After nearly sixty years of facing demolition, two-phase monument status, partial restoration, brief revival, repeated vacancy… Maison Hannon opened its doors to the public in mid-2023 as a house museum for Art Nouveau furniture. Architect Aslı Çiçek succeeds in paradoxically showcasing both the exhibited objects and the architecture in all their grandeur and homeliness in the small spaces.

Curating is a necessary intervention which, etymologically speaking, ‘cares for’ art and makes it visible and even understandable to an audience. Without exhibition, there is no art. Architecture, on the other hand, already exists in the public domain as a functional, three-dimensional, material element. And architecture, too, needs to be curated. Not to cure it, as with art, of its non-committal nature or ambiguity, but rather of its self-evidence and inconspicuousness and of the fact that, as Walter Benjamin succinctly put it in his essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, it is experienced ‘in distraction’.