Press: Architectural Drawing: Not for Construction
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Words: Elizabeth Fazzare
Photography: Vincent Tullo
TheGuide (Published December 11, 2020)
Is there anything more crucial to architectural design than drawing? Whether digitally or hand-rendered, it is the first step on any project big or small. These plans are given center stage in a group show at the recently opened gallery-turned-print shop-turned physical archive a83. “Not for Construction” presents never-before-seen architectural drawings by four designers—Bruna Canepa, Sean Canty, Adam Charlap Hyman, and Clement Laurencio. The works were selected not for the final structures they symbolize, but for the sketches themselves. Released from their bounds as a step toward a construction end, these architectural drawings become infinite vessels for thought and visual analysis, and help an audience breach the ever-illusive inner workings of a designer’s pure creative mind.
The exhibition’s four participants will be familiar to those who experienced the gallery’s first show last summer. “Working Remotely” was curated from an open-source call for designs. But the work the architects and designers have on display now feels quite different from their debuts. In tandem to their practices in realized structures, each explores an art: for Canepa, hand-drawings on paper in ink and colored pencil render miniature construction sites where familiar geometries—stone slabs, scaffolding, gridded land—are abstracted; for Canty, serigraph prints explore extruded gables and the protective shapes they could form; for Laurencio, meticulous graphite drawings imagine fictional structures a la the Italian Futurists of the 1910s; and for Charlap Hyman, a series of four intricate cut-paper works envision a monument’s ruin. What they share, too, is their purpose: a want to communicate concepts outside of the traditional realm of architecture.
Bruna Canepa, Drawing 1, 2021. Ink, colored pencil, and dry transfer on paper. 23.6 x 15.5 inches. Photography by Vincent Tullo.