http://www.fstflorian.com/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A729-2004Apr9.html
Drawing in Two Dimensions, Dreaming In Three
By Benjamin Forgey
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, April 10, 2004; Page C01
"The only possible point of departure for our artistic creation is modern life," declared Austrian architect Otto Wagner in 1895. The statement provides a leitmotif for the splendid exhibition now on view at the National Building Museum: "Envisioning Architecture -- Drawings From the Museum of Modern Art."
MoMA started collecting architectural drawings in 1947, nearly two decades after its founding, but the museum definitively made up for lost time in both quality and quantity. The 190 drawings in the show, a representative sampling of the collection, clearly were acquired with the same commanding sense of connoisseurship that characterizes the museum's holdings of painting and sculpture.
Thus, the exhibition can be appreciated both as art and as history. Many of the drawings on view are ravishing works of art, as might be expected from a roster of visual talents that includes most of the great architects of the last century or so. And many of the very same drawings also document crucial episodes in the development of modern architecture from the late 19th century to the present.
Wagner's 1896 design for an elegant steel bridge in Vienna is the oldest item in the show. It also is one of the most traditional and depictive of the drawings. While appreciating the crisp precision of its inked lines, you also understand exactly how the bridge would look in reality. When you find out that the bridge was not built, you think: What a pity -- it would have been beautiful.
To illustrate in two dimensions what a building will look like in three dimensions is of course the most familiar function of an architectural drawing. But the relationship is not always quite so clear. There are quick first thoughts here, and complex diagrams. Drawings that are sheer fantasies or witty deconstructions. Sketches intended to evoke a mood. Collages meant simply to suggest a style, a palette, an effect.
Sometimes, there's a crackling tension between art and practicality. Louis Kahn surely was aware of this in 1952 when he made his map of a "proposed traffic movement pattern" for downtown Philadelphia. Dispersed unevenly over the city's grid, Kahn's ink and pencil insignia -- arrows, dots, bars, spirals, diamonds -- can be decoded as so many cars, trucks, buses, people. Yet as these marks lead the eye on a vivid dance across the surface, they distance themselves from such literal significance. This traffic study also is one very beautiful work of art.
Likewise, the landscape plans of the great Roberto Burle Marx of Brazil can be patiently deciphered: the red amoeba shape as a bed of bright perennials, for instance, and the blue butterfly form as a swimming pool. Yet his large site studies are equally convincing as pure, abstract pattern, reminiscent of paintings by surrealists such as Jean Arp or Joan Miro.
Frank Lloyd Wright was one of the greatest architectural draftsmen of any age. You can always predict, from looking at his drawings or prints, precisely what the buildings they illustrate will look like. Even so, with their soft-hued planes and intricately interwoven lines, the architect's drawings stand resolutely on their own, creating a Wrightian world with an almost otherworldly ambiance. Wright was intensely pragmatic about architecture, but with a pencil in his hand he also was an idealistic dreamer.
In addition to nearly 1,000 drawings by other architects, MoMA owns the Mies van der Rohe Archive, containing more than 18,000 drawings and sketches by the mid-20th-century master. As one would expect, Mies is a strong presence in the exhibition. As an architect, Mies famously demanded exactitude in the way his buildings were put together. But many of the drawings here, such as the 1939 collage version of the unbuilt Resor House, are evocative rather than descriptive. Mies let just a few light pencil lines and three overlapping planes -- a photograph, a drawing and a strip of wood veneer -- suggest the elegance, rigor and spatial majesty he intended to achieve with his minimalist design.
Fantastic, unbuildable projects form a distinct subgroup in the show, architecture that can exist only on paper. These range from the moody, de Chirico-like imaginary cityscapes by Italian postmodernist Aldo Rossi to wonderfully complex techno-cities conceived by members of the British group Archigram in the 1960s.
The monumental core of Washington, D.C., as re-imagined in the mid-1980s by Leon Krier, might also be included in this category. Technically, Krier's Washington is buildable because there is nothing at all unconventional about the tightly spaced classical and Renaissance-inspired buildings he envisioned for the wide open spaces of our fair city. And the Mall could, I suppose, be retrofitted as "The Grand Canal." But of course it was all a spellbinding fantasy, a chance for the Luxembourg-born architect-urbanist to dream a large-scale dream, pencil in hand.
One of the instructive treats of the show is to get an up-close view of one of the most famous architectural images of the late 20th century, Zaha Hadid's design for the Peak, a building proposed for a mountaintop in China's Kowloon peninsula. Lots of folks thought Hadid was dreaming at the time because the shard-like colliding ramps in her design had the look of fantasy architecture.
But the large painting of the Peak on view here demonstrates convincingly that, even though it didn't get built, the unconventional design was eminently buildable. Hadid had to wait quite a while to begin getting prestigious commissions, but now, of course, the 2004 Pritzker Architecture Prize laureate is doing just fine. Ah, sweet vindication.
http://www.fstflorian.com/Projects/WW2.html
The National World War II Memorial
For many, one of the most surprising fantasies in the exhibition will be a 1968 drawing called "New York Birdcage" by Friedrich St. Florian, architect of the World War II memorial that will be dedicated next month on the Mall. St. Florian was in a different zone back then. His drawing depicts imaginary "rooms" created in the sky by airplanes circling in holding patterns above New York.
Curated by Matilda McQuaid and Bevin Cline, this excellent traveling exhibition of paper architecture leads both eye and mind on a merry adventure.
Envisioning Architecture continues through June 20 at the National Building Museum, 401 F St. NW, open Monday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission is free.
