“I’ve been stepped on many times, but I make this concrete hall inhabitable. Look at me!” exclaims the paprika-colored carpet selected by U.S. architect Paul Rudolph to furnish many of the public spaces in his Brutalist buildings. In Dan Handel’s thought-provoking and conceptually rich exhibition The Design of Carpets That Design Us, a video by Montreal-based artist and filmmaker Ralitsa Doncheva brought Rudolph’s carpet to life by imagining how this inanimate object would talk. The show proposed a new way of looking at carpets in architecture, not as silent furnishings or swaths of never-ending pattern, but as active building interventions that are also performers in space.Although the ideas framing the exhibition extended beyond a specific time or place, Handel grounded his show in North America, and primarily the United States in the 1960s. At that time, in the early stages of advanced capitalism, hospitality megastructures like hotels, casinos, and convention centers began to emerge as important new building typologies. In each of these spaces, designers installed monumental carpets to dazzle, confuse, and disorient visitors. The Design of Carpets That Design Us explored the motivations and mechanisms behind the production of these megacarpets, drawing on archival material as well as a series of photographs and videos commissioned for the exhibition.The modest size of the Octagonal Gallery at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, which hosted the exhibition, created an intimacy that worked in the show’s favor. When visitors entered the single-gallery exhibit, around its perimeter they encountered a series of large glossy photographs of megastructure interiors by Israeli photographer Assaf Evron (Figure 1). At the gallery’s center, four large monitors accompanied by four vitrines presented the organizing themes or sections of the exhibition: “The Architect,” “The Industry,” “The Brand,” and “The User” (Figure 2). Each monitor showed a video by Doncheva on a continuous loop, in which inanimate objects (carpet, software, fabric swatch, money cart) narrated their own roles in the exhibition, while the vitrines showcased related archival materials, such as hotel brand pamphlets and design sketches. The staging integrated the movements of the visitors, inviting them to study the archival materials and Evron’s photographs on the walls while circumambulating the show and listening to the remarks of the anthropomorphized objects. While the confined space facilitated both visual and aural experience, the overall effect was somewhat disorienting, not unlike walking across the dizzying patterns of carpets used in hospitality megastructures.“The Architect” questioned who determines the design and use of carpets in megastructures, and thereby the experience of megastructure space. Doncheva’s videos offered particularly compelling insight into such questions. While the video featuring Rudolph’s speaking carpet invoked the conventional understanding of the architect as a powerful actor, the other videos, along with the exhibition’s archival materials, quickly dismantled this notion. Although architects like Rudolph did make their own furnishing selections, these examples revealed the critical roles of other actors in determining the design and use of carpets in megastructures. For instance, the video “The Industry” highlighted the role of corporate designers, who often choose the ultimate forms that such textiles take. In the video “The Brand,” archival materials demonstrated the kind of language constructed to articulate a corporate vision. For example, a pamphlet from the Hyatt Regency hotel chain explained the company’s “hive” logo as “a dynamic visual representation of our guests’ journey within the Hyatt Regency brand experience. They enter our hotels and resorts and find energizing spaces to experience new things and make new connections.” Thus, the language of the brand translates into the choice of carpeting—in this way, space becomes the lived experience of the brand. The vitrine paired with the video “The User” showcased Bill Friedman’s Designing Casinos to Dominate the Competition: The Friedman International Standards of Casino Design (2000), a book documenting how the selection of every casino design element, including carpets, seeks to maximize profit. Where the designs of some carpets might distract users and create negative impressions, the designs of others may encourage visitors to dwell in a space. The materials displayed in the exhibition’s vitrines challenged the standard assumption that the architect exercises individual agency in shaping spaces, suggesting instead a more complex narrative, where various actors driven by capitalist values determine the use of carpets in these spaces.Evron’s expansive photographic compositions, glossy, highly saturated, and seductive, captured the formal qualities of carpets shown from various angles and suggested how these carpets perform in megastructures through their formal qualities. His photograph of the interior of the Marriott Marquis Hotel in Atlanta was particularly disorienting. In this image, taken from a high vantage point overlooking the hotel’s many floors, the carpeting seemed to dissolve into a maze of stripes. Such photographs reinforced the cumulative and monumental visual effects of textiles in megastructures. Yet to this reviewer, such images also suggested a missed opportunity to explore how carpets perform materially in these spaces.Nowhere did the exhibition present carpets as material objects, except of course in the carpet of the gallery itself, a blue-gray rug with a subtle pattern of graduated coloring that could not have been more different from Evron’s boldly patterned images. The simplicity of the gallery carpet functioned, like many museum carpets, as an almost neutral ground, allowing other materials in the exhibition to come to the fore. However, carpets always involve a tactile element that can be fully understood only through personal experience of the textiles themselves. Photographs reduce textiles such as carpets and rugs to two-dimensional swaths of pattern. How might carpets, as woven materials, inform the sensory experience of moving through the vast interior spaces of a megastructure? The user’s experience is not always one that occurs at a distance, as suggested by Evron’s photographs. On the contrary, people encounter carpets up close. We traverse their tufted surfaces; their woven fibers muffle our footsteps. And what of the materials themselves? What about the industrial process of producing and reproducing such fabrics? While this perspective was lacking in the exhibition, it is critical to comprehending how carpets perform in space.Clearly carpets perform in ways that are rarely controlled by the architect; this exhibition invited visitors to consider how different actors with various motivations may choose to manipulate space at different historical moments. Such inquiries open up promising avenues for research—questions about materiality, about how interior furnishings may transform buildings, and about how objects may construct meaning and thus determine spatial experience.