ON SITE r e v i e w architecture infrastructure urbanism construction design culture summer/fall 2020
37 d ra w in g s
Assembled by Phaidon Press, survey of contemporary drawing. Three volumes: Vitamin D: Phaidon Press, 2005 ISBN-10: 0714845450 ISBN-13: 9780714845456
Vitamin D2: Phaidon Press, 2018 ISBN-10: 0714876445 ISBN-13: 9780714876443
The Hand of the Architect. Mokeskine in collaboration with Abitare/Segesta. 378 autographed drawings by a group of 110 internationally recognized architects as a tribute to Piero Portaluppi. iPad application http://itunes. apple.com/gb/app/la-mano-dellarchitetto/id490106047?mt=8
Boundaries. Maya Lin. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006 ISBN-10: 0743299590 ISBN-13: 978-0743299596
Vitamin D3: Phaidon Press, 2021 ISBN-10: 1838661697 ISBN-13: 9781838661694
Rachel Whiteread Drawings. Allegra Presenti. Munich, NY & London: Prestel, 2018 ISBN-10: 3791350382 ISBN-13: 978-3791350387 Rebecca Horn: Drawings, Sculptures, Installations, Films 1964-2006. Armin Zweite, Katharina Schmidt, Rebecca Horn, Doris von Drathen. Berlin and Stuttgart: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2007 ISBN-10: 3775718915 ISBN-13: 978-3775718912
Line and Field. Christine Heibert. Philadelphia: Gallery Joe, 2018 http://www.christinehiebert.com
Maya Lin: A River Is a Drawing. Miwako Tezuka, Peter Boswell, Maya Lin. Yonkers NY: Hudson River Museum, 2018 ISBN-10: 0943651492 ISBN-13: 978-0943651491
April Greiman: spaceness, wordness, and (no)thingness Moleskine Inspiration and Process series. Princeton Architectural Press, 2020
A m eric a n Neg ro News p a p e r s a n d Pe ri o di c a l s . Š WEB Du Bois, c ourtesy o f t h e L i bra ry o f C o n gre ss
ISBN-10: 1616899034 ISBN-13: 978-1616899035
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Black Lives 1900: W. E. B. Du Bois at the Paris Exposition. Julian Rothenstein,editor. London: Redstone Press, 2019 ISBN-10: 1942884532 ISBN-13: 978-1942884538
ON SITE r e v i e w architecture infrastructure urbanism construction design culture summer/fall 2020
37 d ra w in g s co n te n ts: 4 6 8 10 12
folio introduction Tom Ngo Mark Baechler Seher Shah Iván Hernández Quintela
14 16 18 20 22
Lady McCrady Mark Dorrian Jacob Whibley Dominique Cheng Stephanie White
23 24 26 28 30
Lady McCrady Stephanie White Ella Chmielewska Piotr Leśniak Andrey Chernykh
31 32 34 36 39
Doug Wittnebel Iván Hernández Quintela Stephanie Davidson notes on drawing, and on the drawings contributor contacts
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call for articles Tom Ngo, ‘One 18 x 13” 2-page spread at 1:1’
summer 2020
folio introduction, Maya Lin. Vietnam War Memorial competition entry, 1981. https://www.wdl.org/en/item/222/
I wrote this in 2009: While browsing through the World Digital Library I came across the original panel Maya Lin had done for the Vietnam War Memorial competition when she was an architecture student at Yale. Her black granite walls cut into the green sward, the terrific power of the thousands and thousands of individual names, the absolute simplicity of the idea – all of these things mark a division between pre- and post-Vietnam War memorial projects. Finding the original panel was a shock. The chalk and charcoal drawings were widely reproduced at the time, and in my mind they were large - maybe 3’ wide. However, in reality these iconic works were small, sketchbook-sized. The text describing the project is hand-written and glued onto the panel – in fact all the pieces are glued onto a piece of tan matboard. As presentation goes, so accustomed are we to computer generated layouts, Maya Lin’s panel appears clumsy, unaligned, naïve, un-formed and yet, and yet, these are the drawings that outlined, in an open competition, the most powerful monument of the twentieth century since Vimy Ridge. This is a document from a time when the medium simply put the message forward. It wasn’t the message itself, and it certainly did not dominate or even obscure the message to the extent that we see today. I don’t think this is a case of my not being able to ‘read’ the layers of photoshopped composite images, but rather that drawings today are validated by the complexity of the processes that produce them. Were Maya Lin’s chalk sketches and simple handwritten text the last of the clear relationship between hand and thought? In 1982 when the Memorial was dedicated most architectural offices had their new Macs. Adobe Illustrator was launched in 1986, Photoshop in 1987. The computer is only a tool, like a pen, or a knife, but it is a willful tool and makes complexity very easy to do. At some point we have to ask, is complexity what we need?
