The other drawings in the exhibition belong to the same period and are grouped in series depending on their setting or compositional system, typically following a layout where architecture is set out as an autonomous object or still life. More generally, the exhibition reminds us of the virtuosity and expertise of Lerup’s drawings, and the way his images are used as a tool to represent not only architectural themes, but also create subtle and elaborate narratives within them.[1]

1234 House, 1985, water colour on paper, 24x18cm

Such is the case with Lukamanier Pass – 8, which shows two sets of hands in the bottom left corner of the image, one resisting the other, which, knife in hand, is about to cut into the structure of a building fragment, as if describing some premonitory event. The classical language of the building, formed by a group of columns and a pediment, is time-related to the robes draping the arms above the hands. These are only half visible, covered by the background, like ghostly images found in unrevealed layers of old documents. The event depicted (the fighting to avoid an attack on an architectural fragment) is a mental passage that takes place in a real location (Lukmanier Pass in the Swiss Alps, which borders the canton of Ticino, famous for its 1980s architecture), and which invites the viewer to figure this whole story out.

Lukamanier Pass, 1986, water colour on paper, 24x18cm

From a representational point of view, most of Lerup’s drawings on display use oblique projection, often combining elements with different perspectives – a smart way to elaborate complex narratives, and something that would be more difficult to achieve with standard one- or two-point perspective. This kind of illusionistic projection also enables the viewer to be located closer to the subject, occupying the same representational centre where the action takes place.[2] As a device, the use of multiple projections recalls German fashion photographer Peter Lindbergh’s favoured medium: ‘Using 35mm is more like talking – conversational photography – while larger formats are like presentation. Thirty-five millimetre is like a part of your body. You talk and you take pictures; how people react to you and to your camera, that’s what you can get on 35mm.’[3] The same conversationalism and commitment to analogue photography can be found in the work of Catalan photographer Xavier Miserachs, particularly the images applied to the walls of his house in Esclanyà. Here Miserachs created a beautiful patchwork of family images, mostly taken on the beaches of his beloved Costa Brava, a region where Harnden Bombelli built the Staempfli house – another architectural subject rendered by Lerup (Cadaqués, 1986).[4] This house, like the others displayed as a part of a series in this exhibition, is depicted as an autonomous object, detached from its urban context and immersed in a wasteland of dramatic scenery, like a poetic manifesto to human dwelling.

Set, Ostia, Italy 1991. Photo by Peter Lindbergh

Cadaques, 1965. Photo by Xavier Miserachs

Cadaques, 1986, water colour on paper, 22x16cm

But beyond architecture, Lerup’s work has also consistently dealt with the equally classical models of urbanity and the academy. From the perspective of his written work, and related to drawing, his latest book about Houston is an example of an author able to work simultaneously with visual and narrative content in order to communicate a wider set of ideas.[5] In this particular case, drawings are used as tools to explain complex urban events and conditions, sometimes of a diagrammatic or schematic nature, and seemingly produced at the same speed as his typing. In this sense, Lerup’s drawings are imbued with a sense of humanity and wilderness that connects with the experience of living within a Texan environment, with its humid, subtropical climate as the everyday experiences of driving fast expensive cars over freeways. Ultimately these contradictory features – yet more fatness and thinness – is what most characterises Houston as a living environment. And although his books suggest larger, more deployed narratives than just drawings, these last ones are ultimate instruments to tell, suggest and put us closer to some of the many stories they contain.

—José Zabala, editor at Quaderns.

_____
[1] For additional Lerup material go to the database of the CCA or see the following link.
[2] See: James S. Ackerman introduction to Massimo Scolari’s Oblique drawing. A history of anti-perspective. MIT press Writing architecture series, 2012.
[3] Peter Lindberg, Artforum May 2016, Volume 54, Issue 9.
[4] Manuel Martín et. al., El Cadaqués de Peter Harnden y Lanfranco Bombelli. (Col·legi d’Arquitectes de Catalunya, 2002).
[5] Lars Lerup, One Million Acres & No Zoning. (Architectural Association, London, 2011).

/// The exhibition ‘A Fat House for a Thin Man,’ is being exhibited at Betts Project. Betts Project is a London-based contemporary art gallery specialising in architecture established in 2013 and founded by Marie Coulon.
/// Marie Coulon is the founder and director of Betts Project. She arrived in London from Bordeaux, France, in 2010, having studied at the Ecole d’Enseignement Supérieur d’Art de Bordeaux (EBABX), and worked with Arcade gallery until 2012. At the same time she has worked with curator and critic, Chantal Pontbriand, on a variety of projects including Mutations (Paris-Photo 2011) and Parachute Anthology (2012).
/// We want to say thanks to Thomas Weaver, for his kind advise, reviews and edits on this text.

