Drawing, Design for a Building

This architectural drawing by Stanley Saitowitz may have been created as part of the Walker Art Center’s Architecture Tomorrow project, in which six promising American firms were given the opportunity to develop their own architectural exhibitions. Saitowitz’s exhibition, entitled Geological Architecture, was shown at the Walker Art Center from June 3-August 19, 1990. In his accompanying essay, published in Design Quarterly in 1991, Satowitz states that “architecture is human geography, concordant with site–resonant, dissonant, amplified, harmonic.”
The design in this drawing bears a distinct resemblance to Saitowitz’s startlingly original 1978 design for the Transvaal House, located on a six-acre plot on a highland plateau in South Africa. Both structures are semi-circular, characterized by rounded roofs, and rise up out of their respective sites, though the house in this drawing is covered by one continuous roof unlike the stepped-design roof of the Transvaal house.
Like many of the smaller structures designed by Saitowitz in the early period of his career, this design seamlessly blends the natural and built environments, incorporating the landscape itself into the form of the house. Set into what appears to be a hill, the window on the ground floor recedes from the land on which the structure is built.
This structure also relates to a series of designs for a group of nine buildings developed by Saitowitz in 1991 for Mill Race Park in Columbus, Indiana, which bridge natural elements with urban life and feature similarly curving, pierced roof elements. Speaking about his designs for the picnic shelters, boathouse, and restrooms at Mill Race Park in 1992, Saitowitz described a design process that relates strongly to the house in this drawing: “The genetic structure of the buildings derives from formal explorations that revolve around the roof as the origin of shelter making–roofs as fragments of the dome of sky cut by forms that emerge on the ground as plan. . . The language is drawn from squares intersecting with circles, interpreted specifically in relation to site or program.”

Drawing, Design for a Building; Designed by Stanley Saitowitz (American, b. South Africa, 1949); pen and ink, brush and watercolor on tracing paper; 66 × 91.4 cm (26 × 36 in.); From Lise, Ceil, and Zoe Friedman in honor of their mother, Mildred Friedman; 2017-69-2