Exquisite Corpse
OBRA dismembers its sketchbooks to show them two-sided, page after page in continuous sequences. The sketchbooks contain drawings and notes recounting the design of several projects.
Due to the binding structure of the sketchbooks, mostly organized in signatures of eight pages, detaching, unfolding and laying the pages flat side-by-side scrambles the original chronology of drawing effacing the original vector of intention of the work.
We acknowledge the shared authorship of architecture, not only a collective activity within any studio, but also an activity dependent on the generosity of a given community’s collective unconscious. We believe subtle interpersonal chemistries decide the success or failure of projects.
Conventionally a sketchbook might seem personal, but the displaced logic of the resulting unbound drawing sequences in the exhibit remove any presumption of coherent personal logic, and serve as devices to correct the record for good.
Drawings are deployed on easels suspended from the ceiling allowing double-sided examination. The easels bookend the space with a shy monumentality suggested by the social-realism of the gallery’s building. The layout follows an ABABA classical rhythm, where A stands for people visiting the gallery and B for drawings of another architecture hanging from the ceiling.
This collage in space can flirt with the confusing or even worse, descend into the decorative, to save us from that, and to point tentatively closer to architecture, models of four OBRA projects will offer relief from flatness: a farmhouse by the Andes in Argentina, a museum on a hill outside Pretoria, a multi-family residence in an island in Hamburg and a high rise for feminism in Chelsea, New York.
