Four Architects: Selected Masterworks

Edward Cella Art & Architecture presents a jewel box like exhibition of original drawings and models by four modern masters of architecture: Santiago Calatrava, Frank Gehry, Erich Mendelsohn, and Lebbeus Woods. The exhibition brings together twenty two sketches, presentation panels and two models representing seven iconic projects. The exhibition offers exceptional insight into the creative process and drawing artistry by several of the most influential architects of the past seventy-five years while highlighting the similarities and differences between four architects’ distinct approaches and styles. Gathered together from different collections, the featured works have never been displayed together nor exhibited since leaving the architects’ studios.

The exhibition begins with four rare hand sketches by Erich Mendelsohn (1887-1953) that document his initial designs for the Atomic Energy Building at UC Berkeley, which began development in 1952 but completed construction after the architect’s death. As part of a larger collection of privately-held drawings related to this late commission, the works on view exemplify the German émigré and Modernist architect’s ability to conceive of and visualize a building’s ultimate form though loose, initial sketches. In this regard, Mendelsohn prefigures many other 20th Century architects' use of an initial sketch to begin the development of a project’s design, a technique which perhaps has reached its most brilliant use by the Los Angeles-based architect, Frank Gehry.

Gehry’s iconic sketch work is represented by two initial drawings from 1997 for the Peter B. Lewis Building at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. Representing one of the architect’s most innovative buildings due to its deep undulations in the roof structure, the project is also notable for its association with the relationship between its patron and the architect. Peter B. Lewis originally commissioned a home from Frank Gehry and after more than a decade of design work, which Gehry characterizes as an "endless saga we've been through together,” was never completed. The long design process for the never realized home is considered to have helped Gehry with many of the design advances that lead to the designs of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and for the project on view. The drawings are also notable for their provenance from the estate of the late architectural critic Herbert Muschamp who heralded the transformative and revitalizing effect of Gehry’s designs for the Guggenheim Museum in the New York Times.

Another architect distinguished by his distinctive architectural sketch-work is Santiago Calatrava. Represented in the exhibition with two discrete projects undertaken concurrently, they reflect a common design vocabulary. Calatrava began design work on the Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1995, and the building remained until recently the architect’s only completed project in the United States. Recognized by its ship-like prow with a wing-like sunscreen that adjusts automatically to the light and wind conditions, the museum’s radical design is rendered in a sequence of five watercolor drawings by the architect. Accompanying them are a selection of watercolors and a model depicting an innovative home for the Camelback Mountains in Arizona commission by a Milwaukee family impressed by the architect’s bold proposal for the museum. The single-family residence is unique for being the only one ever designed by the architect, and adapts the museum’s innovative brise soleil for the intense desert sun. The juxtaposition of these two projects in drawings offers a remarkable opportunity to consider a groundbreaking moment in Calatrava’s oeuvre.

The exhibition concludes with Lebbeus Woods who is renowned for his independent, conceptual work staged through drawings, models, and installations. Included in the exhibition are four panels incorporating drawing and wire sculpture that consider the relationship between architecture and the eternal California threat – earthquakes. Conceived of as a direct response to the San Francisco Loma Prieta Earthquake in 1989, Wood proposed a sequence of projects entitled, “Radical Reconstructions.” Attempting to transmit the feelings of movement, shift and persistence, the proposals for “Shard Houses” incorporate the detritus of earthquakes ruble. Wood’s extraordinarily delicate drawing technique stands in contrast to the bold Deconstructionist architectural forms, which continued to have influence to this day. Other works in the sequence are held in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.