SCRATCHINGS

To see Michelangelo’s drawings, on display now at The Met, is to see mastery. Even the tiniest, earliest studies for paintings and architecture projects – his scratchings – have an awesome sense of certainty. Michelangelo draws a lot, at different scales, and to different levels of finish, but he never draws incorrectly or unnecessarily. All his work, even his painting, is sculptural, about the expression of three-dimensional form. He seems to be continually pulling forms out of the air and pinning them down on the page.

Some drawings have a quick, off-the-cuff quality, as if noting an idea that might or might not be pursued. On a facade study for the Church of San Lorenzo, the left half is expressed with light ink strokes in shadow and ornament, while the right half remains in outline, as was the convention when presenting symmetrical designs. Simple shadows pop columns and frames forward dramatically. Figural sculptures along the roofline, depicted in rough streaks of ink, spring to life. They are recognizably human, and look as if they might jostle with one another or jump off the ledge. Even a drawing this diagrammatically conceived, non finito, has a rich physical and emotional presence.

Among many gifts, Michelangelo has a gift to see the reality of a thing in its smaller parts. Many drawings on display are fragments, sometimes surreal, depicting a single arm, thumb, claw, doorway, or base molding. Though most are studies for larger realized works, each is rendered with such sculptural richness so that it is, in itself, fully realized. The paper these fragments are drawn on, small squares of faded parchment, act as a film between this and the next world, upon which the figures leave a swift, bold impression.

Michelangelo Buonarroti (Italian, 1475–1564), with additions and restorations. Demonstration Drawing for the “First Design” of the Facade of San Lorenzo. Pen and brown ink, brush and two hues of brown wash, over underdrawing in leadpoint, compass work, ruling in leadpoint and stylus, black chalk, on six sheets of paper. Casa Buonarroti, Florence.

February 10, 2018 by Nalina Moses

PAPERWEIGHT

A small, fine exhibit at AnySpace, Drawings’ Conclusions, showcases architectural drawings from the 1990′s and 2000′s, when production was migrating, uneasily, from the drafting board to the computer screen. It was a tumultuous time. As an architecture graduate just entering the profession, I witnessed the drama firsthand. Seasoned architects set down their pencils and handed production responsibilities to computer-literate novices. Young architects who had mastered drafting software, and not much else, began taking the lead in office work. Architecture became further detached from any deep understanding of construction, and design became a game played on computers, an image-making unmoored from physical realities. We see the results of this shift in our cities now, where major new civic and commercial buildings have the hollow aspect of projections.

The drawings on display in the show are skillful and touching. Skillful technically, in their angelic pencil and ink linework, and also intellectually, in their clear expression of architectural ideas. There are no fantasies here. However surprising any drawing’s forms and geometries, it offers strong propositions about a building. Best of show goes to to Greg Lynn‘s computer-drafted line diagrams for the Slavin House. This small structure was conceived around a coiled frame that resembles a knit strand of yarn come undone. It’s drawings call out radii and lengths systematically, rationally, conventionally, exactly as required for fabrication.

The distended coil is just the kind of form can be generated easily, randomly, scalelessly, in seconds, in a drafting program like AutoCAD. But Lynn’s drawings remain stubbornly orthogonal. They were imagined in section and elevation, on the page, with pragmatic spatial thinking. They aren’t about the image of the building but about its geometries and profiles. Though these drawings generated by a computer, they have a stodgy solidity, a physical logic. It’s a logic that would disappear soon enough, as new architects began designing with no memory of pencil or paper, of steel frames, and of the cartesian grid.

February 03, 2018 by Nalina Moses

HANDIWORK

About to embark on a new writing project about architectural drawings, I took in this season’s architecture show at MoMA, Frank Lloyd Wright at 150: Unpacking the Archives.

An architectural drawing can do a number number of things: construct a personal vision, instruct a builder, persuade a client, clarify spatial organization, communicate technical specifications… Most of the drawings in the FLW show are visionary, and what singular visions they are. Prepared for publication or presentation, these exterior perspectives illustrate, all-at-once, the character of the building: its sculptural presence, its materials, its formal stylings, and its relationship to the landscape. Many are so brilliantly composed that they are themselves iconic. A drawing of the David and Gladys Wright House gives a glimpse of its curved inner facade from below, standing at the center of its circular walkway, a small child’s glowing spaceship dream.

Other drawings on display are more fundamentally pragmatic, fixing dimensional and construction details. One poster-sized section drawing of the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo slices through its entryway to reveal profiles and details of its customized brickwork and stone panels. It shows every grout line, every turn of every stone panel, every steel reinforcing bar embedded in the concrete decks. Marks noting dimensions have been lain right over those noting profiles, right over those noting materials. The drawing is a cloud of lines, alive with the density, complexity and sensuality of real brick and stone.

Most remarkable are those drawings that convey both the vision and the physicality of a building. A perspective of the Millard House, in colored pencil, shows us its stern textile-block facade from slightly above, as a bird would see it, overlooking a gentle ravine, framed by the drooping branches of decades-old eucalyptus trees. Its yellowing sheet has worn, torn edges, and its surface a rich patina of lead smudges, pencil points, erasings, overlapping lines and small stray marks. The character of the drawing gives the house itself a dark, ancient feeling. It’s less like a building than a natural formation, rising from the ground.

Frank Lloyd Wright, Millard House (La Miniatura), Pasadena, California (Exterior perspective from the garden) 1923–1924

September 02, 2017 by Nalina Moses

CONCRETE DREAMS

How does one exhibit architecture in a museum? Drawings and models engage, but they cannot take the place of the thing itself, the building. The architecture show at MoMA, A Japanese Constellation: Toyo Ito, SANAA, and Beyond, falls into this trap. It’s a supremely elegant installation. Each one of six small second floor galleries is given over to one of the six brilliant architects celebrated here: Toyo Ito, Kazuyo Sejima, Ryue Nishizawa, Sou Fujimoto, Akihisa Hirata, and Junya Ishigami. Models and prototypes are set out on small white stands, and drawings and quotes are pinned to pale grey walls. Photos and renderings, about the size of 11x8 sheets, are projected onto floor-length white linen scrims. The overall effect is low-fi and dreamy, as much of the work here is.

The exhibit designers might have decided to project photographs to avoid visible monitors, to emphasize the handicraft in the work. But the images are small and the linen blurs them so much that they’re practically illegible. We never see what these buildings are meant to look like or what they actually look like, and this is a tremendous disservice, because almost all of them have been built. The ideas and geometries given expression in the drawings are models are astounding: at once simple, obtuse, lucid, startling and lyrical. But having ideas about a building is dreaming, not architecture. Since visitors don’t see the renderings and photos clearly, the work remains paper architecture.

Fujimoto conceived a small house in Tokyo, House NA, by splitting each of its rooms, halls, closets, and stair runs into a separate volume, building each one from glass, and stacking them in a shifting, ramshackle pile. The wood and board model of the building at MoMA is lovely, like a spirited doll house, but photographs of the house itself – that show clearly its modest scale, its precarious foothold along the sidewalk, its bamboo-thin metal frame, its unapologetic transparency – are surreal. As astonishing as the concept of the house is, it’s more astounding that it’s been executed skillfully, with each of its quietly radical propositions (about space, about structure, about domesticity) intact. That might be true for all the projects included in this show. We understand the ideas, now show us the buildings.

House NA, Tokyo, 2011, by Sou Fujimoto. Photo by Iwan Baan.

July 03, 2016 by Nalina Moses