Open Call: 13 White Houses

Call for Participation 

Architecture has long been called upon to give spatial form to political ambition. Its capacity for monumentality, symmetry, and spectacle has made it a reliable instrument of authority—particularly for regimes invested in permanence and control. Yet architecture also carries another, less concrete history: one in which designers, artists, and collectives have worked to unsettle these logics, producing counter-images, counter-spaces, and alternative civic imaginaries. 

13 White Houses takes this tension as both subject and structure. 

Rather than returning once more to the singularity of the White House—an overdetermined emblem of American governance—the exhibition multiplies it. The project assembles thirteen distinct “White Houses,” each understood not as a fixed building, but as a civic construct: a spatial apparatus through which power is staged, negotiated, naturalized, or contested. 

The exhibition will be hosted by Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning and will bring together invited works, juried architectural proposals, and a broader image-based call to form a composite field of speculation, critique, and repair.

Exhibition Structure 

13 White Houses comprises three interrelated components: 

Thirteen White Houses: Propositional Works (Models + Drawings) 

The exhibition is organized around thirteen speculative architectural propositions that reconsider the White House as a civic and spatial instrument. A group of international practices will be commissioned to produce new work, supplemented by additional participants selected through this open call. Realized as models and drawings, these projects examine the White House and its grounds as a site of ongoing negotiation—between governance and representation, permanence and revision, authority and public life. Together, invited and selected practices will constitute the thirteen White Houses that form the exhibition’s core. 

Expanded Field: Juried Image Exhibition 

In parallel, the exhibition will include a juried image presentation drawn from this open call. Comprising single images—drawings, renderings, collages, diagrams, photographs, or other visual propositions—this section expands the exhibition’s discursive field and introduces a broader range of spatial, political, and disciplinary approaches. Submissions will be considered both for inclusion in the image exhibition and as the primary basis for identifying additional participants to develop full propositional works for the model-and-drawing presentation. 

The Thirteenth Condition 

For critical contrast, the exhibition acknowledges a thirteenth condition already underway: the demolition of the East Wing and construction of a White House ballroom. Presented as documentation rather than design, this ongoing intervention functions as a real-time case study in how architecture mediates authority through spectacle, speed, erasure, and unilateral transformation. 

Provocations 

Submissions may engage the White House through any of the following lines of inquiry, or propose others: 

Preservation as an active political practice

Adaptive reuse as institutional reprogramming 

Democratic deep retrofit of spatial and procedural systems 

Unbuilding, subtraction, and architectural refusal 

Proto-constitutional architectures and draft forms of governance 

Ritual and protocol reconsidered beyond spectacle 

Architectures for plural, distributed publics 

Ecological and infrastructural recalibration 

Pedagogical architectures of civic reorientation 

Pop reinterpretation and mediated form 

Iconoclasm without substitution 

Architecture as capital display, development instrument, and spectacle economy 

Image Submission: Open Call 

The open call solicits single-image submissions for inclusion in a juried image exhibition. Individuals and collaborative teams are encouraged to apply. The call is open to practitioners working across architecture, landscape, art, design, and related spatial fields, independent of professional licensure. 

Deadline: Wednesday, May 13, 2026 (11:59 pm EDT) 

Image: One image per submission 

Format: JPG or PNG Resolution: 18 inches × 12 inches  (or equivalent) at 300 dpi minimum 

Text:  Statement (max. 150 words) 

Images should function as complete visual propositions—capable of standing alone as arguments rather than illustrations. 

Submissions may operate at the scale of the building, the landscape, the campus, the city, the territory, or the diagram. We welcome speculative, critical, poetic, and rigorously architectural approaches alike. 

Submission Details 

All submissions must be made via the project website:

Questions may be directed to: [email protected]

Why This Exhibition Now? 

Architecture has often been used to stabilize power by giving it form. 13 White Houses begins from the counter-possibility: that design can function as speculative resistance—a way of rehearsing institutional alternatives before they become real. Thus, the exhibition assembles architectural arguments that reconsider how authority is staged, shared, and spatialized. It suggests that democratic futures may depend less on the preservation of monuments than on the capacity to redesign the spatial conditions through which public life unfolds. 

Curatorial Team: Sharon Haar, Olivier Peyricot, Anya Sirota, Ishan Pal Singh