Architectural illustration has recently experienced a revival. The tradition of grand presentation drawings is rooted in the formal education that 19th-century architects received at Paris’s Ecole des Beaux Arts. But that tradition, along with many others, was expunged during the rise and reign of strict modernism as an architectural aesthetic (roughly the 1930s through the 1970s). Illustrations then, if any, mirrored the pure, spare asceticism of the buildings themselves. Today’s architecture is less reticent about its inspiration from the past, and the profession has shown some glee in resuscitating the importance illustrative rendering has in the design of a building.
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The architecture department at the Art Institute of Chicago, with its knack for choosing exhibitions that reflect currents in the art of architecture, has mounted “Architecture in Perspective IV: A National Competitive Exhibition of Architectural Delineation.” This juried show, now in its fourth year but its first at the Art Institute, is sponsored by the American Society of Architectural Perspectivists. Open now, it can be seen in Galleries 9 and 10 of the museum until November 26.
While critics might dismiss a few of the presentation drawings as purely decorative, some of the conceptual pieces are highly provocative in both technique and subject matter. Penn State architecture professor Daniel E. Willis won this year’s Hugh Ferriss Memorial Prize for his eerie Memorial to Edgar Allan Poe, which comments on Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death.” And New Yorker Chris Anderson won best in the conceptual category for Proposal for an Idaho Farmhouse, a huge canvas that gives new meaning to the concept of a prairie house: furrows in the field surrounding the house seem to be continued in–to make up–the house’s facade.
A free lecture on “Architecture in Perspective IV” will be given Wednesday, October 25, at 12:15 in Gallery 9 of the Art Institute, Michigan at Adams. Call 443-3664 for information.
