Boullée’s Drawing Praxis and the Contemporary Speculative Practice

This paper examines the relationships between the drawing praxis of Boullée and the contemporary speculative practices. The modus operandi on drawing is discussed through the lens of ‘speculation’. Drawings are used to probe, anticipate, and to project his imagination of utopia, where the ‘thing’ of drawing and the idea behind it forms the vessel to the uncharted frontier on science and reason. Another type of drawing is embraced by practices emerged out of the post- Bilbao exuberance, a period after the completion of Gehry’s magnum opus in 1997 until the 2008 Recession. A tendency dominated by, and relied upon speedy image-making, and disseminated through social media for mass consumption. The appetite for architecture as images stemmed from two coinciding conditions. First, the explosion of emerging markets and its demand for building construction. Second, the widespread and ease of use of computational tools in creating architectural shapes and images. These practices are often associated with transnational architectural firms that are conjoined to the capitalistic preconditions. The production of the drawings in these practices are to elevate and enhance the potentiality of the property owners, investors or the State. The objective is not to advance a visionary agenda in the avant-garde sense of the tradition, but rather to visualize the speculative monetary return.

https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.AM.109.36

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ISBN
978-1-944214-37-1