Ceci n'est pas une rêverie is installed thematically, grouping Stanley Tigerman's projects according to motifs that resonate throughout his body of work: utopia, allegory, death, humor, division, drift, yaleiana, identity, and (dis)order. Highlights of the exhibition include models and sketches of such early and midcareer projects as the Five Polytechnic Institutes in Bangladesh (1966–75); the Urban Matrix proposal on Lake Michigan (1967–68); the Daisy House, in Porter, Indiana (1975--78); and Dante's Bathroom Addition, an unbuilt, allegorical project for Kohler (1980), while more recent projects include the Commonwealth Edison Energy Museum, in Zion, Illinois (1987–90); the Park Lane Hotel in Kyoto (1990); the Berlin Wall project (1988); and the Holocaust Memorial Foundation of Illinois, in Skokie (2000–09).  In addition to his practice as an architect, Tigerman is a celebrated designer of furnishings and other objects. Ceci n'est pas une rêverie includes tableware designed for Swid Powell, along with designs for Cannon Fieldcrest, Alessi, and Cleto Munari. Original artworks by the architect include oil paintings from the I Pledge Allegiance series of the mid-1960s; a selection of Architoons, Tigerman's cartoon-like drawings; and travel sketches from the 1970s onwards. Archival material dating to Tigerman's student days at Yale includes his bachelor’s and master's theses, designed under Paul Rudolph. Finally, a new video interview with Tigerman and others, produced on the occasion of the exhibition by Karen Carter Lynch, offers a present-day perspective on the architect and his body of work. The exhibition is curated by Yale's associate professor Emmanuel Petit, assisted by David Rinehart.

A Chicago native and Yale alumnus, Stanley Tigerman (BArch, '60; MArch, '61) has designed numerous buildings and installations throughout North America, Western Europe, and Asia, and has delivered many hundreds of lectures around the world. He has been a visiting professor and served on advisory committees at several prestigious schools of architecture, including Yale and Harvard, and he was director of the School of Architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago for eight years. In 1994, he cofounded (with Eva Maddox) Archeworks, a school and "socially oriented design laboratory," in Chicago. Tigerman's work has earned him critical acclaim and countless awards, especially in Chicago, where he was born and where his practice has flourished for more than a half century. The work of his firm has been exhibited in major galleries and art museums around the world, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Curator Emmanuel Petit is associate professor in the Yale School of Architecture. He received his MA and a PhD degrees from Princeton University (2001, 2006), and an MArch from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH, 1998). He is editor of Philip Johnson: The Constancy of Change, published by Yale University Press in 2009, and made possible in part by an institutional grant from the Graham Foundation; the book received an Independent Publisher Book Award, which "recognizes excellence in independent publishing." He is editor of Stanley Tigerman's Schlepping through Ambivalence (Yale University Press, 2011). His essays have appeared in JSAH, Log, Thesis, Trans, Thresholds, Archithese, Perspecta, and Constructs, as well as in a number of exhibition catalogues (V&A London, MAK Vienna, Vauban Luxembourg). He is curator of the forthcoming Yale exhibition This is Not a Dream: The Architecture of Stanley Tigerman; guest curator of the current exhibition at Yale, An Architect's Legacy: James Stirling's Students at Yale, 1959–83; and cocurator of Peter Eisenman's exhibition Barefoot on White-Hot Walls at the Museum for Applied Art in Vienna (2004). Petit also received a Graham Foundation grant in 2011 for his forthcoming publication Irony, or the Self-Critical Opacity of Postmodern Architecture.

The Department of Architecture at Yale was created as part of the School of Fine Arts in 1916. In 1953, the School of Fine Arts became the School of Art and Architecture.  In 1972, the School of Art and Architecture was split, creating two separate schools: the School of Art and the School of Architecture (YSoA).

The Yale School of Architecture has the following objectives:

1) to stimulate artistic sensitivity and creative powers,

2) to strengthen intellectual growth and the capacity to develop creative and responsible solutions to unique and changing problems,

3) to help the student acquire the individual capabilities necessary for the competent practice of architecture and lifelong learning.