A “worm’s eye cavalier view”, I learn, places you within and without a drawing. This perspective, pioneered by the early modern military artists of Europe to portray fortifications, can suggest spatial depth, while providing the illusion of surveying a building’s heights from its own foundations.
In Luka Pajovic’s walnut-ink-on-paper cutaway of St Stephen Walbrook, this perspective allows you to gaze right up at the dome of Christopher Wren’s masterpiece in the City of London, while admiring the Corinthian columns in miniaturist detail. The warm pigment opens up the church’s glorious interiors like a doll’s house.
Pajovic’s picture is one of several jewels in this year’s Architecture Drawing Prize held at Sir John Soane’s Museum in central London. The award encompasses both hand-drawn and digital depictions of real and imagined buildings, from a coal power station’s second life as a verdant apartment block, to a futuristic buckling streetscape illuminated by suspended yellow taxis.
Architects often fret that architectural drawing has become something of a dying art in the 21st century. But this tiny exhibition – only let down by its cramped gallery – fizzes with ideas. Take Grundtvig by Ben Johnson, in which the artist uses superfine ink to trace Peder Vilhelm Jensen Klint’s vernacular gothic-revival church (completed in 1940) in Copenhagen, which resembles a mighty pipe organ. Under sunlight, Grundtvig’s yellow stones – six million of them – emit a buttery glow.
But Johnson’s austere portrait – in which colour and texture are bled out – strips the church down to pure line, conveying the sense of endless halls within halls. The way your eye works its way around Johnson’s study does not reproduce what the church looks like in reality at all, but perhaps – I like to think – how its vaulted interior might be recalled in memory.