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Drawing used to be my life; I drew my way through school, drew every project in the offices I worked in, taught drawing in many architecture schools. The last serious drawings I did were thirty early 20th century timber dancehalls in Texas: mapped, measured, drafted for the historical record. Then I started my dissertation and in reading through acres of theory, text took over. Now I just write, I don’t draw, and half my brain is missing. I think of drawings, which is not the same as drawing. After getting On Site review 36: our material future out the door last winter all I wanted to do was look at drawings and paintings, and I wrote the call for submissions hoping everyone else was similarly tired of slippery, complicated, dissimulating text where every word invites interrogation. Drawings, even complex and layered ones, speak straight, to me. In laying out this issue, the closest thing I get to arranging things on paper these days, two things I’d not thought of before stand out. One is how scale arbitrates between drawing, the material thing made, and image, which one might say is the text of the drawing. Our pages are 9 x 13”; it would be beyond coincidence that everyone’s drawings were also 9 x 13”, so what are the consequences? We are so used to viewing images, scaleless, placeless, virtual, that a drawing at any scale other than 1:1 becomes simply image – casually scanned, scoped in a glance, as one does. The cover is Tom Ngo’s 1:1 drawing of the specifications for an On Site review spread. It defies image-making. The other thing is a realisation that drawing is a performative act very much bound up in our identity as architects, or designers, or artists, or engineers. We were taught to draw; taught a history of conventions, of acceptable mark-making, of clarity, of how to use a 6H lead and a 2B pencil, how to use CAD and Rhino. The rules are either so ancient or so embedded that even deliberately breaking them simply acknowledges their persistence. These two things, scale and performativity — well, three things if we include image, are an interesting lens with which to view the drawings here. Whether by hand, in Illustrator or combinations that switch and translate back and forth, these drawings are built. Stephanie White, editor
we look at drawings; notes follow the sequence: not random, but also not linear. As with all On Site review layouts, there are conversations between articles, in this case between drawings. These discussions might be calm, they could be acrimonious, but there are conversations. You are part of these ongoing debates about why and how we draw. The order in which these drawings appear is entirely visual: nothing to do with content. Ha.
summer 2020
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on site review 37: drawings
Tom Ngo, a 9 x 13� page within an 18 x 13� spread, 2020
summer 2020
Mark Baechler, Abrahamic Architecture 8
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Seher Shah, UNIT OBJECT, landscape view 10
on site review 37: drawings
Seher Shah, UNIT OBJECT, sculpture garden summer 2020
Iván Hernández Quintela, POSTCARDS - cuarentena. Serie I01-03. each 6.7 x 4.8” 12
on site review 37: drawings
Ivรกn Hernรกndez Quintela, POSTCARDS - cuarentena. Serie B01-03 summer 2020
Lady McCrady, Impulse drawing on location, NewYork 1986, night 14
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Lady McCrady, 9 Dec 1985, 2 am, 34th at Park summer 2020
Mark Dorrian, sketch of an exploded perspective for a Roma and Sinti holocaust memorial, Lety, Czech Republic. 614 x 665mm. 2019 16
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Jacob Whibley, chemin du dÊsir. 15 x 18� 18
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Dominique Cheng, Opus Ziggurat 2020 20
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Stephanie White, Louisbourg hothouses, 1987 22
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Lady McCrady, top: Shelter Flag Cone VelvetRope. below: Cones Lights Parking Spaces. summer 2020
Stephanie White, Chapel, Peak District, 1988. each 22 x 30� 24
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Ella Chmielewska, Notebook 26
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Piotr Leśniak, Architecture of Loss, drawing 03 28
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Andrey Chernykh, Red Sea Ecology, 2017 30
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Doug Wittnebel, Sky Data. iPad 32
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E01, E02, E03
J01, J02, J03
H01, H02, H03
L01, L02, L03
D01, D02, D03
F01, F02, F03
Iván Hernández Quintela, POSTCARDS - cuarentena series D, E, F, H, J, L. 6.7 x 4.8” each summer 2020
Day 16: Do you think they can see me?