“Time occasionally seems to work in favour of certain ideas, acting as a powerful determinant that accumulates arguments, which in turn allow us to see the usefulness of things that, rather unwisely, we had initially dismissed. The house with equal-sized rooms is probably one of those things and today is one of the formulations that best express what a good house should be. Such a house does not distinguish its rooms by any use assigned to them a priori; in fact, its main virtue is that it leaves the decision on what we will do in them in our hands. The floor plans, structured into rooms of similar sizes, without any well-defined hierarchy, demand our attention now more than ever before for their simple defiance towards the hierarchical house formed by rooms of different sizes – sizes that determine what to do in them and also what not to do. In fact, a house with equal-sized rooms is a way of saying a house made of rooms, nothing more and nothing less.”

And just a couple of weeks ago we found, featured in Horizonte 08, a project by Adam Simpson entitled ‘Boundaries‘. This is a graphic provocation, a floor-to-ceiling artwork, appearing on all sides of an elevator vestibule at the ‘Boundary Hotel’, situated on Boundary Street in East London. But it is interesting to go beyond and think how this graphic work raises some questions about the possibility of a scalable idea of Monteys’ ‘House with Equal-Sized Rooms’ to a urban notion of a city with equal-sized rooms.

Boundaries. Adam Simpson

Adam Simpson is an artist and illustrator, but in the architectural field one evident reference of this idea is the project City Walls. Project for the New Multi-Functional Administrative City in the Republic of Korea, 2005 by Dogma and OFFICE Kersten Geers David van Severen. A city designed for 500,000 residents, organised as a sequence of rooms that are formed by ‘city walls’. They ad:

“The city walls are a composition of cruciform buildings that represent two-thirds of the built mass of the city. These ‘walls’ form the habitable architectonic structure of the city. The spaces between the city walls are rooms without content, providing the space for further urban development. The future content is the furniture of the rooms, as it were. The plan seeks to define the form of the city in a rigid manner, without lapsing into the naïve modernistic ideal of the city as a fixed, predetermined organisation of buildings. The city walls and city rooms form the ‘genesis’ of the city, its bare facts. In this manner they fulfil the only role that can be ascribed to architecture: providing a specific inertia against the instability of life itself.”

City Walls. Dogma and OFFICE Kersten Geers David van Severen.

City Walls. Dogma and OFFICE Kersten Geers David van Severen.

Even going back in time to 1969, the No-Stop City by Archizoom proposed an endless grid as the basis for a city designed for a society freed from its own alienation; free, therefore, to express in an autonomous way its own creative, political and behavioural energies, as Andrea Branzi described it. In this project, mass society and its correspondent city was envisioned as an endless ocean, with neither a centre and nor frontiers. Branzi wrote:

“In No-Stop City, this social dimension became a spacial dimension [...] the metropolis was seen as one large interior, a single space.”

Hence, the three projects presented here are about cities without architecture, formed by large, anonymous containers divided by walls.

No-Stop City. Archizoom Associati

We want to end by paraphrasing Xavier Monteys, the ground plans of houses cities with rooms of similar sizes represent a way of understanding housing the city that, by reducing the form to such a simple and repetitive expression, places in the hands of the inhabitants the initiative of granting them meaning.

La ciutat dibuixada pels arquitectes [laciutatdibuixada.blogspot.com.es] is an ongoing course at ETSAB, which aims to explore urban phenomena in a transversal manner from territorial [geography and infrastructure] to architectural domain [ground floor and domestic realm]. Traditionally, drawing described urban form in both an objective [scale drawing] and sensitive manner [free hand drawing]. In recent years, new technological achievements from other disciplines such as photography, modelling and geo-location radically have created new ways to depict subjective and objective mechanisms taking place in cities -alongside the tools required to synthesis them.

This evolution of representation tools has been instrumental in the construction of new interpretative but also projective models. The image of the city embodies the translation of the urban experience for communication and engenders the re-shaping of the worlds in which people live. Developing a “personal gaze” becomes the basis to re-make territory over again.

