With six dozen works including drawings, photographs and models,KieranTimberlake: Drawn + Quartered, on view at PennDesign’s Architectural Archives through October 14, surveys the careers of Stephen Kieran (MArch’76) and James Timberlake (MArch’77). The exhibit offers a “good look at how drawings shape what architects do,” observes curator William Whitaker. Culled from 12 projects (another 12 are highlighted in a concurrent exhibit at the firm’s studio in Northern Liberties), including several school designs from the office’s early days, many of the works pre-date the rise of CAD-CAM and digital printing and bear markings and corrections from the partners. “We can clearly see how by thinking in fragments, a project’s materials palette, scale, and views come together,” Whitaker explains. “There’s a resilience in an approach that evolves out of a process.You’re taking in complex information, a lot of voices from project architects and clients, and trying to really understand what you want the ultimate outcome to be.”
How did the exhibit come about?
The exhibit was conceived after we gifted works from the earliest years of our practice to the Archive, and William Whitaker said he’d like to take some things from that and put together an exhibit. We were delighted. We realized that the timing for this was near the national AIA Convention to be held in Philadelphia in May 2016. Knowing this, and because we wanted to celebrate the move into our newly renovated studio, the former Ortlieb’s Bottling House, we added another ‘half’ to the exhibit there to create a larger arc of information and to broaden the exhibit. We wanted to relate our early work to the new ways of working that our new studio space allows, namely, full-scale prototyping.
What was its intent?
Work that went to Penn was principally ‘analog’ or drawn, right up until some early computer aided drawing efforts, and the work that would be in our office was three-dimensional, computer aided and enabled visualization, modeling, and prototyping, ergo, the ‘quartered’ or visually prototyped work. That’s how we came up with the title Drawn + Quartered.
What is the thread that unites your work as exhibited and in general?
The two exhibits are synergistic, and we’ve encouraged people to visit both as a means of understanding not only the arc of the work, and KieranTimberlake’s design ethos, but also seeing and appreciating how architecture and production has transformed over nearly 40 years. Arguably, the past 40 years has seen the most dynamic changes to architecture and production in a millennium. From conception, through development, to completion, our intention has been to ‘fail early, fail fast’ by understanding the characteristics of the design, whether it be a plan, an elevation, a critical detail. The drawings and models Bill chose from the material archived demonstrates a variety of tools, depictions, intentions, all used to help us appreciate what we were conceiving and attempting to refine.
Can you offer some general comments on architecture in Philadelphia, its place in the overall canon, and your favorite buildings in town?
Philadelphia architecture has a long, great tradition – and the different eras’ work are well represented from the colonial period to present. Within this, it’s hard to choose one or even several favorite buildings. We admire modest and somewhat obscure building works, and of course, appreciate that the great tradition of architects from William Strickland through Paul Cret. In the modern era, Louis Kahn, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, and Aldo Guirgola are all our own.
Lastly, what does the future hold for the firm?
We have lots of work to do, work within us, thoughts and visions to pursue. We’re having fun, working hard, and trying to get better.
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