Envisioning Architecture: Drawings from the Museum of Modern Art, New York

March 20, 2004 - June 20, 2004

The featured drawings, by more than 60 architects—including Frank Lloyd Wright, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Eero Saarinen, Aldo Rossi, Rem Koolhas and Zaha Hadid—have been integral to the development of modern architecture over the last 100 years. They are also striking achievements of the hand and eye.

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) has been collecting architectural drawings for 70 years, acquiring nearly 1,000 drawings by the most eminent architects of the 20th century, in addition to the 18,000 that form the core of its Mies van der Rohe Archive. This exhibition, which features the work of more than 60 architects, represents the breadth and variety of the past 100 years of architecture and highlights the artistry of this extraordinary collection. Ranging from visions of cities both real and imagined to innovative conceptions of the home as a spiritual retreat, a shelter, or an experiment in space and material, these drawings represent achievements that have been integral to the development of modern architecture.

Attitudes toward and visions of the city changed substantially over the past century. They ranged from designs for particular building types on specific sites to utopian schemes for entirely new kinds of cities. Hans Poelzig’s expressionistic Concert Hall (1918), conceived for Dresden, Germany, appears organic; its plantlike forms create a radiating rhythmic pattern evocative of the music it is meant to house. Conversely, Ron Herron’s tanklike structure from the 1960s, Walking City on the Ocean, is rooted in technology; its giant, mechanized vehicles are intended to roam the globe.

The representational techniques of architectural drawing have also evolved. Otto Wagner’s measured, delicate ink rendering for the Ferdinandsbrücke, a proposed bridge in Vienna (1896), relies on the conventional elevation format to present what at the time were progressive forms. By the end of the 20th century, as cities developed an increasingly global and technological character, typical strategies for illustrating urban projects had been altered. Arata Isozaki’s drawing (1992) for his Nara Convention Hall, the first computer generated print in MoMA’s collection, seemingly eradicates the hand of the architect, using electronic technology to create a highly realistic portrait of a building well before construction even begins.

For 20th-century architects wishing to explore new design theories and attitudes, the house proved fertile territory. At the beginning of the century, Frank Lloyd Wright experimented with mass production in his System-Built Houses (1915-17) and later with Textile Block Houses such as La Miniatura, (1923) in Pasadena, California. The idea of low-cost, mass-produced housing may have peaked with R. Buckminster Fuller’s unconventional hexagonal plan for a Dymaxion House, a radically new living environment meant to weigh only three tons and cost about the same as a car. In many ways Fuller stood apart from the leading modernists, but the unabashedly machinelike qualities of the Dymaxion House recall Le Corbusier’s description of his own mass-produced housing as a “machine for living in.” The notion of the home as machine was revisited throughout the century. In Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio’s 1988 proposal for the Slow House, North Haven, New York, video cameras and monitors raise a representation of an ocean view above the view itself.

Each of the 190 featured works in this exhibition — whether a quick sketch, an intricate hand-rendering, or a complex computer-generated output — reveals a discrete moment in the thought process and creative imagination of the architect and in the evolution of architectural imagery. Some, like Theo van Doesburg’s Contra-Construction, are visual expressions of the intellectual manifestoes of their creators; some entail virtuoso graphic flourishes, like the visual pirouettes choreographed by Herbert Bayer within his gridded design for MoMA’s Bauhaus exhibition of 1938-39; some are stunningly subtle studies, like Lauretta Vinciarelli’s evocations of light and water. These and the other works on display all testify to the living vitality of drawing in our contemporary world.

Sponsors

The National Building Museum’s presentation of Envisioning Architecture: Drawings from The Museum of Modern Art, New York was made possible by Lt. Col. and Mrs. William Karl Konze, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Sponsors & Partners

Credits

This exhibition was organized by The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Curators: Matilda McQuaid with Bevin Cline
Coordinating Curator: Chrysanthe B. Broikos
Exhibition Design: MaryJane Valade with Chrysanthe Broikos