La ciutat dibuixada pels arquitectes seeks to experiment with representation tools and formats by means of three academic exercises. First, Unfolding Rambles explores the need to obtain personal records of reality [via own measuring instruments] and translate them into a synthetic document prior to the project. Second, Almanac of Small Data reviews the notion of almanac to propose a polyhedric and collective vision of Barcelona. By measuring and mapping existing conditions using information in a wide range of topics, the almanac will make an assertion about what the future of the city will hold. Finally, Layered Waterfront will complement previous experiences thanks to the construction of a single, synthetic and iconic urban image, i.e., a section of the coastline illustrating the changes experienced over the past twenty years.

Unfolding Rambles
Unfolding Rambles studies this living monument of Barcelona; despite being an area of great symbolic significance for citizens, tourism has deeply transformed and [re]shaped La Rambla. The structural role of the boulevard entails a double approach from the linearity of the promenade itself and its perimeter. Questions arise such as the physical saturation of the space, the guided movement of pedestrians, the poor diversity of ground floor uses [mostly souvenirs and fast food] and the coexistence of locals and tourists.

The exercise goes beyond geographical illustration to unmask invisible urban relationships: where the activity takes place, how public spaces shift according to the time of the day, which are the most crowded areas and places for citizenship’s identification, etc. These other aspects are what we call intangibles. Unfolding Rambles captures the ‘ephemeral’ besides the geometry of urban plots and facades, using novel representation tools from other disciplines [geography, cartography and data analysis] to reveal and realize the hidden urban potential.

The student works are:

DUES GENERACIONS, DUES RAMBLES. Minerva Ramírez Cabello i Lorena Simone Hortelano.
A dynamic space as La Rambla cache static sites (areas to stay or wait for someone, to stop and observe) where different groups coexist according to customs, activities and ways of life. These sites reflect different generations’ behaviour grouped by ranges of ages: youth and senior Rambles indicate common spaces and shared activities.

SCORE. Inés Masó Sotomayor i Cristina Herrero de la Fuente.
Barriers and obstacles in La Rambla block transversal flows. The first representation describes the length, the density/permeability and height of the barriers as seen from the side lanes. The second diagram goes a step further to unveil the negative of the previous vacuum: its rhythm, floor space and density.

URGÈNCY. Marc Anton Ros Gargante i Gemma Torras Rolando.
Diagram describing where to go free and fast at a time of emergency. The permeability of the ground floor in La Rambla is weighted according to the ease of access to toilets’ establishments (May I go to the bathroom?), which link public and private realms.

MONEY, CHAIR AND BEER. Cristina Garcia Nadal i Cristina Rosa Cervelló.
The beer business shapes this urban space. Bars, located on the sides, work during daylight hours enabling a linear activity in the sea-mountain direction. At night, ambulant trade divide La Rambla in sections, each of them associated with a vendor located in proximity to the metro stations. This strategic position, covering also cross trails where beers empty, provokes an unusual transversal performance of La Rambla.

REMAININGS. Maria Múzquiz Barberá i Joana Solsona Bernades.
This cartography, between a skyline and a bar chart, illustrates the years of activity of each establishment. The size and permanence of the business highlights the difference between the two sides of La Rambla. The oldest shops stand as a kind of landmark in the history of the city.

/// Thanks to Mar Santamaria Varas for sharing this project with us.
/// The city drawn by the architects is an optional course lead by Mar Santamaria Varas [coordination 300000kms.net] and Montserrat Ribas Barba and provided by the Department of Urban Design and Regional Planning [DUOT] and Architectural Drawing [EGA] of the School of Architecture of Barcelona [ETSAB-UPC].

Here we present the commended project Athenian Trench developed by Aristide Antonas, Katerina Koutsogianni and Platon Issaias. The Athenian Trench project can be understood as a new step after all these years that Antonas, Koutsogianni and Issaias have been researching the city of Athens, trying to understand its problems in order to propose “a radical change, related to a re-territorialization performed with new protocols; to see the city of Athens as a function of its perverse ground in the same time idealized for its ruins and undermined as the field of its infrastructure,” in Antonas words. The concepts of protocols and re-territorialization can be found in the basis of the project.

