Yale School of Architecture Events : Architecture Exhibition

Yale School of Architecture Exhibition

Palladio Virtuel

YALE SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE INAUGURATES 2012-13 EXHIBITION PROGRAM WITH PALLADIO VIRTUEL, PRESENTING RADICALLY NEW ANALYSIS OF RENAISSANCE ARCHITECT’S WORK

Aug 20 - Oct 27, 2012

The 2012-13 season at the Yale School of Architecture Gallery opens on August 20, 2012, with Palladio Virtuel. The exhibition presents a groundbreaking new analysis of the work of Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio by Peter Eisenman, renowned New York architect and Charles Gwathmey Professor in Practice at Yale. It represents the culmination of ten years of study of Palladio’s villas by Eisenman, adding an important contribution to the sixteenth-century master’s already robust legacy.

Palladio Virtuel has been conceived and designed by Eisenman and Yale School of Architecture critic Matthew Roman. Focusing on twenty villas, it proposes a reading of the buildings that undermines the traditional view of Palladio’s architecture as founded on ideal forms.

The exhibition remains on view at the School of Architecture Gallery through October 27, 2012.

Exhibition

Palladio Virtuel asks what might still be learned from an architect whose life and work has been exhaustively analyzed by both architects and historians. In the 1960s and `70s, Rudolf Wittkower’s typological research on Palladio and Colin Rowe’s linking of modern architecture to the Renaissance through a comparison of Le Corbusier and Palladio opened up new areas for research and design to architects. While inspired by these proposals—Eisenman first visited Palladio’s villas with Rowe in 1961—Palladio Virtuel introduces a fundamentally different way of understanding the work. Rather than seeing Palladio as a Mannerist, deviating from a Renaissance ideal, Eisenman finds complex, indeterminate internal relationships in Palladio’s work. This discovery is presented in the exhibition in three sections: The Classical Villas: The Impending Crisis of Synthesis; The Barchessa Projects: Extensions into the Landscape; and The Virtual Villa: The Dissipation of the Villa Type.

Each of the twenty buildings examined in the exhibition is represented by a diagrammatic model in which the traditional architectural components—the portico, circulation, and central figured spaces—are coded by color. Going beyond typology, proportion, and history, Eisenman’s models, along with 100-plus drawings, reveal adjacencies, superpositions, and overlays among these components, with no foundation in ideal symmetry or proportion. Indeed, in contrast to inherited ideas of harmonic proportions, Eisenman’s radical analysis displaces any notion of a part-to-whole stability or ideal in Palladio’s work and proposes that his villa forms dissipated over the course of his career, their components essentially becoming unrecognizable.

In Palladio Virtuel, Palladio’s legacy is read as a confrontation with certain persistent formal problems. This is also seen in his treatise I Quattro Libri (The Four Books), for which, at the end of his life, Palladio redrew his buildings as he wanted them to be—as “virtual” projects. But he was also, in a sense, redrawing the very boundaries of the discipline at the time by proposing a series of radically different villa plans, each an exercise in double and triple readings. The layering of building, drawing, and text in The Four Books renders Palladio’s architectural project conceptually incomplete.

Support

Palladio Virtuel is supported in part by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and by Elise Jaffe + Jeffrey Brown.

The Yale School of Architecture’s exhibition program is supported in part by the James Wilder Green Dean’s Resource Fund, the Kibel Foundation Fund, The Nitkin Family Dean’s Discretionary Fund in Architecture, the Pickard Chilton Dean’s Resource Fund, The Paul Rudolph Publication Fund, the Robert A.M. Stern Fund, and the Rutherford Trowbridge Memorial Publication Fund.

Related Lecture, Publication

The exhibition will be accompanied by a free public lecture by Mr. Eisenman. Titled “Inventing the Palladian Project,” this will be given on Thursday, August 30, 2012, at 6:30 pm, in the School of Architecture’s Hastings Hall.

