The impressive Henri Labrouste exhibit at MoMA is called Structure Brought to Light, to celebrate the architect's pioneering use of exposed structural steel, most famously at the Bibliothèques Sainte-Geneviève and nationale in Paris. Here slender steel posts lift roofs high and open walls to great expanses of glass. Much of the exhibit is devoted to drawings, models and photographs of these two buildings, and to historical artifacts from their construction. We even see the architect’s cloth-bound construction journals, filled with his lean, leaning script. But the real treasures are Labrouste’s student drawings, which fill the first gallery. They’re huge, yellowing sheets with renderings in black ink and soft, sepia-toned washes. The drawings depict classical monuments Labrouste visited while traveling through southern Europe on the Prix de Rome, and some of his early speculative designs, like a bridge connecting France with Italy, and a tomb for Napoleon, all in conventional neoclassical styles. Despite the fidelity with which these drawings depict masonry (and all of these structures are masonry), they are entirely weightless. The heaviest ink lines are finer than hairs, and the colored washes, laid with exquisite evenness, feel as if they might evaporate from the page.

Labrouste’s student drawings are faithful, cataloging every crevice between stone blocks in a wall, and every millimeters-wide turn in the profile of a corinthian column capital, and also dreamy, unrooted in time and place. The images float on the page, cushioned by empty space, unmoored from landscape and geography. We know precisely what this memorial looks like, how it was built, how to enter it, and what it might look like inside, but we have no idea where it is. Is it off the coast of Elba, at the center of a park in London, or in a back yard in Beverly Hills? In the way the drawing highlights symmetries and geometries of the monument it’s highly rational, and yet it's tempered with romanticism, a yearning for the faraway time and place where the building stands.

There has always been, for architects, a seductive freedom in drawings, where vision is given free reign, unchecked by realities of construction. One of my architecture teachers used to say, “All that’s needed to do architecture is a pencil and paper." Labrouste’s student drawings are a compelling argument for the fullness of paper architecture. They have the geometric clarity of drawings by Claude-Nicolas Ledoux and Étienne-Louis Boullée, the shadowy melodrama of renderings by Giovanni Battista Piranesi, and the unsettling emptiness of paintings by Giorgio de Chirico. Labrouste’s position within modern architectural history is that of an enlightened pragmatist; a man working at the cusp of Modernism, pushing contemporary construction one small, bold step away from Medieval masonry traditions. From the evidence of these drawings, he is also a dreamer.

June 07, 2013 by Nalina Moses

January 06, 2012 by Nalina Moses

Although I missed the display of Elizabeth Taylor’s clothing and jewelry at Christie’s, I was able to see Robert Rauschenberg’s private art collection at the Gagosian just before it closed. It’s eclectic but unsurprising. There are some Native American artifacts and some Americana. There’s a great four-panel Marilyn painting by Andy Warhol, and an intimate, book-sized wood assemblage by Damien Hirst. And there are lots and lots of drawings, which seem to have been exchanged among Rauschenberg and his artist friends (including Cy Twombly, Brice Marden, John Cage, Merce Cunningham and Trisha Brown) like postcards. Walking through the gallery I thought to myself, it’s good to have a lot of artist friends.

I liked Marden’s proto-architectural drawings, which clung tightly and intriguingly to the thin, hard line between abstraction and figuration. But I was most intrigued by the drawings by choreographers Trisha Brown and Merce Cunningham. The two drawings by Brown are composite images of moving body parts – feet in one, and hands in the other – that capture the flickering meanings folded into a single gesture. Merce’s drawings are more like scratchings, incorporating musical notation, sketches of the human figure, line diagrams, and text, all in order to capture, on a sheet of paper, with pen and ink, a dance. These seem less like drawings than like notes Cunningham is making for himself. Although there are codified notation systems to record dance, is it an exercise in futility? Dance might simply be something that cannot be held on the page.

December 22, 2011 by Nalina Moses

Years ago, for a second-semester project in architecture school, I drew the interior perspective of a cafe space with saucers and cups on each table. My critic was so shocked when she saw it that she started laughing. An architectural drawing is supposed to be the facts of the building, a description of what it is, and nothing more. It’s up to the architectural rendering, which has crasser, more commercial, connotations, to present the image of the building, a projection of what the life inside it is like. The drawings of the late modern American architect Ralph Rapson, who lived and worked in Minneapolis, dance in the gap between the two. While they’re accurate dimensionally and proportionally, like proper drawings, they also capture all-at-once the mythology of the building.

Repson’s drawings are cartoon-like but held in check by the conventions of architectural drawing – standard hatch patterns to indicate materials like wood and stone, and carefully constructed perspective lines – that describe the structures with a designer’s clarity and certainty. His drawings have more life, more joy, than conventional architectural renderings, especially contemporary, computer-generated renderings, with their elegant, hyper-real chill. Rapson has a heavier, more sensual hand than an architect. Every line carries substance and shadow. Unlike Le Corbusier’s renderings, for example, which are only populated by abstract, big-limbed scale figures, like Le Modulor, Rapson’s are populated with ladies and gentleman, children, animals and vehicles, all going about their business. They’re brimming with activity. It could reflect a distinctly American, suburban, postwar joy. And it could be the pleasure of drawing.

June 08, 2011 by Nalina Moses

There is yawning gulf between drawing and sculpture, between the presence of a sheet of paper and that of a full-bodied object in space. Sculptor Richard Serra’s drawings from the early 1970’s to the present, on exhibit now at the Met, reach across that divide. There are drawings that are imagistic, offering views of objects. There are drawings that are diagramatic, sketching configurations for sculptures. There are drawings that are architectural, huge paint-covered linen panels stapled to the wall, that play against the gallery floor, wall and ceiling. And, most thrillingly, there are drawings that are so thickly encrusted in eddies and streams of paint that they become sculptures themselves.

Each type of drawing has a different power. The sketches are the least compelling. While they depict forms clearly they’re unrelated in spirit to Serra’s sculptures, which are so densely material. (There is one stunning exception, a rendering of the “Tilted Arc” that, in four thick strokes of paintstick, captures all of that immense, looming figure.) It’s heartening to see all the drawings together. They show the sculptor grappling with the properties of a form that, up until the 1990’s, seems to elude him. (One rather desperate series from the 1970’s, “Forged Drawing,” consists of hubcap-sized slabs of steel that are coated with painstick and then hung on the wall.) But when Serra gets it right, his drawings have all the viscuous sensuality of a Rothko canvas, only with a greater sense of weight. These drawings have no space in them, they’re all stuff.