Core Samples

Core Samples: An exhibition organized by Samaa Elimam and Michael Osman

The second program in our AUD60 Celebration Perloff Hall, Room 1118 On view March 12 through June 30, 2026

“Core Samples” brings daylight to decades of previously unseen work and media in AUD’s archives, an assemblage that demonstrates the both volume and heterogeneity of how design has been recorded over the years at AUD and beyond.

Please join us for an exhibition opening on Thursday, March 12, 5:30 pm.

The exhibition raises questions big and small: What is kept? What is lost? How can our generation solicit others to engage in the process of preservation? How can our effort be both beautiful and objective, aesthetic and scientific, and how can we seek to avoid the biases of our own priorities? How can the exhibit allow current students and faculty to connect to previous AUD generations? How does an institution look at itself and generate a draft of its own history?

“Core Samples” is not a curation, a selection, or a frame. Any curatorial strategy follows directly from its title: a sampling of an overwhelming volume of media, leaving the reading and analysis to the viewer–much like a soil sample that reveals the sediments and layers of a site before a building is built.

The media on view, and their attendant recording technologies, interrogate the multigenerational nature of the institution and the various material infrastructures that contain its memory. These media, and the people and visions behind them, invite a sociability to the material.

This is an effort, in turn, to profile the means for storage and preservation that secure the heritage of our institution. It is a collection that purposely foregrounds formats which constitute a place–UCLA Architecture and Urban Design over 60 years–through a record of the ideas recorded in media such as cassette tapes, slides, posters, photos, videos, and a range of things that we don’t really archive anymore. But should we?

“Core Samples” offers a teaching instrument, transforming the gallery into a “classroom” for exploring materials during the opening. We aim to suggest how future teaching and research could happen through the archive: the collection, after all, is also an archive of teaching and learning. This aspect of the display will be treated as “a seminar in progress,” a teaching collection that encourages collaboration and sociability around the materials, similar to Herzog & de Meuron’s Kabinett.

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