TALK | Mark Wigley

TALK | Mark Wigley @wig56
The Drawing that Ate Architecture
17.06 - 19:00

Some time in 1969, the 30-year-old critic and historian Charles Jencks made a blobby diagram that would become as iconic as any drawing of a building or city by an architect. It was labelled “The Evolutionary Tree”, yet is really a kind of landscape image. Thick curving felt-pen lines drawn by hand portray six lightly shaded pulsating chronological strands of architectural activity moving from left to right across the page. They sometimes widen to merge with adjacent strands, or become as thin as a single line, but finally end up more or less the same width as they started. The liberated yet interlinked blobs freely fluctuate in an unending dance – expanding and contracting, merging and diverging. Their restless fluidity is magnified by the unwavering beat of thin vertical lines that mark the passage of eight decades. Architecture constantly throbs – apparently.


Image: Charles Jencks ‘Architecture 2000: An Evolutionary Tree’, 1971
© Charles Jencks

Also check out other Arts events in Ixelles, Fine Arts events in Ixelles.