning exhibitions not only as displays but as vehicles for thinking about genealogy, intention, and the construction of meaning in architecture.

Almost thirty years after the exhibition Painting and Sculpture of a Decade: ‘54–‘64 (1964), the Smithsons’ reflections on this project and the rest of their exhibition repertoire became a much more recurring theme in their writings. These writings expressed the belief that exhibitions could embody an intention which was consistent with each generation of architects. In the draft version of the text of ‘The Staging of the Possible’, later revised and published in 1995 in Italian Thoughts, was introduced a diagrammatic ‘table’ recording relationships between generations of architects and their intentions with an image.⁴ This schema reframed exhibitions as historiographic tools, simultaneously retrospective and projective. Their final iteration on this idea, ‘Re-staging of the Possible’ in 1997, reinforced this vision; emphasising the exhibition as a medium for tracing genealogies and imagining futures. In this sense, their curatorial and architectural practice operated as a consistent thread linking their early post-war experiments with their later theoretical reflections.

Building on these reflections, exhibition design can be seen as a unique synthesis of architectural intentions, where spatial strategies, object relationships, and audience experience converge into a cohesive whole. In the case of the ‘54–‘64 exhibition, the installation supported the artworks while simultaneously shaping the way they related to one another, creating a dialogue between pieces that extended beyond their individual qualities. It also produced a distinct environment within the Tate Gallery, transforming the existing architecture into a provisional space capable of hosting new experiences and interactions. By bringing together objects, space, and experience, the case of the ‘54–‘64 exhibition demonstrates how architectural thinking can operate beyond permanent buildings, asserting that temporary, curated environments are not merely displays but complex frameworks in which ideas, histories, and sensibilities are communicated.