MQA: An Archive of Impossible Futures
Welcome to MQtopia. With this exhibition, we are questioning the idea of Architecture portrayed only as a finished product, a series of images that appear in industry magazines, with retouched images, seductive renderings, and idealized sketches and drawings. An Archive of Impossible Futures wants to move away from that picture perfect idea by opening our hard drive to reveal what is usually hidden behind the close doors of architecture practice: the projects that never made it beyond a conversation or a site visit, those that stopped at some point before construction, and finally those which crystallized into built architecture.
Our purpose is to reveal the disproportion that exists in architectural practices, applying this question to our own firm. Only a fraction of the “design thinking” is built, while the rest may seem wasted at first, but it is not. Those unbuilt projects train our imagination and shape the soul of our practice. They carry emotional weight; we develop attachments to them, and they live only in our collective memory and in our archive folders. With this compilation, we are creating a library of possibilities for the future. Finally, the built projects are the survivors of a long process. They endured shifting budgets, changing clients, circumstances, construction challenges, and contractors until they became physical reality. They define the public image of MQArchitecture, but they stand on the shoulders of all the rest.
This exhibition unfolds across three acts: lost, unbuilt, and built, a balance between the original idea, the expectation, and the final materialization. Nothing is wasted. The lost and unbuilt projects leave an imprint; we see them with nostalgia for the impossible future that never was, and with hope for the possible future yet to come.
LOST PROJECTS
42%
Some projects remain nothing more than expectations. At the very beginning of any project, we live in the tension of feelings and emotions born from the first conversations: anticipation, excitement, and hesitation. We comfort ourselves by thinking that no physical line is drawn until a contract is signed, yet mentally so much is already unfolding. The proto-project lives in a small corner of the architect's mind, an intuition of something that could come to life, awaiting the official go-ahead. But then, things shift.
Commissions slip away, budgets collapse, clients vanish, and sometimes, we simply say no. These are the never published, the invisible labor of practice. At times, they carry a quiet shame, the shame of admitting that much of the practice never happens, never materializes into anything. Work, business development, site visits, potential client meetings, service proposals, hours of reflection that consume time and energy and remain only in our imagination.
And those lost projects, their only trace is haunting us as ghosts in our project folders, still belong to the essence of practice, because they prepare us in the background, so that when a project does come to life, we are ready.
UNBUILT PROJECTS
27%
Other projects are unbuilt, existing as broken dreams. Developed to some extent, some remained at schematic design, while others reached construction documents phase, only steps away from breaking ground. To a greater or lesser degree, we created an emotional attachment to these projects. They are projects into which we poured hundreds of hours, shaped by the client's needs, working alongside them, trying to bring ideas to life, pushing it toward a real beginning. But then something happens, and they remain in a limbo, a purgatory of projects. There is silence, and a sense of mourning for something that will never happen, where time is real but architecture is not.
We are proud of them. Most of the time they are not published, yet at the same time those projects nourish the rest of the practice. Even if they are not built, they leave behind ideas that materialize in other projects, in details and concepts. They are experiments and explorations of our identity as an architectural office. They are our library of possibilities. Maybe they will not be built, but in one way or another, they will influence of our built projects.
BUILT PROJECTS
31%
Out of the many, only a few projects survive the long process, crystallizing into built architecture. They survive budgets and value engineering, they survive clients changing opinions and needs, they survive change orders and tensions during construction, and they survive, above all, time and uncertainty. They appear permanent, yet the process is fragile. They endure only through compromises of the original idea and by choosing the right battles between vision and constructability. There is a tenacity in the administration of a project, where we defend the original idea until it is finally built. And there is also a deep satisfaction when we see those drawings become physical reality.
We want to emphasize the disproportion between built, unbuilt, and lost projects, yet the built ones define the public image of our office. In most cases they are the only works that get published. Still, they are nourished by the lost and the unbuilt. All built projects are fulfilled experiments, where we condense everything that came before and that is not physically visible.
Roger Williams University Exhibition
Fall 2025 Events Series Cummings School of Architecture, Roger Williams University
September 17 - October 10, 2025 ARCH 121 Gallery
