The Brooklyn Rail

The beige room hums. It is a song of mechanical environmental control, taunting the walls that have been painted to evoke the framed, yellowing paper that is the material subject of New York School of Interior Design’s exhibition The Persistence of Hand Drawing: Interior Rendering Today. The electric ambience of the gallery is muffled by a collection of sketches and renderings which loudly announce the hand of their author, a quality championed by curators Donald Albrecht and Thomas Mellins. Drawing on NYSID’s history as a school founded in the Beaux-Arts tradition, the curators long for the lost disciplinary embrace of the idea that “far exceeding illustration and technical drawing, architectural renderings should in themselves constitute works of art,” as noted in the exhibition’s catalogue. By conceiving of the render in this tradition, architectural drawing is supposedly free from its category of instrumental document. Confusing authorship for artistic liberty, the exhibition shouts its technological provocation so that it may whisper the history in which subordinated labor propped up this invented autonomy of the architect.

Pairing contemporarily produced drawings with works from the school’s archive, the show constructs a historical narrative of stylistic evolution whose only continuity is the hand of the author. Technical characteristics of soft pencil, loose washes of paint, and wrinkly paper are foregrounded, such that the Schafer Buccellato elevations that boast a “beautifully detailed neo-Colonial style” are made as unobtrusive to the present as the MOS-customized Rhino interface, unpreciously printed and scribbled over. Most of the featured works seem to accept that the aesthetic idiosyncrasies of a non-scripted technique are significant enough to set them apart from the monotonous normal of digital imaging. None, with the exception of Nina Cooke John’s underestimated Color of Protest (2020)—which are themselves abstracted constructions, are interested in specific modes of production beyond their representational effects.

This ultimate end of better marketing glosses over the instrumental function of the architectural drawing as communicating with, or even caring about, construction. An archive read through its technology of production would have made a compelling argument for this exhibition; one which engages with embodied labor relations through mechanized production even more so. Sadly, the curators’ technological proposition is only a vehicle for their ideological one: an investment in authorship. Whereas drawing by hand might have been an analogic exercise of bodily attention to the building it prescribes, as was the work of someone like Sigurd Lewerentz, its capacity is limited to being an “indispensable tool of persuasion, promoting designers’ ideas to clients, patrons, and the press.” Even Marshall Brown’s impressive Elements of an American House (2019) uses the shortcut of evenly spaced ruled lines to invoke a material idea instead of bothering to stack its own bricks. The exhibition fails to make a convincing argument for the neoliberal belief in the individual at the expense of collectivity, and instead clarifies its role in estranging the architect’s work into a lonely career of making images for sale.

It would be easy to fall into the habit of contrasting drawings for consumption with those for construction, but the works in a83’s Architectural Drawing III deftly elide either categorization. They are much too laborious to make, too abstracted from buildings, and too stubbornly identified with architecture to be good objects of the marketplace, of advertisement, or of the arts. They may be bad objects of all these realms, but are too smart to be nothing else; in each is a palpable sense of a project that shapes and is shaped by its drawing. The series of “Photogenes” by Gore/Hall instill their animist environments in the section cut, saturating the paper with beeswax in order to make space to do so. Gus Crain’s careful “Tarps” witness their subject fleck by fleck, while Drawing Architecture Studio’s “Flakes of the Snow Country” series refracts itself in more ways on paper than can be imagined.

Every drawing, model, and print is made by hand—just as everything, the curation reminds us, is made by someone’s hands—a responsibility that is embraced without possessiveness. The weaver of these threads is the gallery itself, whose basement workshop and propped-open doors make for a generous, if esoteric, environment of collaboration. The intimacy of working together is somewhat overpowered by the polished show of exuberance; none of the residue of hard work is left visible. Nevertheless, the fact of this shared site of production and exhibition permeates the gallery and its printmakers and curators, Clara Syme and Owen Nichols, with the earned assurance of the practiced craftsperson. They convene the drawings here to discuss the ways in which they are themselves constructed, a verb which includes all the interpersonal consideration and material consequence that can be read in, and which gives purpose to, building. To encounter this sensibility enacted in architectural drawing is heartening and necessary.

The resonance in their shared pigments and production make the drawings feel like peers, even while the practices aren’t. Though all are interested in the project of thinking through drawing, their work is unaffected by their neighbors or the previous two installments of Architectural Drawing hosted by a83. In the absence of a shared project and without building as even a theoretical purpose, the series of exhibitions is stuck in a solipsistic revisionism. Though a rare and commendable group among the streamlined establishment of offices in the city, the abundant experimentation of these participants in exhibition makes itself superfluous when it fails to be heard.