Day 17: Ready for my online class.
Day 20: Just another Wednesday.
Day 21: This kept them busy for 5 mins.
Day 33: Look Mommy, I can fly.
Day 34: WTF.
June 2020: Over 100 days since COVID lockdown. I’m not getting any work done. My kids say I’m always working. Still, somehow the tensions from the early days of self-isolation have loosened
Stephanie Davidson, Momy Holiday 34
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and we’ve reached an equilibrium. In the first several weeks of the pandemic, drawings were my personal way of trying to make sense of the catastrophe on a domestic scale. The kids were happy – no
Day 18: This is my desk now.
Day 19: Is it Halloween yet?
Day 23: The floor is lava.
Day 26: The day I wore noise cancelling headphones.
Day 58: Happy Mother’s Day.
Day 101: Mommy Holiday.
school. I was struggling – working from home. Three months in and we’ve all adjusted, so I’m making less drawings – things seem unremarkable.
Most people call it a pandemic; my kids call it Mommy Holiday.
summer 2020
Notes o n d raw i ng , a nd on th e d ra w i n g s: Mark Baechler
Abrahamic Architecture (2.540m x 3.429m)
Drawing is a slow process of exploring architectural thought. This drawing is part of an ongoing series of large works that I began in 2013, titled Abrahamic Architecture. The duration of time required by graphite drawings at this scale invites years of silent contemplation on the subject matter. While drawing, the buildings are etched in my imagination, connections are revealed and new ideas emerge from the paper.
Dominique Cheng
Title: Opus Ziggurat Size: 12” x 12” Medium: Digital Illustration Year Completed: 2020
The diagram is a whimsical account that describes the origins of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City as a symphonic masterwork resulting from a secret love affair between Frank Lloyd Wright (the building’s noted architect) and Peggy Guggenheim (socialite and heiress to the Guggenheim family fortune). His signature porkpie hat and her Safilo sunglasses may have inspired a flurry of architectural ideas that were too subtle and fleeting even for them to consciously realise at the moment. The composition of curves that crescendo in a whirling atrium, the choice to finish the floors in elegant Italian terrazzo, and the audacity of pink stucco on the exterior were signs of a creative mind caught in a reverie. On diagrams: Diagrams are visual devices for representing quantitative information in an abstract way. It is a technical genre of drawing that often requires two elements: 1. a graphical syntax of symbols, arrows, lines, and notations, and 2. a specific set of parameters through which algorithms can be processed to generate sequences of relationships. They can be used to describe how something functions or the relationships between things. They have the capacity to deal with hard data or soft facts.
Andrey Chernykh
Red Sea Ecology: I combed through a lot of scientific documents as well as maps on the Arabian Peninsula and then drew the majority of relevant information in Adobe Illustrator with some individual elements done in Photoshop and imported back into Illustrator. Drawing courtesy of MT Planners Limited, completed 2017
Making Invisible Visible One of the core principles of art and why artists draw is to reveal something that is invisible. Employing that technique in a design language can be very powerful. The coastal edge of an Arabian peninsula fronting the Red Sea is a place of incredible biodiversity that is constantly shifting and changing. When comparing it to other landscapes that visibly change with the seasons, its desert condition often appears static to the naked eye. A regional section employing visual collage of analysis and research reveals a landscape that is both fragile and complex at the same time. The revelatory aspect of the drawing effectively lays bare the systems at play, their value and interconnectedness. From the top of the mountains tiny particles carry microbes and nutrients, with precipitation, down the dry valleys (wadis) all the way to the coast. Down there they support a rich marine habitat of sea turtles nesting in the sand dunes and exotic Dugongs swimming amongst the coral reefs, feeding on the sea grass. For us as designers these are all assets to be leveraged and protected. In landscape architecture the drawing can and should express a powerful view of the importance of natural systems in supporting our human settlements, exploring previously unseen challenges and opportunities.
