Romania

The exhibition proposes a reflection on the various forms of intelligence—conceptual, historical, technological, artistic, emotional—embodied in architectural drawing as a form of thinking and reimagining the built space. Situated in a posttechnological present, it aims to recover a kind of humanisation of space by creating meaningful relationships between architecture, the nature that sustains it, and the forms of life that inhabit it, as they appear in the architects' ideal drawings.
Building on the practice of the artist Vlad Nancă—centred on the recontextualisation of human silhouettes in architectural drawings—the Human Scale project explores the vital, emotional and symbolic functions of architecture. A selection of chronologically arranged drawings reconstructs, through the medium of entourage, a condensed social history of architecture imagined and built in Romania throughout the 20th century, marking controversial moments, ideologies and epochs. A collection of original historical maps, from the 15th to 19th centuries, in which people appear as allegorical presences, analyses drawing as a tool for projecting political and social power, and the way architecture contributes to shaping collective identities and influencing historical narratives.