JAKOB + MACFARLANE THE INVISIBLE DRAWINGS School Gallery Paris April 18th - June 7 th , 2014 Published at Hyperallergic as The Lush Life of Virtual Architecture http://hyperallergic.com/122097/the-lush-life-of-virtual-architecture/ Joseph Nechvatal Having missed Greg Lynn at the LUMA Arles Foundation’s moving (literally) presentation of Frank Gehry’s architectural models awhile back, I sprang at the occasion to look into “THE INVISIBLE DRAWINGS” exhibition by JAKOB + MACFARLANE, a cutting-edge architectural team in France. Dominique Jakob and Brendan Macfarlane have already done the Restaurant Georges Pompidou Centre (2000), the reconstruction of the theater of Pont-Audemer in Normandy (2001), the library Florence Loewy Books by Artists (2001), the Orange Cube and RBC showroom in Lyon (2010), the FRAC Centre in Orléans (2013) and the wonderfully snakey Cité de la mode et du design (2010) on the left bank of the river Seine. While strictly speaking, what I saw was neither invisible (there they were, architectural drawings from seven projects (2008-20014) that they had never shown in public before) nor drawings (they showed limited edition digital prints made from their CAD drawings) the end aesthetic results were elegant, thought provoking and compelling; engaging my imagination with both the possibilities of actual architectural space and the immersive ideals of virtual reality. Unable to sleep later that night, I mentally compared the virtual spatial conditions in the most recent project “Pavillon Nomade I” (2014) (a collaboration with digital artist Miguel Chevalier) with two of the architectural masterpieces I had experience in Europe: Le Corbusier’s “Chapelle Notre Dame du Haut” in Ronchamp (1954) and Frank Gehry’s “Guggenheim Museum Bilbao” (1997).
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JAKOB + MACFARLANE
THE INVISIBLE DRAWINGS
School Gallery Paris
April 18th - June 7th, 2014
Published at Hyperallergic as The Lush Life of Virtual Architecture