Ella Chmielewska The two pages of my notebook show a group of my stenographic ‘thought-scribbles’ that note links between visual sources (photographs, books, maps, artworks, filmic scenes, pages from magazines) and textual documentation (in poems, books of essays, letters, captions of photographs). Here the lines are not drawing but holding the yet unarticulated connections across varied modalities documenting the ruination and the human loss in the city. The surface of the notebook is for me a thinking space that partakes in working through notes from reading and examining images, a place for figuring spatio-temporal linkages between words, images and archival objects. The notebook always accompanies my reading. My writing starts on and from such pages of scribbles that interrupt my readings. (The notebook is Korean brand Paperways, size is 21x13cm )
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Stephanie Davidson These drawings - digital collages - are glimpses into my life working at home with two kids during the pandemic. I’m in my first semester of a new teaching job, so I’m glued to the screen daily, trying to keep my 99 students on-track remotely. I teach drawing. Meantime, my kids wake up every day in the same mood as the birds outside - chirping, singing, flying around, not a worry in the world. The drawings are meant to convey the chaos and clash of moods in our personal worlds each day. They have an element of the absurd, which is true-to-life. All of the furniture elements come from Rhino files of actual projects that are on-hold due to the pandemic.
Mark Dorrian
The drawing is an exploded perspective of our (Metis: Mark Dorrian + Adrian Hawker) project for a Roma and Sinti Holocaust Memorial, Lety, Czech Republic (competition project 2019). The drawing is 614mm (wide) x 665mm (high), pencil on yellow trace, scanned with digital photomontage elements. The location is a former concentration camp, and the concrete walkway at the bottom of the drawing passes over the archaeological site. The clouds indicate a reflecting pool and the red roofing element is a folded cor-ten steel structure. The little building at the top left of the drawing sits beside the area where those who died in the camp were buried. http://www.metis-architecture.com/projects/roma-and-sintiholocaust-memorial/
I like drawing in pencil because of its tentativeness – which I would describe as a fragile way of reaching out, of extending something with both uncertainty and tact. A sort of reaching out that seeks to touch – to encounter – itself, but in a way that carries a sense of the limits and contingency of the act and a readiness to draw back. A line drawn digitally is never like this, it is either there or it isn’t and so is both more and less certain. When it is there it is absolute, but at the same time it can be removed without a trace. This erasability means that there is less at stake in the drawing of the line, for things can always be reset and returned to the beginning. When the line is drawn on a material surface, which inevitably receives an imprint as well as a mark, this is never the case, and no doubt that’s one reason for the caution with which we have to proceed. And so, while architectural lines in pencil tend to described as singular marks, they are more often accumulations of line upon line – the initial faint path, which is not so much traced but trailed by the pencil, and then another that over-draws the first, making it more certain by both intensifying and inflecting it. And then often further more, which differentiate and dynamise parts of the line, giving them depth. This often gives me the impression that a drawing is seeping out of its paper surface rather than being inscribed upon it.
Iván Hernández Quintela
POSTCARDS - cuarentena. Series C 01,02,03. 4 x 6” each
Since the pandemic, I have been drawing a postcard each day, on nothing in particular, just as an exercise in keeping busy, an exercise in exploring notions of space. They range from abstract geometric compositions to architectural projects I think about as I reflect on the notion of home in isolation times. Each drawing by itself is just another drawing. I think the value is in the series, in the sum of them all. Drawing as a diary. The drawings are traditional postcard size. I draw them on postcard-size white paper. I draft most of them. I then scan them. Somehow I think the scale to be essential. To draw on a 4 x 6 has something of a microcosmos. To lose oneself, for half an hour, in such small piece of paper. And to think of the drawing as a postcard, as an open letter, and for the drawing to be part of the text, to think by drawing. I will send the originals to the friends and family I could not see during the pandemic. About the drawings, I usually draw in sets of three, for three days I will draw something similar with small variations. Perhaps by a sense that I might improve from one drawing to the next but by the third attempt I feel I can move unto something else. Then I start another mini-series, a different approach, with a different technique, a different concept. So I guess I drift by blocks. I do feel that after a couple of dozen drawings one can see a preoccupation, or a sense of pattern.
