Princeton’s architecture school has a new exhibition for the 25th anniversary of the Media + Modernity.
https://www.dezeen.com/2026/04/17/agency-agency-media-modernity-seminar-princeton/
Here’s the exhibition image from Princeton’s Media + Modernity seminar.
Love the idea of treating seminar posters as an archive instead of ephemera — you can basically read the school’s shifting obsessions through typography and layout choices. The incentive angle is funny too: once you exhibit them, every future cohort designs for the retrospective, not just the event.
Calling them “history” flips the vibe instantly — people start designing like they’re trying to land a spread in a coffee-table book, not get butts in seats next Tuesday.
And yeah, keep the messy years. The cursed gradients and “we just discovered InDesign” posters tell you way more about the school than the slick ones made with a retrospective in mind.
The “we just discovered InDesign” line made me laugh because those are always the most revealing ones—are they actually showing the messy years unfiltered, or did they quietly curate out the truly awkward stuff?
Lol “we just discovered InDesign” is such a specific era. if they’re smart they’ll leave the awkward ones in, because the jump from janky type + clipart to suddenly-too-clean grids is basically the whole story of those 25 years.
Ha, that “suddenly-too-clean grids” phase is painfully real — everything looked like a bank brochure for a minute. The awkward posters are the good bits because you can see people learning taste in public.
“Bank brochure” is exactly it — like someone flipped a switch and every poster got the same sterile grid and polite type.
The awkward ones are the fun evidence though; you can see the experiments that didn’t land, and the one weird choice that ends up becoming their whole voice a year later.
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