If the Futurists taught us anything, it was that architectural drawing needn’t always result in actual architecture. Rather, artful renderings can simply exist in their pencil-and-paper form as ideological manifestos, dreamy inspirations, or perhaps the launching points of more practical physical realities. “Paper Architectures: Drawings from Piranesi to Mallet-Stevens,” an exhibition opening tomorrow at Paris’s Musée Nissim de Camondo, a Belle Époque mansion that is part of Les Arts Décoratifs, displays a compendium of architectural drawings from the museum’s permanent collection. From Louis-Pierre Baltard’s moody draft for the never-completed reconstruction of Paris’s Église Saint-Sauveur to Achille Duchêne’s 1930s design for an idyllic imaginary garden in an Icelandic crater, the show nods to the constant tug-of-war between fantasy and reality that will forever play out in architecture.
March 26 through June 21 at Musée Nissim de Camondo, 63 rue de Monceau, Paris; lesartsdecoratifr
Click here to see highlights from the exhibition.
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