archives documents history recovery latin america
the forgotten art of architectural drawings
the modern movement | peru ’ s walter weberhofer by hector abarca
The representation of coded factual information, even if carefully laid out, is what stops architectural drawings from being considered art work; however, major art galleries today have recently added historical architectural drawings to their collections, even if they were not meant to be exhibited in museums but in boardrooms and on construction sites as guidance tools for builders throughout the construction process. For many, they are mere documents that after building occupancy should end up in storage or in city hall archives. But, is not the aim of an architectural drawing to make feasible an idea? Might this be the reason why artists have flirted with architecture and vice versa? After centuries of trial and error, the arrival of Masolino allowed linear perspective to shape the Renaissance. The architecture of Raphael’s School of Athens used Bramante’s early designs of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome as the illusionary meeting point for philosophers. Giovanni Battista Piranesi made a name with his hyper-realistic antic Rome veduti and Bernardo Belloto, nephew of Giovanni Antonio Canal – better known as Canaletto, two centuries after his death surprisingly helped, with his accurate cityscape renderings, to rebuild Warsaw after the destruction of World War II. From antiquity to baroque times, any review of a difference between architecture and art would have been considered irrelevant as all fine arts were completely interwoven. In their capacity to visually communicate how to build, architectural drawings have the power to present impossible but verisimilar worlds that we believe could exist and be built, even if they escape the limits of reality. Piranesi, M C Escher, Antonio Sant’ Elia and Hugh Ferriss showed us futuristic, fantastic, ethereal, dark and sometimes impossible imaginary explorations of abstract architectures. With the advent of the twenty-first century, as construction technology becomes more complex, building regulations more sophisticated, professional roles more specific, liability mandatory, and expenditure more tightly controlled, architecture faces many more constraints and variables than ever before; the computer files of today travel the world back and forth with exactitude and the soulless precision of anonymity.
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Alvarez Calderon, beach house, 1959, Santa Maria del Mar, unbuit. Main floor; construction set, scale1:50. Ozalid copy of pencil on vellum original Fernandini beach house, 1959 Santa Maria del Mar, built. Entrance elevation; construction set, scale1:50. Ozalid copy of original in pencil on vellum, original set used on site, 24x36” Fernandini beach house, 1959 Santa Maria del Mar, built. Second Floor; construction set, scale1:50 Ozalid copy of originals in pencil on vellum, original set used on site, 24x36”
Detail, 1957 to 1959 Santa Maria del Mar.
Typical balcony parapet & handrail detail. Ozalid copy of original pencil on vellum, part of a 24x36” sheet
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