An exhibition highlighting the 25th anniversary of the Program of Media + Modernity seminar at Princeton University has been installed at the architecture school there, with a silver fabric curtain displaying the seminar posters over the years.

Curated by a scholar and long-time director of the programme, Beatriz Colomina, alongside Foivos Geralis and Antonio Cantero, Media and Modernity: 25 Years of Thinking Through Mediation highlights the history of the interdisciplinary work done in the seminar.

Princeton has put on an exhibition celebrating 25 years of the Program of Media + Modernity

Founded in 2000, the Program of Media + Modernity (M+M) has brought together scholars to look at the intersection of architecture and media, from architect Le Corbusier to magazine Playboy and beyond.

For the exhibition design, New York-based architecture studio Agency–Agency took elements from past seminars and exhibitions, and wove them together in an intimate set-up that features a semi-transparent silver fabric with posters from the seminar transferred onto it in a sublimation printing process.

Agency–Agency did the exhibition design

"The use of the reflective curtain is to create an intimate space, an entirely different kind of space, like a black box outside yet within the University, much like the classroom of N-107," Agency–Agency founder Tei Carpenter told Dezeen.

"We printed the posters on the curtain that came out of the weekly Media and Modernity seminars and wrapped the gallery in them, inverting the interiority of the classroom – turning it inside out – and making it instead the backdrop to understand the M+M program and how it catalyzed so many of the M+M exhibitions, film, and books featured in the central vitrine that traveled around the world," she continued.

"We hope that the exhibition presents the incredible Media and Modernity archive in such a way that there is no one thing that is foregrounded, but instead it offers a non-hierarchical, polyvocal way to understand the program and its life both within the Princeton classroom and how its impact has rocketed around the world."

Decades of posters were printed on silver fabric

Also included in the exhibition are screens playing content from the seminars, while pillows printed with "media" and "modernity" further the exhibition's intimate feeling, allowing visitors to lounge and browse the books that formed the core of the interdisciplinary curricula.

At the entrance is a binder with print-outs and memos, which track the founding of the programme. Carpenter referred to this binder, set within a vitrine, as a kind of "relic".

Studio Laura Coombs carried out the graphic design work to align with the Carpenter's scenography.

Media from the seminars plays on screens

A host of well-known scholars have been associated with the programme over its tenure, with philosopher Paul B Preciado acting as the first coordinator at its beginning. Each year, the programme has had a theme, such as surveillance, and speakers and texts are curated based on it.

Colomina told Dezeen that despite being between departments, marked only by a certificate, the programme's success has been evident in the global uptake of some of its exhibitions, such as a project on small-circulation magazines and one on Playboy.

The strength of its interdisciplinarity has allowed it freedom from some of the bureaucratic malaise of the university.

"It became an escape precisely because it's not official in so many ways," said Colomina.

"It's part of the of the university in one sense, and the universe in another, because it goes all over the place, and people follow us, as demonstrated during the Covid [pandemic], where we had an audience from all over the world."

The interdisciplinary approach has produced successful exhibitions

Other recent exhibitions include a celebration of architect Denise Scott-Brown's photography at Yale.

The photography is courtesy of Princeton University School of Architecture. 

Media and Modernity: 25 Years of Thinking Through Mediation is on show at Princeton from 3 March to 1 May 2026. For more international exhibitions and events in architecture and design visit Dezeen Events Guide.