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| Artist at home, in the studio, working on a capriccio of buildings in Jersey |
Laubin is an American, born in New York City in 1947. He studied architecture at Cornell University. He moved to London and worked for ten years with a firm of modernist architects – Douglas Stephen & Partners before joining the firm Jeremy Dixon. He became a full time artist in the late '80s. Carl Laubin's paintings explore the many aspects of architecture - existing or imaginary, present or future - with topographic precision. He painted a capriccio of Nicholas Hawksmoor in 1996, and more recently Palladio, Sir Christopher Wren, C.R. Cockerell and Claude-Nicolas Ledoux. His latest works include two capricci of Vanbrugh in 2011.
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| Recent exhibition at the Plus One Gallery, 2011 |
Sorcerer at the drafting table
Architectural artist Carl Laubin transforms the subject of blueprints into the stuff of dreams
Writing of "that kind of architectural draughtsmanship which I hold to be most important to the welfare of architecture, the draughtsmanship that shows the public what to expect in what is not yet built, and what to look for in it when it comes into being", the British architect and historian H. S. Goodhart-Rendel asserted that "when architecture again becomes pleasant to draw, many happy draughtsmen will arise to celebrate its restoration." That was in 1951, when the pictorial perspective-the watercolor rendering that depicts a design in three dimensions, sitting in context on the ground-seemed a thing of the past. The modern movement was in the ascendant and anything so subjective and pretty was eschewed as potentially misleading. Buildings had to be represented in purely objective geometrical drawings - plans, elevations, and sections - which many nonarchitects, including clients, had difficulty understanding. The result was an architecture that, whatever its merits, was often arrogant, alien, and utterly unloved by the public.
But what Goodhart-Rendel prophesied has come to pass. The revival of a more traditional architecture, a new classicism, has gone hand in hand with the revival of fine draftsmanship. Architects are again rendering their designs in perspective, using color and pictorial techniques. Above all, there has been the emergence in Britain, of the extraordinary talent of Carl Laubin. No other architectural artist today is producing such evocative and sophisticated work, images that not only convey a convincing impression of a design in three dimensions but show it in use, inhabited, its surfaces weathered, taking its place alongside the buildings of earlier ages.
Carl Laubin suddenly emerged in 1986. I well remember the shock of seeing his paintings of Jeremy Dixon's design's for enlarging the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden which showed the piazza under an evening sky and the new colonnades bustling with life. It was a shock of unalloyed pleasure and of recognition: here was an accomplished artist of a kind we had not seen for decades. I inquired and was told that Laubin was an architectural assistant in Dixon's London Office who painted in his spare time and had been persuaded, reluctantly, to produce a perspective of the controversial project for the opera house.
The real story is a little more complicated - and interesting. Laubin is an American, born in New York City in 1947. He studied architecture at Cornell University, where the influential architectural historian and critic Colin Rowe opened his eyes to the past, especially the Renaissance, and impressed him with the idea of a modern "collage city" full of the same sort of happy collisions and coincidences that now occur in Laubin's own urban scenes.
After graduating from Cornell, he moved to London and worked for ten years with a firm of orthodox modernist architects before joining Dixon, a designer who is at home in various styles. Intrigued by his brilliant draftsman who worked a four-day week to leave time for painting, Dixon asked Laubin to execute a perspective of the firm's housing scheme for Compass Point on the Isle of Dogs, then under construction. The result was a view of the gabled row houses as they might look after a few years, with their brickwork mellowed and puddles on the riverside terrace reflecting the cloudy London sky. Dixon was evidently impressed, for the opera house perspectives soon followed. Then came commissions from architects Leon Krier, John Outram, and John Simpson to render their classical designs, and Laubin's career took off. He now paints architecture full-time.
In some ways Laubin's perspectives are quite different from those of the past. For a start, he paints in oils, rather than in gouache or watercolor, giving his images rich coloring and depth (this technique also permits overpainting as a design evolves in response to Laubin's three-dimensional exploration of its form). If his work has any link with the British school of draftsmanship that flourished in the first four decades of this century, it is closer to the fastidiously detailed watercolors of the prolific Cyril Farey than it is to the dramatic impressionism of William Walcot, Edwin Lutyens's favorite renderer. Rather Laubin must be compared with architect-artists of the neoclassical period who painted visions of antique splendor with luminous clarity, such as Leo von Klenze and Karl Friedrich Schinkel in Germany or J.M. Gandy in England.
Laubin's work is also reminiscent of early twentieth century British landscape painters like Algernon Newton, who portrayed London streets with almost surrealist precision. Newton's spaces tend to be empty and eerily melancholy, however, whereas Laubin's teem with life. Here he scores over almost all other perspectivists, past and present, for, unlike them, he can draw people and does not need another hand to introduce figures in front of the accurate "setting -up" of a building. (The son of a musician who painted, Laubin took life classes at school as part of his training). And his figures are memorable, tantalizing: a solitary girl on Dudgeon's Wharf, modelled on the artist's wife; circus acrobats in the Covent Garden piazza; surpliced choirboys crossing a redesigned Paternoster Square near Saint Paul's Cathedral.
But Laubin's greatest strength is that he gives an air of time's passage to architects' conceptions, for patina is crucial to the beauty of architecture. It is all too easy to imagine how steel and concrete will look after a few years in the London atmosphere - which is why Laubin generally prefers depicting classical buildings with their masonry that takes on a subtle layering of textures with age. Nevertheless, unwilling to be stylistically typecast, he has done commissioned perspectives of the arid modernist interior of Colin St. John Wilson's new British Library and, off his own bat, painted Cesar Pelli's slick Canary Wharf Tower, although these are far from his most compelling works. His romantic realism veered close to sentimental cliché in depicting the rather twee Englishness of a villagelike development at Poundbury commissioned by the Prince of Wales.
Laubin is at his best representing the schemes of architects who interpret the monumental classical past with imagination and vigor. Paintings of Leon Krier's ideal city of Atlantis, set in a landscape reminiscent of the Canary Islands, are particularly captivating and belong in the great tradition of architectural fantasies. Although Laubin is a master at glamorizing the often rather pedestrian designs of our new classicists, the original fantasies to which he occasionally turns his hand (Le Reve d'architecte a Bordeaux, exhibited at the Centre Georges Pompidou, comes to mind) lead me to suspect he has more imagination than some of his architect -clients. I long to see new realizations of his own architectural visions, for he is indeed a happy draftsman in a noble tradition.