Letters to the Mayor is an itinerant exhibition that displays letters written by architects to their city mayors. The project has been presented in Athens, Bogota, Buenos Aires, Lisbon, Madrid, Mariupol, Mexico, New York, Panama City, Sao Paulo, Taipei, and Taichung.

 

Each edition of Letters to the Mayor invites one hundred local and global architects to deliver their thoughts directly to the desks of elected officials, and simultaneously into the public consciousness.

 

Taking the form of an exhibition and a series of public debates between architects, the mayor, and citizens at large, Letters to the Mayor is a forum for the discussion of the future of cities and the built environment. The project provides a transversal understanding of relevant issues within local contexts, and shared concerns throughout cities around the world.

 

Editions include:

New York — Storefront for Art and Architecture / April 30 – May 24, 2014

Panama City, Panama — JUNTA Espacio de Arquitectura / March 17 – April 27, 2015

Mariupol, Ukraine — Izolyatsia / October 23 – November 13, 2015

Bogotá, Colombia — CAMPO Cultural Center / Oct 24 – Dec 19, 2015

Taipei, Taiwan — URS 127 / Jan 8 – 31, 2016

Athens, Greece — METAMATIC: TAF / February 25 – March 6, 2016

Mexico City, Mexico — Arquine / March 5 – April 4, 2016

Buenos Aires, Argentina — Monoespacios /  March 19 – May 21, 2016

Taichung, Taiwan — MOT Lab / March 25 – April 24, 2016

São Paulo, Brazil — Pivo / July 30 – August 27, 2016

Madrid, Spain — COAM –  / Sept 29 – Oct 9, 2016

Lisbon, Portugal — Lisbon Architecture Triennale / October 6 – November 25, 2016

Aarhus, Denmark — Aarhus School of Architecture / August 24 – September 15, 2017

Seoul + Pyongyang, Korea — 2017 Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism / August 31 – November 5, 2017

Oslo, Norway — Oslo Architecture Triennale / September 26 – October 22, 2017

Toronto, Canada — Don Valley Parkway / September 28 – October 28, 2017

Valparaiso, Chile — XX Chilean Architecture and Urbanism Biennial / October 26 – October 31, 2017

Nashville, United StatesNashville Civic Design Center / November 30, 2017 – February 3, 2018

Rotterdam, Netherlands — Het Nieuwe Instituut / January 12 – February 11, 2018

Prague, Czech Republic —  Norma Space / April 23 – May 30, 2018

Lima, Peru —  Museo de la Nación / October 12 – November 5, 2018

Barcelona, Spain —  Architects’ Association of Catalonia / March 28 – May 5, 2019

Berlin, Germany — Deutsches Architektur Zentrum (DAZ) / November 15, 2019 – February 2, 2020

 

PROJECT TEAM

 

Curator: Eva Franch i Gilabert

Associate Curator: Carlos Mínguez Carrasco

Communications: Jinny Khanduja

Curatorial Fellow: Iara Pimenta

Graphic Design: Project Projects

Support team: Estefanía Acosta, Mariam Azim, Asia Bazdyrieva, Lafina Eptaminitaki, Justine Frances Flora, Carolina Florez, Juan Carlos Javier, Bon Hae Koo, Katerina Kulanova, Amela Parcic, Luca Smith Senise, Ann Vaikla, Connie Wang

 

Local Curators

Bruno de Almeida, Fernando Falcon, Moneo Brock, Enorme Studio, CAMPO (Carlos Balen, Felipe Guerra, Alejandro Piñol, Germán Ramírez, Juliana Sánchez and Alejandra Sarria), Andrea Griborio (Arquine), Martin Huberman (Monoambiente), Ivo Poças Martins, David Tseng, Johann Wolfschoon (JUNTA Espacio de Arquitectura), METASITU (Eduardo Cassina, Liva Dudareva), Dongwoo Yim, Calvin Chua, Tron Meyer, Oslo Architecture Triennale, Partisans, Pola Mora, Fuller Hanan and Daniel Toner (Nashville Civic Design Center), Marten Kuijpers, Marina Otero, Michiel Raats, Kateřina Kulanová, Jana Moravcová, Ernesto Apolaya Canales, Claudio Cuneo Raffo, Jorge Sánchez Herrera, Ricardo Devesa, Xavier González, Núria Moliner, DAZ 

 

Design Teams

3 pounds Co. Ltd, Ana Arana and Enrique Ventosa, Grupo Bondi (Eugenio Gómez Llambi, Iván López Prystajko), Branco Papel de Parede, Lucas Simões, Piotr Chizinski, Pablo Gómez Uribe, Pedro Hernández, Paulo Licona, Oscar Melgar, Iphigenia Papamikroulea, Nameless Architecture, R2, The Rock Instrument Bureau, Gonzalo del Val, Marina Samokhina, George Vousta, César Mendoza, Tron Meyer, Arna Mačkić & Lorien Beijarts, Rudy Guedj, Jan Boháč, Sandra Nakamura, Arturo Higa, L’estoc, Marga Gibert, something fantastic

 

Partnering Organizations

Arquine, CAMPO Cultural Center, COAM, IZOLYATSIA, JUNTA Espacio de Arquitectura, Jut Foundation for the Arts and Architecture, Lisbon Architecture Triennale, metamatic:taf, Monoambiente, MOT Lab Taichung, Pivô Arte e Pesquisa, Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism, Design og arkitektur Norge, Oslo Architecture Triennale, Partisans, XX Chilean Architecture and Urbanism Biennial, Nashville Civic Center, Het Nieuwe Instituut, Norma Space, Patronato Cultural del Peru, Architects’ Association of Catalonia (COAC), urbanNext, DAZ

 

Future Letters

Further iterations of the project also include Letters to the Developer and Letters to the Minister. To propose an edition in your city, please contact info@storefrontnews.org

 

 

SUPPORT

 

Letters to the Mayor is part of Storefront for Art and Architecture’s initiative Architecture Conflicts, a project with the purpose of identifying pressing issues, ongoing conflicts, and design solutions in relation to the most important urban problems today. Architecture Conflicts is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.