Piotr Lesniak Drawing 03 is part of a project titled Architecture of Loss by Dr Ella Chmielewska, in which I participate as a designer and researcher. Focusing on five sites in Warsaw, the project seeks to develop a methodological alternative to historical description, drawing on ‘moments of danger’ as flashpoints of learning (about oneself as much as about the Other) in Benjamin’s sense. The punctum of the collage — if I could ever isolate one — seems to emerge from the overlapping of the city’s photoplan and the oblique aerial photograph. Taken by Luftwaffe’s own reconnaissance aircraft in 1944, the photograph shows an extensive ‘morphology of ruination’ (E. Chmielewska), from spot damage to entire tenements reduced to rubble behind the diagonal lines of the Ghetto wall.
summer 2020
Lady McCrady
Drawing 045: TreeSawArboristWorkerCone. 30h x 22w. 2012
I draw two opposite ways. One is on impulse. I see something notable and visual. I’m walking or it’s out a public transport window. I scratch it onto scraps, receipts or book interior pages, which later intrigues me about the timing. Or it’s on Smith’s stationers Basildon Bond airmail paper I horde from rare trips to the UK and carry in my bag. I only use a knife-chiseled Ebony pencil. It’s inside a London souvenir pencil case with cliché London landmarks on it, which, au verso, says in fluorescent pink Juliet. Back in the studio I scribble-in the color: I don’t like to fuss. Color abbreviations are Ye - yellow, Ma - magenta, Go - glowing gold light. The Prismacolor pencils are in a cedar-smelling Spanish cigar box. Two - in the studio vertically on big body size-related paper. This is about the pleasure of a sweeping motion of the arm in lyrical, curving, flowing tides of marks. Charcoal floats down the surface of the paper and attaches or makes a strip at the bottom that has to be vacuumed. Actually, third is with liquid-ish paint, and long brushes with long animal hairs. My elbow is glued to my hip as I stand over a low table with large Arches Platine paper or metal litho plates. Drawing is a direct expression of the mind in a trance.
Tom Ngo I’ve been a practicing visual artist working fulltime as an architect since 2008. An undercurrent within my work is examining the intersection between art and architecture. I believe the two are not mutually exclusive. This recent work examines one of the primary tasks of an architect – defining space. I’ve taken the measurements of the publication, in this case (2) - 9” x 13” and re-established them to highlight the act of space defining. The communication of this is important to me for a couple reasons. The first is that one can recreate this space if inclined, which is the instructive part of an architectural drawing. The second is it displays the space at 1:1. The immediacy of showing the dimensions of the paper space avoids a reinterpretation that may occur when depicting spaces and structures of different scales. The issue of immediacy does not plague works of art as they are typically the final outcome. Most of the arguments of why architecture and art are not the same stem from the idea that architecture is functional. With this work I am attempting to reframe and highlight the functional aspects of architectural representation and reframe them as a creative gesture.
