Los Angeles, CA (February 22, 2017) – SCI-Arc is pleased to announce, Drawings’ Conclusions, an exhibition curated by Jeffrey Kipnis and produced by Andrew Zago opening March 10 in the SCI-Arc Gallery. The exhibition is complemented by a two-day symposium March 24-25 featuring a keynote address by Peter Eisenman on Friday, March 24 at 6pm.
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 wire frame 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-Arc’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.