Why architects are suddenly a big draw in the art world
In 2011, when awarding the Pritzker Architecture Prize, Barack Obama, the then US president, addressed the hoary old chestnut of whether architecture is art or merely a functional necessity. Architecture at its best, he said, becomes “works of art that we can move through and live in” – a classic compromise that, nevertheless, holds good for most of us.
The same compromise might also apply to architectural drawings, which can be either dry and functional or artworks in themselves, providing insights into the imaginary and creative process that goes into making inspirational buildings.
In the context of the art market, such drawings have had a chequered history and could be considered a neglected field, making them bargain territory for collectors. In the Eighties, collecting architectural drawings was fashionable. Sotheby’s and Christie’s held specialised sales in London and New York but, following the recession of the early Nineties, demand fell away and tastes changed. “In those sales, Piranesi prints and drawings would be mopped up by decorators for their Colefax-and-fowler-designed interiors,” remembers Gregory Rubinstein, the Old Master drawings specialist at Sotheby’s. “Now the decorators want more contemporary
things.” Neil Bingham, formerly the curator of contemporary architecture at the V&A, believes the shift in taste was directly connected to the mid-late Eighties boom of interest in post-war and contemporary art.
With this in mind, the new Draw Art Fair London, which has its preview at the Saatchi Gallery on Thursday, is turning a spotlight on modern and contemporary architectural drawings. In London, perhaps the principal venue for architectural drawings is the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition, which opens next month. Here, the drawings that are for sale are not expensive. A drawing of the Shard, for instance, by architect Renzo Piano, was on offer last year for just £200.
Among the exhibitors at the fair is one of the first galleries to deal in contemporary architectural drawings, Antonia Jannone from Milan. Jannone began as a dealer in antiquarian drawings of buildings in the Seventies but, finding them too expensive to keep buying, befriended living architects who would give her drawings to sell for them. “I never got rich doing this,” she says, “but I am still going after over 40 years.”
Jannone is exhibiting drawings by one of Italy’s best-known architects, Aldo Rossi (1931-1997), priced from £6,000 upwards, and some Fascist-era drawings by Mario Bacciocchi (1902-1974) that were made to impress Mussolini and which Jannone acquired direct from Bacciocchi’s family. These will be priced from £4,320 to £19,000. Unfortunately, she has sold out of every drawing she had by the renowned Italian designer Ettore Sottsass (1917-2007) – a rare example, she says, of a booming market in a country where the economy is in dire straits.
Another exhibitor at Draw is Betts Project, which specialises in contemporary architectural drawings. It handles works by art-friendly architect Caruso St John, designer of Damien Hirst’s Newport Street gallery, and Tony Fretton, architect of the Lisson Gallery. Marie Coulon, the director of Betts, considers the drawings more as works of art than a functional process, and many of her clients are contemporary art collectors. For the fair, Betts is bridging the gap between old and new, real and imaginary with Sam Jacob’s Empire of Ice Cream, an eight-year series of fantastical designs on graph paper that combines elements of ancient Greek temples with football pitches and a Buzzcocks record cover. Prints and drawings from the series range from £200 to about £6,000.
Lending gravitas to the commercial element, the fair is also presenting displays from private collections formed by the Berlin-based architect Sergei Tchoban, the late Alvin Boyarsky, and cardboard cut-outs by sculptor Isamu Noguchi.
All of which is food for thought for a round-table discussion chaired by Rowan Moore, the architecture critic, and including Neil Bingham and Barbara Pine, the American architectural drawings collector. Altogether, this amounts to the greatest concentration of expertise in architectural drawings that I can remember at any art fair.