Seher Shah
Unit Object (sculpture garden) Portfolio of 7, Etching and aquatint on paper, 23 x 26 “, 2014 Published at the Glasgow Print Studio; installation view: the Lightness of Mass, Green Art Gallery, Dubai, 2016
‘Throughout her practice, Seher Shah has consistently re-shaped representation. Working with both drawing and sculpture, she has revisited the mainstays of architectural representational methods — plan, elevation, section — to inject unsettling slippages into their rigorous formalism. Materiality is central to The Lightness of Mass — the deposit of ink on paper, the coarseness of sand cast iron, even the drawn line operates as an almost palpable material component in large-scale drawings. The Unit Object etchings liberate classic architectural representations from their restrictive process of perspective drawing, introducing them into a fluid dance of line and the material corporeality of ink.’ — Excerpt taken from the exhibition text for The Lightness of Mass at Green Art Gallery, Dubai, 2016
Jacob Whibley
Chemin du désir 15 x 18'
38
Drawing for me will always be interstitial - a Darwinian process that occupies the space between thought and final form. It is a convoluted narrative & process: this collage/drawing was 3 years in the making. The initial panel, the blank support, was built and then forgotten behind a pile of half finished sculptures and storage tubs. It was rediscovered in January 2020. i hung it on my wall with a few other unfinished pieces, holding up some scrap pieces of paper to it, and waiting to see if any of them felt like committing themselves to the surface - none did. Then when sorting through a pile of paper found a stack of old photo album pages: photos long removed, memories disappeared but the glue that had fixed them to the sheets held on tight, leaving rough scraps (ghost traces) behind. The pages were a perfect neutral ground to work off of, the traces provided a compositional problem to work around or with, and there were these tabbed sides with holes punched out of them that were an intriguing detail - so I secured them to the panel and emphasised the tabs by allowing them to jut out. Then it sat on the wall for another month. And then in early April splitting my time between sorting old work and digging through stacks of paper, I took a break and came across an article on desire paths, read it, and then looked over at the panel and imagined a looping swirling network of sculptural paper lines that wove their way along the surface and through the punched holes… I finished cutting and gluing the lines down within an hour. And there you go - a long and circuitous path to a long and circuitous solution.
on site review 37: drawings
Stephanie White This is from the 1980s, the era of which Peter Wilson says: ”We did not know at the time that a digital eclipse was around the corner’. I remember doing this drawing, it is at the bottom of a large sheet of other things, most of which I had forgotten; but I remember being surprised by this bit of it, and have never forgotten that feeling. It is an axonometric with shifting axes; each building stretches away from the group much in the way that attention stretches at the edges. We can’t give full attention to everything all the time. Edges often are left to look after themselves, to develop some sort of new dynamic, totally unexpected. The other drawing (these are all from long sets of project drawings) is 22 x 30, charcoal and pastel. How sensual can one make an architectural drawing? Quite, it turns out.
Doug Wittnebel Sky Data building design study of responsive facade and sky gardens: positive and negative spaces. Multiple grid layers support glazing sections that can respond to the amount of daylight received and will adjust accordingly to minimise heat gain and glare. The glazing sections can also be manually adjusted. The drawing explores alternative means of cladding or applying a skin membrane on a living and working set of environmental spaces. It hints at layers of gleaming, glowing radiance; the façade would have similar qualities of lambency if constructed in real time and space. Several companies offer new glazing products that can alter the inherent properties of reflection, tinting, solar absorption and controlling views. With the immediacy of the sketch and the drawing comes the slow increase of delight as the sketch is created, line by line, dash by dot, hatch by scribble. The delight is from the sensation of the mind and hand working together in tandem, and can be described as a feeling of ‘in the flow’ calm at times and of frenzied energy at other times. The action of drawing on paper, or on a wall, or on a digital tablet are all part of the creative process of the engagement of the hand and the mind in a very cool flow of energy from within to without and on to the receptive surface. I investigate ideas and problems through many varieties of drawing a painting techniques, and am at the ready to encourage the guesses and the attempts that will allow me to see all of the other possibilities that lie within a scenario or a problem. When you draw, your sensibilities awaken to the other layers and the understanding of the problem gets denser and richer and links to other real and imagined realms.
contri butors : Mark Baechler is an assistant professor at the School of
Piotr Leśniak is an architect, editor of Drawing On [www.
Dominique Cheng is is an architect, artist and writer based in
Lady McCrady is a New York artist with a studio in New Haven.
Andrey Chernykh is a landscape designer and urbanist based in
Tom Ngo is an architect and artist from Toronto.
Ella Chmielewska is Senior Lecturer in Cultural and Visual
Seher Shah’s background in art and architecture informs her
Architecture, Laurentian University, Sudbury. www.markbaechler.ca
Toronto. He founded NONUMENT in 2020. www.nonument.com Toronto. andrey-chernykh.squarespace.com Studies, University of Edinburgh.
www.cityspeculations.com
Stephanie Davidson co-operates the design practice Davidson
drawingon.org] and runs a postgraduate architecture studio at the University of Strathclyde. See also www.cityspeculations.com www.ladymccrady.com www.tomngo.ca
www.palacit.com
drawing, printmaking and sculpture. She lives in New Delhi. www.sehershah.net
Rafailidis, and is assistant professor at Ryerson School of Interior Design University in Toronto www.davidsonrafailidis.net
Jacob Whibley is an artist who lives and works in Toronto.
