Bless This Press

Downtown print studio and exhibition space a83 has spent the past five years holding it down for a once-formidable strain of artistic production: architectural printmaking, a key component of the design process for decades as well as a once popular market for collectors, now rendered functionally obsolete by digital drafting programs. The gallery’s latest show, Architectural Drawing III, follows two previous installments in 2021 and 2023, all exploring the technical and creative possibilities of ink on paper in an increasingly dematerialized world. Together, they make a strong case for the power of the pen, the pencil, and the press, not just as media for creating attractive objets but for footloose experimentation.

Like the previous iterations, III features a remarkably diverse group of seven practices as
well as a correspondingly broad range of conceptual and visual approaches. From well-known New York office MOS, “Dropped Figures” is a sequence of six formal studies, regular geometric shapes in candylike ombre colors of extraordinary delicacy: Never did silk screens look so silky. At the opposite end of the professional and chromatic spectrum, emerging designer Michael Robinson Cohen’s blind-embossed “Housing-as-Housing” prints are ghostly white-on-white palimpsests of building plans that suggest the seriality of J. N. L. Durand’s famed nineteenth-century typology studies, rendered here through a gauze of modernist memory.

Perhaps most appetizing to the nonprofessional palette, the “Flakes of the Snow Country” pictograms from Chinese office Drawing Architecture Studio are luridly hued serigraphs of jazzy, Stuart Davis–ish urban scenes that look like they could pop out from their frames; as
a matter of fact, they can, with the designers offering two small models made from the cutout collage components. Recent Cooper Union grad Gus Crain’s “Ongoing Construction” folio does elegant, almost erotic homage to the humble blue protective tarp, draping it suggestively over concealed and semiconcealed frameworks.

Works from Gore/Hall (dramatic black-and-white landscapes printed on beeswax paper), Bureau Spectacular (construction plans, offered straight up and then in playful abstract variations by paper architect Jimenez Lai), and Young Projects (façade studies of the office’s Glitch House, appearing in pixelated swatches that look alarmingly like a congressional electoral map) round out a very gratifying installation, especially in a83’s quaint, SoHo-when-it-was-still-SoHo street-front loft. With its belowground printing apparatus, the gallery continues to go the extra mile to make architectural printing an alluring and potentially commercially viable enterprise (all the pieces are for sale, if not eminently affordable), while at the same time allowing designers to work out ideas that would otherwise be confined to a screen (the unsilky kind). In short: Don’t stop the presses.