The second installment in the two-part exhibition of Folios produced by the Architectural Association in London between 1983 and 1991 is now on display at Cooper Union's Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture in New York City. World-Architects stopped by and took some photos.
During his nearly twenty years as chairman of the Architectural Association (AA), from 1971 until 1990, Alvin Boyarsky reshaped the AA as a globally and artistically minded institution with a prolific output of exhibitions and publications. To Boyarsky, drawings were architecture in their own right, and nowhere was this more visible than in the Folios — one of seven publication series produced by the AA in the 1980s — which accompanied exhibitions at the school and were formatted as 12x12" boxed sets of plates, each with a catalog of essays and interviews. When the sketches and drawings exquisitely reproduced on plates were not sitting in their boxes, they were meant to be hung on walls, turned into fine art and replicating the exhibitions they came from. Published in limited runs, the Folios are rare, coveted, and expensive objects that many people have not seen in person, making exhibitions of them welcome.
Fourteen titles in the Folios series were produced between 1983 and 1991, and The Cooper Union Library has all of them in its collection. Last year, the Library and School of Architecture put the first seven Folios, from 1983 to 1985, on display. Although they sat in a third-floor hallway adjacent to the architecture studios, the exhibition was open to the public, so World-Architects stopped by in September to look at the Folios featuring projects produced by Daniel Libeskind, Zaha Hadid, Peter Eisenman, and others.
The second installment opened on January 21 in the same hallway, where it will be on display until February 13. Covering the years 1986 until 1991, one year after Boyarsky's death, the second batch of seven Folios features projects by Bernard Tschumi, Andrew Holmes, Eduardo Paolozzi, Günther Domenig, Shin Takamatsu, Coop Himmelblau, and Kikō Mozuna. Befitting the square format, the plates are mounted behind acetate in gridded displays, while the catalogs with essays and interviews are provided for perusal.
“The AA Folios were circulated around the world,” writes Igor Marjanovic in the catalog to Drawing Ambience: Alvin Boyarsky and the Architectural Association, the 2015 exhibition he curated, “further promoting the AA's global presence while at the same time transforming exhibition contents into peripatetic commodities of intellectual and creative exchange.” With their square format, the most obvious contemporary equivalent to the Folios is Instagram, which architects use effectively to share their projects and process with others around the world. Even Andrew Holmes's Folio from 1986 seems to presage the tiled arrangements that some architects opt for with Instagram. Still, the Folios, though widely distributed, were made with limited print runs and were not reprinted, so they remain exclusive objects, the antithesis of Instagram and other social media. Nevertheless, it seems that architecture students today can learn something from these now-40-year-old creations carefully displayed right outside their studios.
