The 2023–2024 Out of the Box exhibition series is dedicated to the work of Argentinian architect Amancio Williams (1913–1989), a key figure in modern architecture in South America. It follows from an extensive archive of proposals produced and reworked by Williams’s office from the 1940s through the 1980s. The archive, which includes drawings, photographs, correspondence, and models, was donated to the CCA by the Williams family in 2020.

Gilles Delalex and Yves Moreau of Studio Muoto explore the infrastructural dimensions of Williams’ work, with a focus on his unrealized projects for an airport on the coast of Buenos Aires (1945) and the church Cruz en el Río de la Plata (1978‒1980), both of which establish a dialogue with the horizon. While the drawings of these projects primarily depict them as buildings, Williams’s writings situate them as infrastructure designed to operate at an urban and territorial scale. Their reading of the archive emphasizes Williams’s belief that modernity, and the engineering advances it enabled, would have the capacity to elevate humanity.

This Out of the Box series includes two more exhibitions: from 12 October 2023 to 21 January 2024, Claudia Shmidt delves into the many letters found in Amancio Williams’s archive; and from 15 February to 5 May 2024, Mauricio Pezo and Sofia von Ellrichshausen offer an interpretation of what is likely Williams’s most widely known project, the Casa sobre el Arroyo in Mar del Plata.

Curator: Studio Muoto
Project direction: Francesco Garutti
Curatorial research: Megan Marin, Anna García Molina
Archive processing: Catherine Jacob
Graphic design: Our Polite Society, Hamburg / Montréal / Stockholm
Design: Anh Truong, Sébastien Larivière
Conservation: Emilie Demers, Anne Gauthier, Daphnée Bouchard
Installation: Catherine Labonté, Michael Eddy, Nolwenn Sylvestre-Maurice