The first exhibition of «BornHouse» took place at the former department of sculpture at the Moscow Architecture Institute, once the legendary VKHUTEMAS. Before that it housed the Stroganov Imperial Institute of Industrial Art, and even earlier the building – late eighteenth-century

design of the great Russian architect Matvei Kazakov – was the Medical and Surgical Academy which trained more than two thousand doctors and pharmacists for at little less than a century. In 1913 a new building was

added to the Stroganov Institute – an exemplary concrete structure, designed by civil engineer Alexander Kuznetsov in the style of Art Nouveau. A year after construction was completed, World War I broke out, and the building was converted into a hospital. The new institute exhibition pavilion, obviously intended for large-scale sculpture, became a chapel, soon thereafter named the church of St. Nicholas. When the war ended, church services did, too, and the building resumed its artistic function.

VKHUTEMAS, or the Higher Artistic Technical Studio, was established here in 1918. It stood alongside the German Bauhaus as one of the world leading schools of design, a cradle of twentieth-century architecture. VKHUTEMAS laid the foundation for the world first modern system of industrial art education; its faculty included leading figures of modernist architecture such as Nikolai Ladovsky and Ivan Leonidov.

When the former Stroganov Institute was renamed as the Moscow Architectural Institute, the painting studio in the old chapel was refitted for sculpture. The famous photographs of the VKHUTEMAS studios that inspired «BornHouse» were taken on the next floor up; they show rows of clay models erected on stools – explorations of new architectural forms. Thus the building real and imagined histories married medicine and architecture, sculpture and religion. The exhibition hall became a chapel; the chapel where victims of war were mourned became an art studio; the studio eventually resumed the space original role as an exhibition hall. Here, by some miracle, the birth of new form met with healing and with death. The genius of place imbued the creative act with sacred properties.

The San Stae church in Venice, unlike the Moscow Architecture Institute, was not specially selected as an exhibition site. It came about by chance, and does not have the same kind of layered history as the first site of «BornHouse. »The Scuola Grande di San Marco carries full responsibility for medicine in Venice, while San Stae, like many of the city churches, has always been a glorious temple of painting and sculpture. Arranging stools with architectural models, like at VKHUTEMAS, would be unthinkable in San Stae – a church is not a studio. The only architecture a church could accommodate would be the temporary architecture of the presepio, the den that appears in European churches at Christmas time. «BornHouse» has a den, but it is empty, without a nativity scene. All the works are tucked in the intricate woodwork of its walls. The only place for the den was the church geometric center, which in San Stae holds the remains of a Venetian doge. Here, once again, birth meets death. Nomen et Cineres una cum vanitate sepulta, reads the inscription carved on the doge tomb – «Name and ashes come together in glorious burial». In other words, architecture belongs to it’s time, birth and death – to eternity.