Untitled, Presentation Drawings

Italian artist, architect, and educator Lauretta Vinciarelli explored the intersection between art and architecture in her visionary drawings and watercolor paintings. Vinciarelli did not intend these as working drawings, but rather as suggestions and explorations of architectural forms and concepts. This two-part drawing is part of a larger conceptual project Vinciarelli began in the late 1970s, using the town of Marfa, Texas, as a case study. In this set of drawings she abstracted and creatively re-combined the basic architectural elements of these indigenous types. The procession and space of an imagined building are depicted through axonometry, consistent scale, and parallelism, providing the viewer with a two-dimensional image that imparts a vivid sense of depth. Completed at a moment when concepts of architectural typology returned to architectural discussions, Vinciarelli’s work proposes an expanded language of architecture that breaks and enlarges what many postmodern critics at the time claimed were the limited formal referents of the Modern Movement.