Mark Wigley
The Drawing that Ate Architecture
© Charles Jencks
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.
This talk will be followed by the talk with Beatriz Colomina "We the Bacteria - Notes Towars Biotic Architecture"
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Mark Wigley is a Professor and Dean Emeritus at the Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. As an architectural theorist and historian, Wigley explores the intersection of architecture, art, philosophy, culture, and technology. His books include Konrad Wachsmann’s Television: Post-Architectural Transmissions (Sternberg Press, 2020), Passing Through Architecture: The 10 Years of Gordon Matta-Clark (Power Station of Art, 2019); Cutting Matta-Clark: The Anarchitecture Investigation (Lars Müller, 2018); Are We Human? Notes on an Archaeology of Design (with Beatriz Colomina; Lars Müller, 2016); Buckminster Fuller Inc.: Architecture in the Age of Radio (Lars Müller, 2015). He was the co-curator of “We the Bacteria Notes. Toward Biotic Architecture” (Triennale Milano, 2025) and of the 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial in 2016 (both with Beatriz Colomina), the curator of “The Human Insect: Antennas 1886-2017” at Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam in 2018 and “Passing Through Architecture: The 10 Years of Gordon Matta-Clark” at the Power Station of Art, Shanghai (2019–20).
