When architecture wanted to be drawing

Resumen

Abstract

Drawing has always been considered an instrument subordinated to the ultimate object of architecture: the real construction of the building. However, since the foundation of the discipline in the fifteenth century, this relationship has sometimes been questioned, altered, and even inverted, coming to confuse reality and its representation. Through the study of the Museum of Roman Art of Mérida, by Rafael Moneo; the first urban projects carried out by Ricardo Bofill in France at the beginning of the 1980s; and the restoration project of the Chapel of San Isidro developed by Javier Vellés between 1986 and 1990, this article delves into the last episode of this phenomenon. Due to the effort of its authors to carry out the liberal exercise of the profession, by means of the restitution of their specific instruments, these architectures would be conceived through the drawing, and it is possible to appreciate in their configuration the same types of illusions of the drawing. These works suggest a wish to bring reality closer to representation, transfering something pictorial to something stereotomic, and materialize those illusions previously deposited on the paper, with the techniques that made possible the physical building of architecture. Eventually, these works reveal the desire of its architects to build the drawing, but, ultimately, they will come to highlight the continuities and incompatibilities between the architecture trapped in the paper, and the production system that make it possible.