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.