Architect: Peddle Thorpe
Size: 50cm x 35cm
Medium: gouache and watercolour
1994

David Hoedmaker Juror Award
The American Society of Architectural Perspectivists

Published in Architecture in Perspective 10
Rockport Publishers, Inc
1995, p. 22.

'At first glance, we may think this is a nice drawing of a very modest building. We might not know where this city is, but we know it's not Manhattan, Rio de Janeiro, or even Seattle, for that matter. We're not talking about the glitz of light and steel, the melodrama of urbanity or spectacle of site here. This is a case where the artist has reminded us of the reason people started designing buildings like these. They have, of course, fallen out of fashion (we've learned too well from Las Vegas). But here we see how attractive simple lines can be when the architecture is clean and new, when it is made within an appropriate scale, and when it is set in a kind relation to nature, that is, water and bushes.

"At school she learned to draw a map of the valley with the river coloured in blue. It was never blue. Sometimes the Giffre was the colour of bran, sometimes it was grey like a mole, sometimes it was milky, and, and occasionally, but very rarely, as rare as the siren for accidents, it was transparent, and you could see every stone on its bed." (John Berger, Once in Europa)

This is a brave drawing. It may not feed the ego of an architect or a developer, but it sure makes you feel good about drawing. It may be as close to a classic work of contemporary art as anything here, because it acknowledges the value of the banal. Its great insight is that resonancse feeds off restraint, something all too often overlooked in our world. The water is not used as a sparkling mirror that redoubles a striking image of the architecture, but as an unassuming space in the drawing which shows a correspondence to the flat planes in the building. At its essence is a confident dignity that takes things as they are and sees something special in that modest reality.'

- David Hoedemaker 1995
 

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