DRAWINGS FOR NON-COMPOSITIONAL ARCHITECTURE

Betts Project (1) gallery is opening an  exibition 

on drawings by Pier Vittorio Aureli.

Betts Project gallery -London

 

In art, everything is knowledge, effort, patience, and what comes in an instant it took years to grow.  

Fernand Pouillon ( Il canto delle Pietre)

Drawing is one of the key factor of the architectural profession.
Over the years the meaning of  drawing (the used technique  is not important) has changed a lot. I am convinced that regardless of the act drawings is very important to link this practice to a theoretical reflection  taking place during the time of  architecture thinking.
Therefore drawing as a moment of thought, as a construction of theoretical models, such as spiritual action, as a premise or as a subsequent confirmation of a specific idea.
Aureli has been doing it from long time, Its should be a daily ritual. I can see him in this slow construction of diagrammatic images, early in the morning, before starting work in his office. 

His drawings are not exercises on form but actions that gives form to future space.
The exhibition catalog will be reviewed in the coming days.
Now it is better to give credit to the author and to his brief introduction to the exhibition.

The Marriage of Reason and Squalor

Drawings for Non-compositional Architecture
By Pier Vittorio Aureli

The Marriage of Reason and Squalor is a set of drawings I’ve produced since 2001. They are an investigation into what, in the absence of a better definition, I’ve called ‘non-compositional architecture’. Since the very beginning, I’ve conceived of these drawings as something to be executed by the simplest of means, and all starting with a 50cm x 50cm sheet of paper on which I draw with pencil and ink a building with no specific programme. Each of the resulting building plans then emerge according to the following constraints: choose the simplest geometrical form (ie, a square) and than work out its further articulation from the logic of the initial form. The organisation of plans and elevations must be the logical consequence of the first step. In addition, the spatial organisation of the proposed building must adhere in all its parts to the logic of the initial form, including it proportion, symmetries and internal relationships. 

Untitled, 2001-2014, ink on paper, 50 x 50cm

For more than two centuries the architectural project has lost the certainty that had originally linked it to clear liturgies and programmes. It is for this reason that composition has gained relevance within the making of architecture. Composition was the art of putting together not just forms, but also uses and programmes whose combination was increasingly uncertain and unstable. If composition puts the emphasis on formal autonomy, it does so because within programmatic instability form is devoid of any meaningful relationship with the uses and the gestures that form is supposed to contain. And yet with its ‘innocent’ goal of a ‘good form’, composition is the subliminal way of legitimising the bad faith of the content to which composition is expected to give a reasonable appearance. 

Untitled, 2001-2014, ink on paper, 50 x 50cm

In the history of twentieth-century painting there have been various attempts to go beyond composition as an ‘ideology’ of balance. The art historian Yves-Alain Bois has talked about ‘the difficult task of erasing oneself’ with reference to works such as Black Square by Malevich, the zip paintings by Barnett Newman and the strip paintings by Frank Stella. The Marriage of Reason and Squalor is the title of a painting produced by Stella in 1959. Like all his early black paintings, it consists of concentric stripes whose form follows the shape of the canvas and the latter’s vertical axes of symmetry. I’ve always been deeply fascinated by the non-compositional logic of Stella’s early paintings because to me they evoke both the abstract motifs of archaic buildings and the generic character of more recent anonymous industrial architecture. To put it in musical terms: Greek chorus meets The Ramones. 

Untitled, 2001-2014, ink on paper, 50 x 50cm

Within the tradition of architecture we could think of parallels in ancient Chinese architecture where the form of buildings or cities was deduced by the subdivision of an initial simple form (a square or a rectangle), rather than by multiplication or addition. Once a form was decided, all its further articulations were logically deduced from this initial step. 

Untitled, 2001-2014, ink on paper, 50 x 50cm

In this sense, non-compositional architecture offers a kind of paradox: on the one hand, it is the explicit result of a clear decision, and on the other, its inexorable logic erases its ‘authors’. More fundamentally, non-compositional architecture is non-functional, non-narrative and non-justifiable. 

Untitled, 2001-2014, ink on paper, 50 x 50cm

(1)

Betts Project
1st Floor, 111—113 St. John Street, Clerkenwell, 
London EC1V 4JA
Opening hours during exhibitions: Tuesday—Saturday, 10am—6pm or by appointment