ARCHITECTURE IN PERSPECTIVE VI
The job of the perspectivist is to translate the three-dimensional ideas of an architect into a two-dimensional representation for the general public. Until recently, architecture schools in the United States taught architects themselves the fine-arts techniques needed to make the transition from blueprint and design sketches to realistic drawing. Up until the 1950s, rendering was considered so much a part of an architect’s practice that architects rarely farmed out illustration work. Those who did usually signed their own names anyway. (Ironically Frank Lloyd Wright, whose style of drawing is as instantly identifiable as his architectural style, relied on the talents of other renderers for his most famous buildings and projects. Marion Mahony [1871-1962] has been credited with a large role in defining Wright’s style and a “talent for delineating Wright’s building that far exceeded the architect’s own,” as Brendan Gill wrote in his biography of Wright. Throughout his career Wright kept his studios busy with speculative and fantasy designs, most unrealizable, and these constitute a vital record of the architect’s creative output. But the fact that the records, now so valuable, were signed by Wright but not made by him would rankle the current crop of perspectivists, who are considerably more savvy on issues of intellectual property than their forerunners.)
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Retro-optimism, relying on fashions of the 30s, is such a pervasive feature in current perspectivist styles that the exhibit jurors grew tired of paintings that depicted what jury chairman Thomas Fisher described in the catalog as “buildings at night with searchlights . . . in the background. While these rendering formats are no doubt intended to add excitement to the image, they had the opposite effect.” Despite the jurors’ scorn for searchlights, several works in the exhibit feature them. Gilbert Gorski’s rendering of Booth, Hansen & Associates’ proposal for Chicago’s Navy Pier seems drawn directly from a Century of Progress stylebook. In this night view, shafts of light shoot up from towers alongside the pier. The lights are a clever solution to a sticky design problem: they provide vertical elements in what would otherwise be a dull, squat horizontal view. Orest Associates’ illustration South Ferry Plaza, New York uses beams to augment the vertical design of a retro-futuristic high rise. The building (which resembles the angled, cantilevered towers architect Gary Cooper designed in the 1949 film version of The Fountainhead), has a campiness that the hackneyed searchlights complement.
The jurors gave the show’s top honors to Luis Blanc’s intricate pencil drawing Affordable Housing Now! The Brooklyn artist has designed an imaginary New York street busy with several construction projects. Barricades, equipment, and workmen have made the street impassable. Steel frames, scaffolding, and enormous tarps loom over three small urban homes dwarfed by the new projects. Though Blanc has every vertical and horizontal right where it should be, the drawing is far from static: it conveys the feeling of massive, restless development burying the low-rise city in its path. On the construction barricade in the foreground Blanc has scribbled in graffiti style “Affordable housing now!”–a message the artist offers as a polemic against virtually every other piece in the show. Its antidevelopment stand undermines the perspectivist’s very bread and butter. And what better way to separate the illustrator from the architect? Blanc’s work is especially effective because it expropriates, to a degree, the media of those it criticizes. But Blanc intentionally omits the humanizing use of shading and color developed by Mahony, a feature intended to draw people into the idea of still-unbuilt buildings.
