P.A.Molnar, Hotel Nord-Sud, North and South Elevation Drawings, 1932-34

In her practice, Slovakian born Katarina Burin interrogates feminist histories of modern architecture and design, as well as the role of memory and nostalgia in shaping our bodies and minds through the built environment. HOTEL NORD-SUD 1932-34: Design and Correspondence is a series central to Burin’s practice. Developed over seven years, between 2010 and 2017, the project centers on architect Petra Andrejova-Molnár, a figure that Burin has completely fabricated. Her premise is provocative, conceptual, visually compelling, and supremely clever. A serious historian of modern architecture, Burin has created an entirely plausible female architect active in the early 20th century, Molnár, and painstakingly constructed a believable body of work for Molnar, including a never-realized project, the Hotel Nord-Sud. This choice is nod to Burin’s longstanding interrogation of spaces of leisure in Eastern Europe; the choice of gender acknowledges the heavily gendered world of architecture, both then and now, and suggests a reassessment of the canon. The constellation of works references axonometric methods of architectural presentation, modern design language in the furniture and graphic design of the hotel stationary, and histories of the historical avant-garde. In its atomized parts, it adumbrates but never fully defines its sources, offering an alternative, imaginative, and more expansive history of modern architecture.