A83: Architectural Drawing 4

TBD

This year’s Architectural Drawing show, the fourth in ongoing series at A83, certainly continued the gallery’s reputation for being at the warm, gooey heart of what’s good in contemporary architectural practice. Upon entering the opening, your glasses fogged over with the humidity of a hundred breaths from socialites packed shoulder to shoulder. Although the “feels like” temperature outside was –4°F, a committed group of smokers was not deterred.

Viewing the work was not an important part of the gallery opening. Obscured vision due to fogged glasses—or what my colleague described as the incredibly high sexual tension between all the men in the room—didn’t matter. The work on opening night was to observe who’s who in this pocket of the New York City and global architecture scene. Notable appearances included Lydia Kallipoliti of Columbia's GSAPP and Hayley Eber of the Van Alen Institute. Both arrived an hour after the posted end time in outfits that proved “fashionably late” is alive and well.

Returning to the gallery after the opening, I was able to get up close to the work and hear from co-directors Owen Nichols and Clara Syme about the process and drama behind the prints. A triptych screen print series composed of around forty layers of black ink (printed by Jasper Townsend AR’25 for Mexico City based architect Isidoro Michan-Guindi) features redacted language excerpts from a litigation battle between the firm and a neighbor who hated the house Isidoro designed. Another notable triptych comes from Cooper alum Sophia Mercado AR’25, depicting vernacular domestic architecture in the Philippines an extension of her ongoing thesis research.

Mercado's series is screen printed but made to look like an etching, using a predictive investing software script to generate a hairy texture. The texture renders the drawing with a surreal sense of movement and light. It captures the literal materiality of thatched roofs and the essence of a goat’s shadow in one uniform blow.