Alvin Boyarsky Archive at the Flanders Architectural Institute

Buildings.

Hand drawings and paintings by Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, Daniel Libeskind and others are among 50 works drawn from the archive of the late Architectural Association chairman Alvin Boyarsky for ‘Drawing Ambience’, an exhibition at the Flanders Architectural Institute.

During Boyarsky’s tenure as head of the school, from 1971 to 1990, drawing was celebrated not merely as a means of representation, but as a form of architectural practice in its own right. The search for new spatial ideas, reflective of the concerns of the period, is vividly expressed in the diverse techniques and subjects of the drawings collected by Boyarksy.

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Top: Nigel Coates, 1949 Ski Station, 1982 Oil pastel, pen and black ink, gold marker ink, and spattered white ink on dark gray paper (faded to brown) Imagesheet 32.5 x 50 cm, From the Collection of the Alvin Boyarsky Archive
Above: Daniel Libeskind, Micromegas, The Garden, 1979 © Daniel Libeskind. From the Collection of the Alvin Boyarsky Archive

The exhibition is co-organised by the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis and the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence. It is co-curated by Jan Howard, chief curator of the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design and Igor Marjanović, professor of architecture at the Washington University in St. Louis. Production of the Antwerp edition of the exhibition is by Flanders Architecture Institute, deSingel International Arts Campus in collaboration with KULeuven and Piet Zwart Institute, MIARD. The Antwerp edition of the exhibition has been initiated and designed by Riet Eeckhout and Arnaud Hendrickx. The show is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue distributed by the University of Chicago Press. 

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Above: Jeremie Frank, The Macrophone, 1981 Technical pen and ink, airbrush and ink, collage and graphite underdrawing on paper board 81 x 111.4 cm, From the Collection of the Alvin Boyarsky Archive. Image – Jeremie Frank

A conversation between British architect Sir Peter Cook and Russian architect Alexander Brodsky, on 24 October, marks the opening of the show. Both noted for their drawings, they will explore its role in their own practice.

Above: Office for Metropolitan Architecture, Site Plan for Parc de la Villette, Paris, 1983 © Office for Metropolitan Architecture. From the Collection of the Alvin Boyarsky Archive; Office for Metropolitan Architecture, Alex Wall, The Pleasure of Architecture, 1983 Color screenprint on paper Sheet 77.9 x 51.3 cm, From the Collection of the Alvin Boyarsky Archive image © OMA

In a related exhibition at de Singel (‘Drawing out: material dialogues with the Boyarsky collection’, 28 November 2017 to 14 January 2018), curators Riet Eeckhout and Arnaud Hendrickx invite Belgian artists and architects to “go into dialogue with the works from the Boyarsky collection”. The works presented from the collection “will be confronted with new or reformed work” by Stijn Ank, Bart Hollanders, Ephraim Joris, Peter Swinnen and Jo Van Den Berghe, among others.

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Above: Zaha Hadid, The World (89 Degrees), 1984, Print with hand applied gouache and ink wash on paper Sheet 69.9 x 57.5 cm, from the Collection of the Alvin Boyarsky Archive image © Zaha Hadid Foundation; Zaha Hadid, Sperm Table, 1988, © Zaha Hadid. From the Collection of the Alvin Boyarsky Archive

‘Drawing Ambience: Alvin Boyarsky and the Architectural Association’
25 October 2017 to 14 January 2018
deSingel International Arts Campus, Antwerpen, Belgium