Michaelmas 2024
by PhD students Luka Pajovic and Matthew Lloyd Roberts
The exhibition explores different modes of architectural representation between drawings, engravings and photography, asking how these images shape our understanding of architecture and how they relate to buildings which are lost or damaged.
It comprises a collection of drawings and photographs by Pajovic and Roberts, alongside archival material, with a focus on buildings lost to fire and demolition, and how they have been restored, reconstructed or forgotten. How can different modes of representation frame and change the way we think about architecture? What role have the conventions of architectural representation played in shaping our expectations of the built environment? Particularly, what relationship do certain tropes of representation have to the long and complicated life of a building - perhaps even beyond its destruction?
In this small exhibition, we explore a variety of modes of architectural representation: principally drawings and photography to interrogate our assumptions about the choices we make when representing buildings.
How can different modes of representation frame and change the way we think about architecture? What role have the conventions of architectural representation played in shaping our expectations of the built environment? Particularly, what relationship do certain tropes of representation have to the long and complicated life of a building - even, or especially, past the point of their destruction.
Since the revival of classical architecture in sixteenth-century Italy, one of the most basic norms of architectural representation has been the trio of plans, elevations and sections: all forms of 'orthographic projection', which aim to accurately reproduce a building at scale, without the distortions of perspective. Colen Campbell's Vitruvius Britannicus (1715) suggests a typical combination of plan and elevation to depict a building by John Vanbrugh (1664-1726), Seaton Delaval Hall. Thus represented, it formed a part of a catalogue of identically rendered country houses from around England, deliberately styled after the illustrations of Andrea Palldio's Quattro Libri. What are the opportunities and the limitations which apply to this mode of architectural representation?
The axonometric projection of Christ Church Greyfriars in Pajovic's drawing comprises a radically different way of representing a building. While the church survives today as a shell harbouring a beautiful urban garden, the drawing is a product of intensely researched speculative reconstruction, aided by 20th century photography and pre-War surveys. What relationship do these images have to the lost, transfigured, restored or demolished buildings that they depict? Especially if compared to the photographs of Seaton Delaval Hall by Matthew Lloyd Roberts, taken in 2022, three centuries after Vitruvius Britannicus and two centuries after the house was gutted by fire. Photographs can capture a building in a particular moment, but they are just as constrained as drawings and engravings by genre and convention in capturing what the actuality of architecture is.
Luka Pajovic trained as an architect at Cambridge and Yale before undertaking doctoral research on classical vaulting in seventeenth-century England under the supervision of Prof. James Campbell. His drawings build on this body of research, investigating the tension between early modern construction methods and the formal requirements of classical design, chiefly in the work of Sir Christopher Wren and his collaborators.
Matthew Lloyd Roberts is a History of Art PhD student at the University of Cambridge, and member of the Ax:son Johnson Centre for the Study of Classical Architecture. He produces the architectural history podcast About Buildings and Cities and his writing on architecture has appeared 1n Tribune Magazine, The New Statesman and The Critic.
