13 White Houses

The White House is not simply a building. It is an architecture of power. At once residence and workplace, monument and construction site, symbol and security apparatus. It gives political authority spatial form.

13 White Houses removes its singularity. Multiplies it. Offers many propositions, many voices, many claims on the same civic ground.

The purpose is not a better White House. The purpose is the political imaginary itself: provoked, reopened. Democracy, like architecture, is not fixed. It is drawn. It can be drawn otherwise.

“Taken together, the exhibition is a snapshot of where architectural culture locates political imagination today.”

EXHIBITION STRUCTURE

Three Interrelated Parts

INVITED CONTRIBUTORS

Thirteen White Houses: Propositional Works (Models + Drawings)

Thirteen commissioned international practices treat the White House as a design problem rather than a national symbol. Their proposals recast it as a civic construct through which authority is organized, challenged, and spatialized.

CONTRIBUTORS

OPEN CALL + JURY

Expanded Field: Juried Image Exhibition

One image. One argument.

The open call invites architects, landscape architects, artists, designers, and interdisciplinary teams to submit a single visual proposition. Drawings, renderings, collages, diagrams, photographs, and other image-based work will be juried into an exhibition that expands the project’s discursive field.

Deadline: September 15, 2026

MEET
THE
jury ↓

SUBMIT
NOW →

JURY

Peggy Deamer

Iker Gil

MEET THE CURATORS

OLIVIER PEYRICOT

Olivier Peyricot is a designer, curator, writer, and Director of the École Nationale Supérieure d’Art et de Design de Limoges. His work investigates the political, social, and ecological dimensions of design through research, exhibitions, publications, and institutional leadership. From 2014 to 2022, he directed the Research Platform at the Cité du design in Saint-Étienne, where he served as Scientific Director of the 10th Biennale Internationale Design Saint-Étienne (Working Promesse, 2017) and the 12th Biennale (Bifurcations, 2022), advancing design as a framework for civic inquiry and cultural debate. His writings and exhibitions have shaped international discourse on labor, technology, institutions, and ecological transition, while his own design work is represented in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Pompidou, the Fonds National d’Art Contemporain, and VIA. Through his curatorial and editorial practice, Peyricot has consistently expanded the role of design as a critical instrument for understanding and transforming contemporary society.

SHARON HAAR

Sharon Haar, FAIA, NOMA, ACSA is Professor of Architecture at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. An architect, educator, and scholar, her research examines housing, urbanism, public institutions, and the social agency of architecture. She is co-founder of the Collective for Equitable Housing (CEH), an interdisciplinary initiative advancing research and partnerships to expand equitable housing policy and design in Michigan and beyond. Her scholarship explores the evolving relationship between higher education and cities, as well as the histories and practices of socially engaged architecture. She is the author of The City as Campus: Urbanism and Higher Education in Chicago and Schools for Cities: Urban Strategies, and her writing has appeared in leading journals including the Journal of Architectural Education, the Journal of Planning Education and Research, and the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. A Fellow of the American Institute of Architects and former President of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, Haar’s work bridges architectural research, public policy, and civic practice.

ANYA SIROTA

Anya Sirota is an architectural designer, curator, and Professor of Architecture at the University of Michigan. Her work examines how architecture constructs public narratives and mediates the relationship between politics, culture, and civic life. Working across buildings, exhibitions, publications, and institutional initiatives, she investigates architecture as both a spatial and cultural medium. She is the founding principal of Akoaki, an award-winning architecture and urban design practice recognized for projects that combine design research, public engagement, and cultural production. Her work has been presented internationally at venues including the Vitra Design Museum, the Design Museum Brussels, Centro Pecci, the Saint-Étienne International Design Biennale, and the Chicago Cultural Center. She is the recipient of the Architectural League Prize and the ACSA Faculty Design Award, and co-editor of Junior Architects (Park Books, 2026). Her current research explores architecture’s entanglement with political power, representation, and the public imaginary.

Why Now?

Democracy is under construction

Liberal democracy is under strain. The planet is reaching its limits. The technological revolution is wreaking havoc on labor and resources. Conflict rages, and from it new political configurations take shape: authoritarianism ascendant, kleptocracy normalized, an international order once assumed permanent now treated as negotiable. What looks like erosion is not erosion; it is intentional. Institutions are being dismantled, privatized, and rewritten by people for whom the rewrite is the point.

The East Wing’s demolition belongs to this pattern rather than departing from it. Its significance is that it is legible. Architecture, unlike policy, cannot be dismantled quietly, cannot be revised in a memo. What we are watching, in built form, is the visible fraction of a much larger operation.

13 White Houses, the exhibition takes the American White House, the building’s own multiplicity as its premise, and its premise as license: an occasion to keep open a set of questions about democracy, about civic representation, about architecture’s persistent, but often disavowed claim on the political.

The exhibition proceeds in three moves. First, thirteen international practices, brought in for the expertise, distance, and critical reading that a nation cannot easily produce of its own house. Second, an open call: collective, additive, unranked, structured as volume rather than competition. Third, an archive: fragments and histories that narrate not only the building but, through it, the vicissitudes of the country that built it.

Across these three, singular authorship gives way to accumulation. That shift — from monument to movement — is the exhibition’s proposition for reconstruction.