Together with society, architecture and the tools used to create and communicate it evolve. This exhibition explores these transformations through the evolution of its primary medium: drawing.
The exhibition offers a compelling exploration of the ongoing transformations within the world of architecture and the tools used to create, represent and communicate it. In the beginning, there was the drawing: an original act capable of synthesising the relationship between space, function and structure in a single gesture, an indispensable tool for any spatial thought. Then, from the final decades of the last century, we witnessed the rise of digital techniques, practices borrowed from art, exercises in political activism and hands-on participatory forms that shape the spaces we inhabit, giving less importance to “beautiful drawings”.
Works by significant figures—some drawn from the MAXXI Collection—accompany visitors on a journey through the 20th and 21st centuries. They illustrate how the ability to represent and define space, once the exclusive domain of drawing, has now expanded to include a world of digital simulations, collages, videos, performances, textiles, and more. These new representational forms can profoundly reshape the future of architecture and spatial disciplines.
Drawing is dissolving into countless different forms, presented in the various sections of the exhibition. Digital culture tends to replace it with the input of data and algorithms at the very outset of the design process. Installation, film, performance, and other creative practices are substituted for it in the work of those who aim to defend the artistic nature of architectural design. Direct engagement with lived spaces and close collaboration with communities are the preferred tools of those who believe in architecture’s political value. Finally, the exhibition touches on cases where drawing is interpreted as a choice and a form of resistance. Among the featured authors are those who seek to preserve its role in reaffirming disciplinary identity, those who oppose or aim to bend digital tools to an analogue aesthetic, and those who reject the reduction of architecture to the broad field of art, which is often – rightly or wrongly – seen as too detached from the actual structure of the world.
header: November Wong, “The Drawing Machine”. Courtesy the artist.
Together with society, architecture and the tools used to create and communicate it evolve. This exhibition explores these transformations through the evolution of its primary medium: drawing.
The exhibition offers a compelling exploration of the ongoing transformations within the world of architecture and the tools used to create, represent and communicate it. In the beginning, there was the drawing: an original act capable of synthesising the relationship between space, function and structure in a single gesture, an indispensable tool for any spatial thought. Then, from the final decades of the last century, we witnessed the rise of digital techniques, practices borrowed from art, exercises in political activism and hands-on participatory forms that shape the spaces we inhabit, giving less importance to “beautiful drawings”.
Works by significant figures—some drawn from the MAXXI Collection—accompany visitors on a journey through the 20th and 21st centuries. They illustrate how the ability to represent and define space, once the exclusive domain of drawing, has now expanded to include a world of digital simulations, collages, videos, performances, textiles, and more. These new representational forms can profoundly reshape the future of architecture and spatial disciplines.
Drawing is dissolving into countless different forms, presented in the various sections of the exhibition. Digital culture tends to replace it with the input of data and algorithms at the very outset of the design process. Installation, film, performance, and other creative practices are substituted for it in the work of those who aim to defend the artistic nature of architectural design. Direct engagement with lived spaces and close collaboration with communities are the preferred tools of those who believe in architecture’s political value. Finally, the exhibition touches on cases where drawing is interpreted as a choice and a form of resistance. Among the featured authors are those who seek to preserve its role in reaffirming disciplinary identity, those who oppose or aim to bend digital tools to an analogue aesthetic, and those who reject the reduction of architecture to the broad field of art, which is often – rightly or wrongly – seen as too detached from the actual structure of the world.
header: November Wong, “The Drawing Machine”. Courtesy the artist.
exhibition's sectios
digital
activist
artistic
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