We all know that architectural drawings are a fundamental step in conceiving, developing, considering and communicating a design. This talk proposes that they play a much wider role in the history of ideas, and should be viewed not as tools of a trade but as one layer in the shifting geologies of mind that generate them. This idea is lavishly illustrated with drawings from two contested utopian epochs: the France of 1760-1840, in which a newly hygienic, enlightened notion of the city was formulated in near disregard for the turbulence of the times; and the mix of anxious and exuberant rethinking about ways and patterns of living that marked the short-lived Space Age. Ranging from Delafosse to Matta Clark and Boullée to Constant, these examples suggest that architecture is always a form of social iconography, and that the language of drawing that produces ideas for, of, or against it is one of the essential tongues we use to hold a conversation about the nature, state and possible futures of civilization.
Dr Nicholas Olsberg is former Director of the Canadian Centre for Architecture and was founding head of Special Collections at the Getty Research Institute. He is an archivist, critic and curator with a long standing interest in architecture, and its many modes of expression and representation, as a cultural archeology.
His architectural publications and exhibitions include studies of Marcel Breuer, Carlo Scarpa, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Arthur Erickson, as well as many aspects of California modernism, including books and exhibitions on Cliff May, John Lautner, and the work of Ernest and Esther Born. His essays appear in numerous recent collections including Living in A Modern Way: California Design and The New Sculpturalism. He is a regular contributor to Architectural Review and AAFiles.
He curated master drawings from the Tchoban Collection at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in 2011, and has co-curated three exhibitions for Drawing Matter – Land Marks, at Hauser and Wirth Somerset in 2015; This Was Tomorrow, currently on view at the Swiss Architecture Museum in Basel; and – in collaboration with the Courtauld and to be shown there this autumn – A Civic Utopia: France 1760-1840.