Eisenman’s book on the work, Palladio Virtuel: Inventing the Palladian Project, is forthcoming from Yale University Press in 2013.

Yale School of Architecture Gallery

The Yale School of Architecture Gallery is on the second floor of Paul Rudolph Hall, located on the corner of York and Chapel Streets (entrance on York), in downtown New Haven. Exhibitions at the Gallery are free and open to the public. Hours are Monday–Friday, 9 am–5 pm; Saturday, 10 am–5 pm. The Gallery is closed on Sunday. For additional public information, visit www.architecture.yale.edu/exhibitions.

Peter Eisenman

15 Feb 2012

Yale School of Architecture Event - Symposium on Architectural Drawing

Is Drawing Dead?

If the hundreds of attendants at the Yale School of Architecture's recent symposium, Is Drawing Dead?, are any indication, drawing thrives, inspiring enormous—if diverse—passion. Spilling well beyond the capacity of the School's Hastings Hall Auditorium, the symposium audience was treated to a rich mix of presentations and debates regarding the historic significance of drawing; its visceral effect on author and viewer; its potential to make unimagined realms of experience accessible; and even its neuropsychological underpinnings.

1. Architects Greg Lynn, Yale University + Preston Scott Cohen, Harvard University
2. Architect Michael Graves
 
photos © Yale School of Architecture, photo by Erik Herrmann

1. Architect and Assistant Dean Mark Foster Gage, Yale University
2. Architect Patrik Schumacher of Zaha Hadid Architects
  
photos © Yale School of Architecture, photo by Susan Surface

The symposium reached beyond the simplistic battle lines often struck between digital and manual drawing, seeking instead to clarify drawing's place in contemporary practice and education. Speakers presented a variety of perspectives that recognized the vastly enlarged set of tools offered by emerging technologies, while also confirming the role of traditional hand-drawing in the creative process. In his Keynote Address, Sir Peter Cook spoke of the elusive spirit that can be captured in a drawing, irrespective of medium, concluding that "drawing may really be about creatively searching for the sublime."


image : Alan Dunlop Architect

The diverse roster of symposium participants included Preston Scott Cohen, chair, Harvard Graduate School of Design; Michael Graves, Robert Schirmer Professor of Architecture, Emeritus, Princeton University; Greg Lynn, founder, Greg Lynn FORM, Davenport Visiting Professor of architecture, Yale; Deanna Petherbridge, CBE, visiting professor of drawing, University of the Arts, London; and Patrik Schumacher, director, Zaha Hadid Architects, among many others (see attached program).

1. Architects Peter Eisenman, Yale University and Michael Graves
2. Architect Preston Scott Cohen, Harvard University and Massimo Scolari, Yale University

photos © Yale School of Architecture, photo by Erik Herrmann

Architect Sir Peter Cook

photo © Yale School of Architecture, photo by Susan Surface.

Setting the stage for the symposium was an exhibition of work by noted Italian architect, painter, and designer Massimo Scolari, entitled Massimo Scolari: The Representation of Architecture. This exhibition, which includes about 160 paintings, drawings, and watercolors, inspired Mr. Graves's reply to a question about the importance of composition and form-making in drawing and architecture: "How could you look at the work [in the exhibition] and not see the importance of drawing?"

Robert AM Stern and Mark Foster Gage

photo © Yale School of Architecture, photo by Erik Herrmann

One of the common positions emerging from the conference was the need for a richer critical and theoretical treatment of contemporary drawing practice, with numerous pleas for the academy to "catch up to the profession." With programs such as the Is Drawing Dead? symposium, the Yale School of Architecture—where drawing occupies a critical position throughout the curriculum—is working to advance and enrich the debate about this crucial topic.

Architect Sir Peter Cook, Royal Academy of Arts, London, who delivered the Keynote Address

photo © Yale School of Architecture, photo by Susan Surface

12 Jan 2012

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Yale School of Architecture - Symposium on Architectural Drawing