Drawing ambience

Igor Marjanovic, Jan Howard, Drawing ambience: Alvin Boyarsky and the Architectural Association, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 2015, pp. 160.

  “We fight the battle with the drawings on the walls”. This is how Alvin Boyarsky summed up his strategy at the head of the Architectural Association, the central London school of which he was chairman from 1971 until 1990, the year of his death. In the 1970s, the Architectural Association, better known by the acronym AA, was a fundamental workshop for the architecture of the following decades, and Boyarsky’s leadership was critical to this end.

When appointed chairman by a committee of students and professors (winning a hard-fought battle against historian Kenneth Frampton), the school was facing closure, with a balance sheet in freefall. The cultural crisis of Modernism, the economic recession and cuts to student grants by the then Minister for Education, Margaret Thatcher, (the AA is an independent school) seemed to herald the forced end of the AA’s “British” period, one that should, perhaps, include the Archigram fad consecrated in the early 1960s by the school, because the group’s members had studied and taught there.

Boyarsky had a global profile and an erratic biography: born in Canada in 1928, his curriculum spanned Canada, the United States and Britain with a mix of teaching and professional practice, and architecture and urban design (his doctorate dissertation at Cornell was on Camillo Sitte, supervised by Colin Rowe). In an attempt to save the situation by attracting new students from abroad, Boyarsky promptly took the avant-garde tradition acquired by the AA in the 1930s – when it became the British bridgehead of Bauhaus-style Modernism fleeing Nazism – to the extreme. He enrolled the school’s recent graduates and young architects – often foreign and many with unorthodox CVs – as lecturers in pursuit of this strategy. Every teacher had an annual design course and its results were displayed in July, in a collective exhibition that Boyarsky turned into a social and cultural ritual reaching far beyond the school’s confines.

At the start of every year, the lecturers had to convince students to attend their course. Amassing only a few students meant that the contract would very probably not be renewed. In such a context, the designs produced the previous year became crucial tools of persuasion. Consequently, they drew a great deal at the AA and it was mainly the drawings that made the AA the influential centre of a re-visitation of the Modernist avant-gardes and of the great return of architecture to the heart of the public debate and media focus from the 1980s on. An incomplete list of AA lecturers and student names from the 1970s and early 1980s conveys the degree of influence that the school has had in this sense: Rem Koolhaas, Bernard Tschumi, Zaha Hadid, Daniel Libeskind, Nigel Coates, David Chipperfield, Peter Wilson, Ron Arad.

Over the years, the AA’s “impresario”, as he was called by Archigram member Peter Cook in an obituary, Boyarsky amassed a personal collection of architecture drawings, nearly all by people who had in some way been involved in the school’s life; indeed, it can be considered a “portrait of the architect as a chairman”. Now an itinerant exhibition curated by Igor Marjanovic and Jan Howard has just shown this collection in several US universities and museums. The catalogue combines a remarkable synthesis of what influenced the AA in the 1970s with the ensuing results in the 1980s.
The first part contains an in-depth essay by Igor Marjanovic (author of a doctorate dissertation on Boyarsky at the Bartlett) offering a multi-faceted account of Boyarsky’s role at the AA, exploring both his institutional work, centred on the system of annual design units, and his cultural leadership.

The second part is an alphabetical catalogue (by architect/artist) of 30 drawings in the collection, accompanied by profiles that have the philological accuracy and interpretational wealth of an art catalogue. The collection includes a core body of works by AA professors, ranging from Rem Koolhaas and drawings from the early days of OMA (produced, among others, with Stefano de Martino and Elia and Zoe Zenghelis) to Zaha Hadid, Daniel Libeskind, Bernard Tschumi and Peter Wilson, among others. There are also architects who influenced school life from the outside: from Superstudio to Coop Himmelb(l)au, John Hejduk and Peter Eisenman; plus drawings seemingly more closely linked to personal research by Boyarsky the collector. They feature Alexander Brodsky and IIlya Utkin, to the fore in Soviet and then Russian paper architecture, Eduardo Paolozzi, Shin Takamatsu and Lebbeus Woods.

Every drawing is analysed for links and influences before and after production. As a whole, the drawings do not form a single story unitary, which was not the intention. The catalogue offers an excellent number of thoughts on what the AA school was in Boyarsky’s years and, more specifically, in the first decade of his tenure. Reflection on the biographies of the school’s leading lights prompts a number of still unanswered questions. Circumscribing the subject to architectural drawings – it is, after all, a catalogue of drawings – the question becomes, perhaps, even more pervasive: how and to what degree can a drawing exist independently of its project, and how/whether it must simply be at its service. The fact that all the drawings in the collection were produced before the spread of software drawing makes the issue all the more fascinating.

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