While the exhibition looks back at precedents from as early as the 16th Century, the focus is on modern minds in modern times, and especially on those European and American architects and artists who influenced and changed our sense of what structures could do and say, as the societies they served moved from the first vast emplacements of the machine age, to the dawn of the electronic era.

The exhibition opens by looking to the natural world, showing situations in which structures charge the space around the sites on which they sit, moving from Frank Lloyd Wright, who believed his task was to complete the unfinished work of nature, to Superstudio, whose gigantic mirrored wall aims at a total reconfiguration of the landscape through reflection. Some of the works underline the stillness of the wilderness and garden.

Others bring that stillness to life, insinuating moments of dynamic presence into a static world. Like Le Corbusier’s Open Hand, which punctuates the gigantic dam at Chandigarh, all of the works play on the viewer’s reading of distance, the shifts in scale and detail that appear as the viewpoint changes.