Review: Because of seeing architecture in Drawing Matter

February 9, 2024

Stan Allen reviewed Giuliano Fiorenzoli: Because of seeing architecture at ‘T’ Space for Drawing Matter.

Allen writes,

“Fiorenzoli has spoken of the importance of the craft of drawing, and each of these drawings is a beautiful object; they reward close scrutiny. They offer the patient viewer a shared experience: the study of a carefully made artefact, the observer participating in the slow and precise work of constructing a drawing by hand. Fiorenzoli lays down a delicate scaffold of pencil lines, mostly on opaque paper with a subtle tooth, sometimes in colour, then gives the structure depth and casts it into relief by casting shadows. He suggests materiality and defines the ground that the structure occupies, all with painstakingly applied layers of coloured pencil, each stroke visible but dissolving into a vibrating field.”

“Fiorenzoli’s drawings, beyond questions of analogue vs. digital media, serve as a means to reflect on the essential characteristics of architectural representation. These drawings are at once self-sufficient as works of art, autonomous and complete, and at the same time, projections of an imagined reality: scripts or scores for an alternative future. The best architectural drawings always operate simultaneously in both registers, some favouring autonomy, some tending toward instrumentality and translation. Fiorenzoli’s drawings lean towards autonomy; they are fully realised aesthetic objects but they never lose sight of architecture’s projective capacity.”

Click here to read the full review on Drawing Matter’s website.

Because of seeing architecture is currently on view at Pratt School of Architecture’s Higgins Hall Hazel and Robert H. Siege Gallery through March 1, 2024.