Architects today tend to neglect physical models, once the fundamental tools of their trade. Digital technologies have rendered manual designs for construction inefficient, if not all but obsolete. In her exhibition “Drawing Apart,” which is on view at MIT until April 12th, Katrin Sigurdardóttir shows herself to feel most at home in just this obsolescence. Here she salvages, by choice, the architect’s most anachronistic techniques. MIT List curators Paul Ha and Jeffrey De Blois display the commissioned completion of two series of sculptures the artist has been producing over the past decade. The wooden works included in Ellefu (“eleven” in Icelandic), 2011–15 — model her childhood home in Reykjavík, cut into that exact number of interior segments. After conducting an on-site survey of the structure as a whole, Sigurdardóttir sketched architectural drawings for separate molds later cast, joined, and polished by hand. She has scattered the resulting units across the gallery floor, where their compacted scale conjures the dollhouse. To catch a closer glimpse of exposed hallways and bedrooms, viewers might move onto hands and knees, like children. But these sculptures will disappoint those looking for play: Sigurdardóttir has coated their walls with a forbidding institutional white. Without furniture or decoration, the uncovered interiors evoke cold anonymity. Life has no room in this home. For the present, memories appear absent. They are lost, scraped away, or have yet to be added.If Ellefu models the past in order to abstract and distance it, the sculptures collected in Unbuilt Residences in Reyjkavik, 1925–1930, 2005–15, bring history closer by making it. This second set of works relates to plans for unrealized houses Sigurdardóttir discovered in her hometown’s archives. Having redrawn the basic architectural designs for these structures, the artist created wooden, concrete, and papier-mâché models she subsequently dropped and burned. Sigurdardóttir has picked up the pieces, reassembling the ruined sculptures in various states of imperfection. A new piece produced for the gallery’s exhibition, Unbuilt 6 — Dentist Hallur Hallsson Residence, 2015, has lost all exterior walls during the violent procedure, now possessing only an occasional gray-and-black scab over its gridded wooden framework. This artificial destruction miniaturizes history’s progression. Time becomes tangible, as the dream or future associated with architectural design — unmoved, in the archive — shapes into a memory that haunts.A version of this article appears in the June 2015 issue of Modern Painters.
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