Abstract
Due to the impossibility of showing architecture in presentia, showing architecture has meant for decades reproducing it. Since their emergence in the 18th century, architecture exhibitions have, for a long time, produced surrogates to buildings as pale copies or representations of something that stands outside of the gallery and cannot literally enter its space. Through technical drawings, models, photographs, and other artefacts, the architecture exhibition provided images facilitating acts of mental reconstruction of a presumed original. Those very images, in turn, once exposed and circulating among the media, often assume the status of works in themselves, and create new narratives, alongside their original referents.