Dead Tech

You didn’t have to be an architect to have gotten something out of Print Ready Drawings, organized by the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, but it wouldn’t have hurt. I noticed a middle-aged man smirking to himself as he read an old advert for drafting arms, his amusement perhaps arising from a working knowledge of Revit (or maybe it was just the hokey ad copy). The young couple gushing over a drawing by Lina Bo Bardi—displayed alongside schematic plans by French American architect Roger Katan in one of several inconsequential curatorial pairings—certainly looked the part of designers. I’m not sure about the visitor whose head was glued to a video showcasing printing techniques, though I understood the urge. As an index of a mostly vanished material culture, the show was enlightening, but as a show, it bordered on tedious. Lithographs, collages, printing stock (justice for Zipatone!), and period-inflected (specifically, the period from 1950 to 1989) ephemera were neatly deposited on wooden tray tables, a little like the letterpress drawers you might expect to see …