Louise Smith Bross Lecture Series: Alina Payne
The Case for and Against Drawing
Abstract
This talk confronts the agency of the architect’s visual instruments by focusing on the most ubiquitous one of all: the drawing. What are the consequences of a mode of seeing imposed by the two-dimensional practice of drawing, inserted as it is between the design of architecture and its production as full-scale construct? What gestures, prejudices, strategies, distortions surreptitiously invade and contaminate architecture—its making and its reception? Focusing on the Renaissance—from Alberti, Raphael through Michelangelo—as the moment when architectural drawing became codified and enforced with norms and conventions, this talk seeks to unpack the complexities, ambiguities, and limits embedded in the architectural drawing, specifically in the orthographic projection drawing, that became the architect’s basic representation tool to this day.
Architecture in Two Dimensions
Architects have perennially struggled with the problem of conceiving and executing three-dimensional structures using vehicles at scales and materials vastly different from those of the finished buildings. Yet, these conceptualizing and visualizing tools, among them drawings, prints, models, books, photographs, slides, computer models, and even paintings are not transparent devices, invisibly and seamlessly connecting the mind with the finished product. Rather, I argue, they leave significant residues on the object of architecture; as tools and mediators they themselves have agency. In these three lectures then I seek to address the consequences of the most fundamental distortion that architecture suffers: the design of buildings and environments as conditioned by two-dimensional supports. Taking a longue durée perspective, my case studies focus on pivot points in the history of architectural representation—from the invention of orthogonal projection in drawings, through photography to computer modeling— that is, moments when genuine paradigm changes occurred that allowed two-dimensional biases to seep into the design of architecture and remain quietly at work within the realm of tools, beneath the surface, for a long time thereafter.
About the Lecturer
Alina Payne is Alexander P. Misheff Professor of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University and Director of Villa I Tatti (Florence). Most recently she published L’architecture parmi les arts. Matérialité, transferts et travail artistique dans l’Italie de la Renaissance (Hazan/Louvre 2016) and The Land Between Two Seas. Art on the Move in the Mediterranean and the Black Sea 1300-1700 (Brill, 2022). She is the editor of a number of volumes among which The Renaissance in the 19th Century (with Lina Bolzoni; I Tatti/Harvard, 2018); The Companion to Renaissance and Baroque Architecture (Wiley/Blackwell, 2017); and Histories of Ornament: From Global to Local (with Gulru Necipoglu; Princeton, 2016). In 2006 she received the Max Planck and Alexander von Humboldt Prize in the Humanities and is Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has held visiting appointments at the GSD (Harvard University); Villa I Tatti; Kunsthistorisches/ Max Planck Institut Florence; École Pratique des Hautes Etudes; Paris, Hertziana/ Max Planck Institute, Rome; University Roma II; University of Palermo; and Max Planck Institute, Berlin.
About the Louise Smith Bross Lectures
The Bross lecture series is endowed in memory of Louise Smith Bross, presented every three years by a distinguished scholar of pre-1800 European art and resulting in a book-length publication. There are three lectures presented in this series and the invited lecturer for the 2022 series is Alina Payne.
This series is being offered in a hybrid format. To register for the virtual lecture please RSVP here.