Architects Are Artists
Exhibit gives Santa Barbara architects space for art for art’s sake

by Zach Mortice
Assistant Editor

How do you . . . host an art exhibit that features the visual arts skills of architects?

Summary: The Architects as Artists exhibit hosted by Santa Barbara’s Arts Alive! gallery showcased the visual artistic abilities of 20 local architects workingin a variety of media. The participants ranged from seasoned art exhibitors to artists whose work had never been seen in pubic before, but all drew encouragement and inspiration from the chance to see the raw creative potential of their fellow colleagues.

For Jason Currie, a project manager at Phillips Metsch Sweeney Moore Architects, painting and drawing are a way to think through the site design process and study a building site from the convenience of his own desk. For Magdalena Corvin of Tectonica Design Partnership, drawing and painting are a way to give her clients a personalized representation of what a completed project will look like. “This is a tool to communicate,” she says. “For me, it’s mandatory to practice that skill.”

For both of these architects and about 20 others in the Santa Barbara, Calif., area, the Architects as Artists exhibit at the Arts Alive! Creativity Center was an opportunity to showcase their artistic skills outside their profession. Arts Alive! (a gallery and art classroom space in Santa Barbara) hosted the exhibit from April 13 to May 19. The 200-square-foot gallery and several classrooms were filled with photography, sculpture, computer models, paintings, and drawings all created by area architects. Forty percent of all proceeds from sales of the art work were donated towards arts scholarships for children.

Laura Inks, the owner of Arts Alive!, organized the exhibit with a bit of help from the local AIA component, which provided e-mail contact lists. She says she tapped architects to exhibit work because of their sometimes unconsidered fine arts tendencies. “I was just trying to think of different subcultures in our town that have artists involved that maybe don’t have an opportunity to exhibit,” Inks says.Additionally, Architects as Artists was a way to bring the close-knit community of Santa Barbara architects together and introduce a few lesser-know architect-artists. “There are a few architects who are known as artists here in town, and those names flip off of everybody’s tongue pretty quickly, and it’s nice to have people who weren’t known for art work show their stuff.”

A revealing look
Architects as Artists was the first time Stephanie Christoff, Assoc. AIA, formally exhibited her work. She contributed a series of drawings on a theme she has been developing for about 10 years. Her pieces are impressionistic re-interpretations of maps as seen through various social and experiential lenses, such as the speed and velocity of movement, circulation, and specific geography. Formerly a double major in art and architecture at Rice, Christoff says she uses these same social and experiential lenses to organize building plans for her firm Christoff Design. Strikingly abstract and decontextualized, Christoff’s pieces still retain a few fundamental map signifiers—lines that clearly demark breaks in represented geography and color, and omnipresent grid systems of modern cities.

Seeing her own work and the work of other architects in the community on display was a revealing process for Christoff. “[The exhibit] is a window into what is the foundation of what people are bringing into their architecture, but it has the freedom of not having to be built,” she says.

Inspiring surroundings
Ed Lenvik, AIA, of Lenvik & Minor Architects, also brought his landscape and cityscape watercolors. His firm specializes in commercial and industrial work in Southern California, and he encourages all his employees to draw and paint. “It makes us better architects,” he says. “We are able to see more clearly, not only the landscapes we live in, but also the built environment we live in.”

For years, every Saturday, he and William Mahan, Emeritus AIA; Fred Sweeney, AIA; and Peter Ehlen, a structural engineer, paint together at Mahan’s studio, where they draw inspiration from the vibrant Spanish-style villas common to the native architecture of Santa Barbara. All of them exhibited their work at Architects as Artists, and all of them also host yearly art shows to sell their work. These breezily romantic, terra-cotta vistas were a common touchstone for many of the artists at the exhibit. “We love our architecture here,” says Mahan. “The buildings are very paintable.” Mahan, the sole proprietor of a firm specializing in these native architectural forms, learned drawing and painting as part and parcel of his architectural education at Iowa State University 50 years ago, and generally begins buildings renderings with colored pencil sketches. “[Art] is part of the practice of architecture,” he says.

Corvin’s architecture and design firm Tectonica Design Partnership specializes in adaptive reuse with an eye towards green and sustainable design. The pen and ink, pencil, and color marker drawings she brought to the exhibit are also coastline depictions of local architecture. Originally trained as an artists and a designer, Corvin calls her art and architecture “inseparable” from each other.

Inks hopes that all architects would keep their passion and career so close together. “People get caught up in making money and lose sight of the enjoyment of creating and exhibiting,” she says. “If there’s an opportunity to exhibit and there’s enough advanced notice, then it kind of gives them the impetus to create.”