Drawings Conclusions

The exhibition, which debuted at the SCI-Arc Gallery in Los Angeles last March,

Jeffrey Kipnis, visiting faculty at SCI-Arc and professor of architecture at The Ohio State University’s Knowlton School,

The exhibition was designed by Andrew Zago, who’s a principal at L.A.-based Zago Architecture as well as on faculty at SCI-Arc and a clinical professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Stan Allen
Andrew Atwood
Preston Scott Cohen
Greg Lynn
Anna Neimark
Ben Nicholson
Phillip Parker
Jesse Reiser
Baharam Shirdel
Stephan Turk
Nanako Umemoto
Michael Young
Andrew Zago

The exhibition asserts as self-evident that the constellation of hand architectural drawings reached an apex in its conceptual and technical development around 1990 just as computational technological instruments such as wireframe drawings, renderings page definition illustrations and 3-d models began to supplant its predecessor entirely as the primary vector for disciplinary and professional communication. Indeed, the anticipation of inevitable computational transformation, already forecast by film animation, scientific illustration and magazine graphics, fueled hand drawing’s last outburst of creative and technical development.

The exhibition is not an encyclopedic survey of that transition as such, but rather, in keeping with SCI-Arch’s unique pedagogical charter, it is an examination of a small group of architects, most just a few years out of graduate school at the time, who were then united by a precocious and deeply vested interest in the hand drawing, though each in his or her own, way – sometimes personal and idiosyncratic, sometimes conceptual and technically arcanely, and sometimes esoteric though stringent in drawing process. Each went on to negotiate the transition to the computational environment forthrightly and in highly original ways, maintaining a loyalty to their legacy without nostalgia in the new work.

In addition, the exhibition offers a small selection of a new generation of architects whose work, in the opinion of the curator, seems to keenly aware of the disciplinary legacy and vicissitudes of the hand drawing constellation, and desires to offer in its own way, again without nostalgia and with true originality, a continuing reflection on the question, what are drawing’s conclusions.