The following text was shared with us by Aristide Antonas:

“Athenian Trenches” tackle the city as a condition that operates with an apparent duality. On the one hand, what is stressed is the city’s current condition, which classifies Athens as the paradigmatic city in the era of this particular financial moment of the globe. On the other hand, the proposal measures the importance of the city as an urban formation inhabited by traces of both an ancient and a recent past. Every part of the Athenian history forms a potential narrative. The various successive layers in the city of Athens correspond to this system of narrative strata. Departing from Dimitris Pikionis’ tradition, but also commenting Bernard Tschumi’s interpretation of the urban underground in his New Acropolis Museum, we attempt to introduce a different type of “archaeology”, one that constitutes a spatial strategy documentation of the findings as project that leads towards some practices of urban subtraction that constitute the core of the project. The proposal uncovers, organizes, piles and composes in this particular moment the fragments of the city’s uninterrupted social activity. The “New Panepistimiou Axis” becomes the plane that continues the experience of Pikionis’ pedestrian networks of Acropolis and Philopappou Hills for the inhabitant and the visitor of Athens. The proposal introduces an area of transition from the ancient, historic spaces to the core of contemporary Athens.

In the landscape treatment of Acropolis and Philopappou Hills, Pikionis treated the paths and his new structures as planes of his idiosyncratic pattern: the archaeological findings and pieces constituted for him built matter par excellence, raw construction materials and not museological objects. The “Athenian Trenches” of the Panepistimiou Axis should be therefore understood as an attempt to transform the archaeological devices to a polemic, conceptual landscape narrative for Attica.”

“In this proposal, there is an attempt to construct different qualities and occupations of public space, primarily with the removal of urban matter. We define as urban matter the material that organizes the surfaces of streets and squares, and also the building volume that occupies the surrounding area of the Panepistimiou Axis. Abandoned structures, degraded passages, empty commercial spaces and unexploited urban roofs are incorporated in the project, in an effort to regenerate and to economically boost these problematic clusters of the Historic Centre. In the street level, this “excavation strategy” materializes trenches and pits that uncover layers of the city’s historic phases. These peculiar archaeological digs display the more or less random ancient or medieval findings and ruins and together with these, there is a a field of infrastructural networks, recent building materials, tubes, pipes and rough structural planes that can constitute equally important materials of this paradoxical excavation. The arrangement of their fragments in the city’s public space, together with traditional archaeological findings, organizes sitting areas and spaces, underlying this peculiar composition of the Athenian ground. Within this perspective, the carvings of passages and the reactivation of the existing arcades, stoas and roofs constitute an urban initiative that similarly supervenes on the subtraction of building matter in a conceptual way. The porous quality of such operations do not only organize the pedestrian flows and the public activities but also signify a particular reading of the existing urban text.

Similarly with the archaeological excavation, which distorts the existing matter in order to render to the reality of the city a narrative of a different kind, “Athenian Trenches” demand to project a syntax of some sort, one being composed by the various uncategorized fragments, no matter where these are coming from. At the core of this Athenian practice lies a specific interpretive rigorousness, which converts the assemlage of impromptu findings to an effective, useful and coherent architectural field.”

The City Protocols name some systematic micro-legislative interventions operated in the existing tissue of the city; the project proposes the administration of selected rooftops, arcades and specific urban areas such as Korai street with alternative legislations operating autonomously by a control via the Internet; the legal structure that would allow the protocols operation is the most crucial, invisible part of the project. Protocols would have to control the performativity of the proposed spaces in order to clarify political agendas in a practical manner; architecture is used towards an institutional intervention in the core of a collapsed city proposing structures that are supposed to spread socially and organizing new possible urban conditions that could last. The project orients towards an institutional cut viewing alternative city functions. The design departs from some observations on the very ingredients of the city’s materiality and history; the athenian ruins of any kind seek alternative protocols of habitation and programmatic activation.

For a better understanding of the project, please see the following video [HD on recommended]:

Sequence 01 from Antonas Office on Vimeo.

It is interesting to read how the project proposes an idea of the city based on architecture. It is a well-known fact that, unlike the ancient city that was primarily made with architecture, the modern city is characterised by a great divergence between the scale of architectural form and the urban dimension. While the modern city is made of urbanisation, the extensive apparatus of governance and inhabitation, architectural form always addresses the possibility of a singular and finite form within the space of urbanisation.

Aureli and Tattara points that “A Simple Heart” was named after Gustave Flaubert’s short novel Un coeur simple [1877], in which the French writer celebrated the ardent integrity and naivety of a humble servant against self-referential sophistications of bourgeois mentality, the project ultimately celebrates the power of form in framing and defining the space of existence against the fragmentation perpetrated by contemporary urbanisation.

You can read the complete info about the project here:

A Simple Heart Pier Vittorio Aureli by Catia Milia

In Quaderns #264, we retrieve the yearbooks published regularly in the magazine between 1969 and 1979, with a selection of over 50 works, projects and more.