Mark Dorrian and Adrian Hawker form Metis, an atelier for art,
Stephanie White gratefully lives and works in both Calgary
Iván Hernández Quintela is an architect and founder of ludens
Doug Wittnebel is an architect, an illustrator and an artist
architecture and urbanism in Edinburgh. www.metis-architecture.com in Mexico City. www.interferencia.me
www.jacobwhibley.com
in Treaty 7 territory, and Nanaimo, the unceded territory of the Snuneymuxw peoples. based in California.
www.dougwittnebel.com
summer 2020
ON SITE
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37 : dra win g su mmer 20 20
The here and thereness of things
On Site review is published by Field Notes Press, which promotes field work in matters architectural, cultural and spatial.
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difference apartheid [mé]tissage
Canada Post agreement 40042630 ISSN 1481-8280 copyright: On Site review. All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopied, recorded or otherwise stored in a retrieval system without the prior consent of the publisher is an infringement of Copyright Law Chapter C-30, RSC1988.
greenbelts freeways crossings For every barrier, there is a way to cross it. Breaches, or ruptures, or checkpoints, or other breakages show both the strength and weakness of the barrier, wall, fence, cliff face. Clearly this can all be taken as a huge metaphor; it can also be an investigation of specific sites. how wide is a line? Between this and that, here and there, often turns out to be a zone in geographic and ethnic reality. Think of this issue at any scale, and in any way, environmentally, geographically, architecturally. Other issues, social, political and personal will, no doubt, unfold in these specific investigations.
Proposals due October 31, 2020 Mention how your proposal relates to the theme of this issue (above). Remember, we are a journal about architecture, landscape, infrastructure, urban design, all as conducted on site.
Send to www.onsitereview.ca/contact-us Finished articles due December 31, 2020 Images: 300dpi, at least 2000pixels wide, copyright clearance secured if not your own work. Length: 500 - 5000 words
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http://www.francisalys.com/greenline/ The Green Line Sometimes doing something poetic can become political and sometimes doing something political can become poetic. Jerusalem, June 2004 Video in collaboration with Philippe Bellaiche, Rachel Leah Jones, and Julien Devaux 17:34 min ©©Francis Alÿs This project appeared in On Site review 30: ethics and publics, guest edited by Thomas-Bernard Kenniff
back issues: https://issuu.com/onsitereview/docs editor: Stephanie White design: Black Dog Running printer: Emerson Clarke Printing, Calgary distribution: online: onsitereview.ca print: onsitereview.ca/contact-us
Out of the Box: Gordon Matta-Clark Selections by Yann Chateigné, Hila Peleg and Kitty Scott The 2019–2020 Out of the Box exhibition series is dedicated to the works of trained architect and conceptual artist Gordon Matta-Clark, whose writings, photographs, films, correspondence and select artworks were produced between 1969 and 1978 and donated to the CCA by the Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark in 2011. Structured as a study in three acts, this series invites three guest curators from different curatorial backgrounds to explore Gordon Matta-Clark’s critical practice within the architectural scene of the time.
Line of Flight: Gordon Matta-Clark selected by Kitty Scott through 27 September Dig itis ed Item s For: CP138, Go rdo n Ma tt a -C l a rk c o l l e c ti o n
www.cca.qc.ca
Edgar Moreno Memoirs of Water Aug 21st – Oct 4th In this exclusive online exhibition Venezuelan artist Edgar Moreno addresses the complex historical and contemporary relationships between man and nature in the lands that comprise the Orinoco and Amazon river basins. Most of these works are vintage and were part of the traveling exhibition Memoirs of Water that opened at the Museo de Bellas Artes in Caracas in 2003. www.artsy.net/show/photo-edition-berlinedgar-moreno-memoirs-of-water
The origin of forms, 2002 Gelatin silver print and selective toning 23 3/5 × 39 2/5 in 60 × 100 cm