Drawings and Objects by Architects
July 9, 2009 | Levent OZLER
ECAA announced its debut architectural exhibition entitled, Drawings and Objects by Architects featuring unique and original drawings by several of the 20th Century's most iconic architects Frank Gehry, Richard Neutra, Lebbeus Woods, and Frank Lloyd Wright. The exhibition also includes preparatory studies for two prominent skyscrapers the Empire State Building and the World Trade Center.
Several rare color pencil drawings by the most influential 20th century architects, Frank Lloyd Wright are included in the exhibition. Perhaps the most significant of these is a preliminary rendering of a proposed Connecticut studio residence for the noted writer Ayn Rand. Designed three years after the release of Rand's most famous novel, The Fountainhead, the drawing is one of the few tangible connections between the novelist and Wright (who is widely regarded as an inspiration for Rand's uncompromising protagonist Howard Roark).
Another significant residential project featured in the exhibition is Richard Neutra's Warren Tremaine Residence in Montecito, California. Represented in the exhibition by a highly articulated color pastel interior rendering, the project was commissioned at the very end of World War II. The Tremaine residence was widely published and is regarded as one of Neutra's most iconic domestic designs.
Illustrating the depth of ECAA's significant architectural holdings is a pair of projects documenting the two of the most famous skyscrapers in the United States the Empire State Building and the World Trade Center. The first is a suite of pencil drawing by the firm Shreve, Lamb & Harmon intended as the penultimate scheme for the floor plan layout of the Empire State Building. Executed of in October of 1929, the suite of drawings is a means of understanding the previously unimaginable scale and spatial opportunities the hundred-and-one floors of Empire Sate Building presented. On an opposing wall, and for the first time anywhere; the exhibition presents a highly important drawing for the World Trade Center. Commissioned by the building's architect Minoru Yamasaki, this presentation drawing was created in Los Angeles by the noted architectural draftsman Carlos Diniz to illustrate the potential for tower's unobstructed, open floor plan made possible by Yamasaki's innovative, yet ill-fated perimeter tube frame structural system.
Looking to conceptually motivated architectural projects, the exhibition also presents a suite of twenty-one color pencil drawings by the visionary architect, Lebbeus Woods. Entitled Underground Berlin, the project was conceived of in 1988, a year before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and intended as a rhetorical proposal for unifying the politically divided city via a subterranean metropolis linking East and West Berlin. Recognized as the first of Wood's site-specific, political projects, Underground Berlin represents the zenith of a type of architectural rendering that is investigatory and conceptually motivated.
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