Drawing ambience: Alvin Boyarsky and the Architectural Association

This book (before was the exhibition) brings together an iconic set of drawings by some of the most prominent architects and artists of our time—including Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Daniel Libeskind, Mary Miss, OMA-Rem Koolhaas, Eduardo Paolozzi, Bernard Tschumi, Shin Takamatsu, and others. The combination of critical texts and close-up reproductions of prints, drawings, and the limited edition AA Folio series provides an unprecedented opportunity to explore both the techniques and the imaginative spirit of drawing practices that permeated this time of change and experimentation in architecture worldwide.

Boyarsky’s tenure at the AA—the United Kingdom’s oldest independent architectural school—coincided with a period of great transformation and experimentation. When appointed chairman by a committee of students and professors (winning a hard-fought battle against historian Kenneth Frampton), the school was facing closure, with a balance sheet in freefall. The cultural crisis of Modernism, the economic recession and cuts to student grants by the then Minister for Education, Margaret Thatcher, (the AA is an independent school) seemed to herald the forced end of the AA, in spite of have been a fad school in the early 1960s thanks to Archigram, because the group’s members had studied and taught there.

Boyarsky argued that architecture was not only a profession but also an artistic venture—a practice that comprises drawing and publication as much as it engages design and construction. During his time leading the school, he orchestrated an ambitious exhibition and publication program, a sister to the exhibition and publication program simultaneously being developed at The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture by John Hejduk, that situated drawing as not only a representational tool, but as a form of architecture in its own right. Drawing Ambience explores Boyarsky’s role as a collector of drawings and also, metaphorically speaking, of the ideas and people that have come to define a key moment in architectural history.

Under his leadership from 1971 until his death in 1990, the AA helped introduce a wide range of concepts and methodologies that remain relevant today. Through a unique constellation of exhibitions, teaching studios, and publication projects, Boyarsky encouraged young architects to embrace the emerging global culture and probe contemporary issues while defining their own visual and spatial languages.

“We fight the battle with the drawings on the walls”. This is how Alvin Boyarsky summed up his strategy at the head of the Architectural Association. In the 1970s, the Architectural Association, better known by the acronym AA, was a fundamental workshop for the architecture of the following decades, and Boyarsky’s leadership was critical to this end.