--
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A729-2004Apr9.html
Drawing in Two Dimensions, Dreaming In Three
By Benjamin Forgey
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, April 10, 2004; Page C01
"The only possible point of departure for our artistic creation is modern life," declared Austrian architect Otto Wagner in 1895. The statement provides a leitmotif for the splendid exhibition now on view at the National Building Museum: "Envisioning Architecture -- Drawings From the Museum of Modern Art."
MoMA started collecting architectural drawings in 1947, nearly two decades after its founding, but the museum definitively made up for lost time in both quality and quantity. The 190 drawings in the show, a representative sampling of the collection, clearly were acquired with the same commanding sense of connoisseurship that characterizes the museum's holdings of painting and sculpture.
Thus, the exhibition can be appreciated both as art and as history. Many of the drawings on view are ravishing works of art, as might be expected from a roster of visual talents that includes most of the great architects of the last century or so. And many of the very same drawings also document crucial episodes in the development of modern architecture from the late 19th century to the present.
Wagner's 1896 design for an elegant steel bridge in Vienna is the oldest item in the show. It also is one of the most traditional and depictive of the drawings. While appreciating the crisp precision of its inked lines, you also understand exactly how the bridge would look in reality. When you find out that the bridge was not built, you think: What a pity -- it would have been beautiful.
To illustrate in two dimensions what a building will look like in three dimensions is of course the most familiar function of an architectural drawing. But the relationship is not always quite so clear. There are quick first thoughts here, and complex diagrams. Drawings that are sheer fantasies or witty deconstructions. Sketches intended to evoke a mood. Collages meant simply to suggest a style, a palette, an effect.
Sometimes, there's a crackling tension between art and practicality. Louis Kahn surely was aware of this in 1952 when he made his map of a "proposed traffic movement pattern" for downtown Philadelphia. Dispersed unevenly over the city's grid, Kahn's ink and pencil insignia -- arrows, dots, bars, spirals, diamonds -- can be decoded as so many cars, trucks, buses, people. Yet as these marks lead the eye on a vivid dance across the surface, they distance themselves from such literal significance. This traffic study also is one very beautiful work of art.
Likewise, the landscape plans of the great Roberto Burle Marx of Brazil can be patiently deciphered: the red amoeba shape as a bed of bright perennials, for instance, and the blue butterfly form as a swimming pool. Yet his large site studies are equally convincing as pure, abstract pattern, reminiscent of paintings by surrealists such as Jean Arp or Joan Miro.
Frank Lloyd Wright was one of the greatest architectural draftsmen of any age. You can always predict, from looking at his drawings or prints, precisely what the buildings they illustrate will look like. Even so, with their soft-hued planes and intricately interwoven lines, the architect's drawings stand resolutely on their own, creating a Wrightian world with an almost otherworldly ambiance. Wright was intensely pragmatic about architecture, but with a pencil in his hand he also was an idealistic dreamer.
In addition to nearly 1,000 drawings by other architects, MoMA owns the Mies van der Rohe Archive, containing more than 18,000 drawings and sketches by the mid-20th-century master. As one would expect, Mies is a strong presence in the exhibition. As an architect, Mies famously demanded exactitude in the way his buildings were put together. But many of the drawings here, such as the 1939 collage version of the unbuilt Resor House, are evocative rather than descriptive. Mies let just a few light pencil lines and three overlapping planes -- a photograph, a drawing and a strip of wood veneer -- suggest the elegance, rigor and spatial majesty he intended to achieve with his minimalist design.
Fantastic, unbuildable projects form a distinct subgroup in the show, architecture that can exist only on paper. These range from the moody, de Chirico-like imaginary cityscapes by Italian postmodernist Aldo Rossi to wonderfully complex techno-cities conceived by members of the British group Archigram in the 1960s.
The monumental core of Washington, D.C., as re-imagined in the mid-1980s by Leon Krier, might also be included in this category. Technically, Krier's Washington is buildable because there is nothing at all unconventional about the tightly spaced classical and Renaissance-inspired buildings he envisioned for the wide open spaces of our fair city. And the Mall could, I suppose, be retrofitted as "The Grand Canal." But of course it was all a spellbinding fantasy, a chance for the Luxembourg-born architect-urbanist to dream a large-scale dream, pencil in hand.
One of the instructive treats of the show is to get an up-close view of one of the most famous architectural images of the late 20th century, Zaha Hadid's design for the Peak, a building proposed for a mountaintop in China's Kowloon peninsula. Lots of folks thought Hadid was dreaming at the time because the shard-like colliding ramps in her design had the look of fantasy architecture.
But the large painting of the Peak on view here demonstrates convincingly that, even though it didn't get built, the unconventional design was eminently buildable. Hadid had to wait quite a while to begin getting prestigious commissions, but now, of course, the 2004 Pritzker Architecture Prize laureate is doing just fine. Ah, sweet vindication.
http://www.fstflorian.com/Projects/WW2.html
The National World War II Memorial
For many, one of the most surprising fantasies in the exhibition will be a 1968 drawing called "New York Birdcage" by Friedrich St. Florian, architect of the World War II memorial that will be dedicated next month on the Mall. St. Florian was in a different zone back then. His drawing depicts imaginary "rooms" created in the sky by airplanes circling in holding patterns above New York.
Curated by Matilda McQuaid and Bevin Cline, this excellent traveling exhibition of paper architecture leads both eye and mind on a merry adventure.
Envisioning Architecture continues through June 20 at the National Building Museum, 401 F St. NW, open Monday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission is free.
--
The Design-L list for art and architecture, since 1992...
To subscribe, send mailto:design-l-subscribe-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx.
To signoff, send mailto:design-l-unsubscribe-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx.
Visit archives: http://lists.psu.edu/archives/design-l.html