Aiming to continuously rethink and re-examine the scope and the boundaries of “curating architecture,” the CCA solicited ideas for projects that were taking innovative curatorial approaches and experimental formats.

The Emerging Curator Program, which ran from 2011 and 2020, offered the opportunity to propose and curate a project at the CCA related to contemporary debates in architecture, urban issues, landscape design, and cultural and social dynamics. The project was to be developed during a residency of three months at the CCA.

Over the years,the selected candidates became acquainted with the CCA’s institutional knowledge and vision, explored the institution’s resources and the collection holdings, and applied their direction to develop the proposed project.

As of 2021, the Emerging Curator Program is replaced by the Emerging Curator Residency Program.

2019–2020
Niklas Fanelsa, Architect, Atelier Fanelsa, Berlin, Germany
Patterns of Rural Commoning focuses on countryside communities that develop unique forms of living, working, and producing. The potential of rural areas brings together knowledge, skills, and inhabitants to create places of commoning with a self-awareness of local built space and local social networks. Based on this theme, a series of international collaborative workshops investigates possible and desirable answers to questions and conditions within today’s society.

2018–2019
Sben Korsh, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong S.A.R.
Maxime Decaudin, Université Paris-Sorbonne, France
Market Landscape is an investigation into the urban ecologies of two major financial districts: Hong Kong’s Central District and London’s Canary Wharf. Entangled by histories of empire stretching from the early stages of industrial capitalism up to the present day, this project explores how seemingly mundane design features—like parks, plantings, and land works—reveal new frameworks to understand the inner workings of global financial markets and their wider planetary impact. In doing so, the project aims to contribute to the knowledge of architecture’s role in the Anthropocene.

2017–2018
Robert J. Kett, University of California, Irvine, USA
In the 1960s and 1970s, architecture embraced “anonymous” building and simultaneously turned toward systems and the digital. This project revisits key architectural engagements with the Indigenous peoples of the Americas to examine their role in articulating architecture’s relation to an emergent technoscape, a process with important implications for contemporary debates concerning cultural appropriation, architectural method, and the digital. This research is presented in Prospects Beyond Futures: Counterculture White Meets Red Power.

2016–2017
Evangelos Kotsioris, Princeton University School of Architecture, USA
Lab Cult, an exhibition, investigates the laboratory as a recurring and productive allegory for experimentation, and imagines new modes of transdisciplinary research. A series of case studies from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are presented through archival material from the CCA collection, as well as models, scientific instruments, and photographs on loan from historical and scientific institutions.

2015–2016
Víctor Muñoz Sanz, TU Delft and Het Nieuwe Instituut, The Netherlands
Off:Re:OnShore, an audio documentary, explores the legacy of industrial offshoring, the effects of corporate actions on the built environment of labour, and the role of architecture in bringing closer ideas of work and the good life across the Global South.

2013–2014
Francesco Garutti, Politecnico di Milano, School of Architecture and Society, Italy
The project “Talking about Devious Design,” which resulted in a film and a digital publication, takes as its point of departure the controversial history of the design of some overpasses commissioned by the American public administrator Robert Moses in Long Island at the end of the 1920s. This narration becomes a tool to activate a discussion on the relation between material form and social content.

2012–2013
Carrie Smith, University of California, USA
The houseplant arrived indoors around 150 years ago and quickly became a familiar element in the interior. “Best Supporting Actor” challenges this passive role of indoor plants via a series of photographically documented interventions in the spaces of the Canadian Centre for Architecture.

2011–2012
Dan Handel, Technion Israel Institute of Technology, Israel
The exhibition First, the Forests examines some unexplored relationships between forestry, planning and design. The project proposes an expanded understanding of the connections between natural resources, production processes, and designed form.