Amazing Building Adventures!
- 2015-11-10
- New York Review
Constructed of sturdy materials and meant to last decades, even centuries, architecture may seem to have little in common with comics, which are printed on cheap paper and prone to being thrown away by one’s mother. Yet the two mediums not only have a natural affinity, but the multi-panel drawing format can do several things that other visual methods cannot to advance broader knowledge of the building art.
An intriguing new exhibition, “Arkitektur-Striper: Architecture in Comic-Strip Form,” at Oslo’s National Museum-Architecture provides a fascinating overview of this phenomenon. Co-curated by the Norwegian institution’s Anne Marit Lunde and the Vienna-based cultural anthropologist Mélanie van der Hoorn (whose 2013 book Bricks & Balloons: Architecture in Comic-Strip Form served as the basis for the show), it proves why a once déclassé graphic genre is able to explain buildings to the general public better than even the most immersive virtual-reality techniques.
Comic strips can vividly illuminate a sequential story, and thus bring alive the often long, tedious, disjointed, and arcane process of architecture. Because so many comics are still hand-drawn, they can portray urban settings that feel much more emotionally alive than the super-slick, digitally altered photos now favored by real estate developers to make their unexecuted plans look as real as possible.
Two parallel but intertwined threads run through “Architektur-Striper”: comics that use architectural motifs, and architects who draw on the conventions of comics to present their designs. Not surprisingly, many modern master builders—like their fellow avant-garde artists in other mediums—drew on pop cultural forms to give their work a more contemporary feel.