Beginnings: Drawing Early Architecture

This week an exhibition at MIT opens in the Keller Gallery featuring work of PAYETTE’s Timothy Cooke. “Beginnings: Drawing Early Architecture,” curated and designed by Timothy Cooke and Andrew Ferentinos, exhibits artwork created for the book “Architecture of First Societies: A Global Perspective,” by MIT School of Architecture Professor Mark Jarzombek, which will be published later this year. Selected drawings from the over three hundred created for the book will be on display. The drawings depict pre-modern architecture. Cooke became involved with the project through a class with Jarzombek in 2010 and later became the drawing manager of the project.

The book for which the drawings were produced explores “the different cultural formations that developed in various places throughout the world to form the built environment.” In his introduction to the exhibit, Jarzombek says he quickly realized his book required hand drawings to illustrate the topics discussed because “hand drawings force the maker to think more carefully about the nature of the image and its content.” The drawings depict site, context and concept from an architectural point of view. The drawings are as much for the book as they are a meditation on the art of drawing by hand to explore ideas. At a time when hand drawing in the field of architecture feels like a lost art, this exhibit and subsequent book highlight the beauty and revelation of hand media. In the exhibition book, Cooke contributed a piece “A Meditation on the Light Table,” exploring the physical relationship of the artist to the light table and its role in the work of reproduction.

The drawings on display in the Keller Gallery showcase the diversity of subject matter and the artistry of the drawings. In addition, the exhibit pulls apart the process of creating such drawings from the original pen-and-ink drawings to the finished digital composites.

The exhibition opens on Wednesday, May 15 and runs through June 3.

Drawings depicted here by Timothy Cooke.