My Kid Can’t Do That

At the closing event of a83’s Parallel Rules exhibition, the second in a series on architectural drawing, the audience was clearly dazzled by the technical virtuosity on show. “You drew all this by hand?” someone tenderly asked Carole Lévesque, who responded in the affirmative. Each piece rewarded prolonged looking: the stunning pen-hatched textures of Lévesque’s massive compositions of architecture and wildlife; the way Galo Canizares’s pixel paintings (actually, silkscreened .gif files) appeared to move; and the granular photographic detail of duo Aelitta Gore and Daniel Hall’s to-scale wall section, down to grass root systems and cracks in dimensional lumber. The works on the walls and the questions in the room kept their distance from the practical realities of building, and yet they registered less as academic speculation and more as a kind of mourning. For this audience member, the fixation on drawing’s laborious production was tinged with a melancholic resignation to the fact that for many architects, architecture is out of reach.