LONDON.- Drawing is a fundamental component of Sir John Soane’s Museum, reflecting its importance to Soane’s conception and practice of architecture. Following Soane’s example, this exhibition by leading contemporary practitioner Eric Parry will reveal the enduring centrality that drawing has to architectural practice and culture. It offers a never seen before insight into the extraordinary range of drawings Parry has created over the last four decades, focusing on the three sections: Observing, Designing and Building.

For Eric Parry (b. 1952) drawing is integral to his practice as an architect: not just as a design tool, but as a way of conceiving, reflecting on and analysing buildings and the places they occupy. Across projects as diverse in typology, scale and context as the new buildings at Pembroke College, Cambridge, the Holburne Museum in Bath, the renewal of St Martin-in-the-Fields, One Eagle Place on Piccadilly, 30 Finsbury Square (in the City of London) in Islington and the more recently completed 4 Pancras Square at King’s Cross and Fen Court in the City of London – drawing is always fundamental to Parry’s creative process.

‘Observing’ explores the sketchbooks that Parry first began making in his twenties and which act as a near continuous record and archive of experiences since that time. This includes his travels in Iran and India in the 1970s, teaching at the University of Cambridge and architecture schools across the world, as well as studies of buildings, places, people, and the miscellaneous ideas and observations accumulated running one of Britain’s leading architectural offices.

The sketchbooks are displayed around the Museum in table cases and vitrines designed by Parry especially for this exhibition and presented according to themes and ideas that run through them: character, atmosphere, movement, analysis, precedent.

Displayed in the Museum’s exhibition galleries, ‘Designing’ considers the different ways Parry uses the device of drawing in the process of conceiving, iterating and working up an architectural design. Drawings included in this section of the exhibition relate to buildings of a range of types and scales, from the studio designed for artist Tom Phillips to 1 Undershaft, which when built will be the tallest building in the City of London.

Finally, the ‘Building’ section of the exhibition will reveal how designs are resolved into computer-generated construction drawings that show with immaculate precision the inner workings of Parry’s buildings, such as 30 Finsbury Square, the renewal of St Martin-in-the-Fields and One Eagle Place on Piccadilly.

Eric Parry: Drawing will also include two further interventions in the Museum: a video installation in the Foyle Space exploring the extraordinary construction process of Parry’s 4 Pancras Square, and a corresponding intervention in the Museum’s famous Picture Room, illustrating this particular project from different perspectives.

The exhibition will be supported by a corresponding publication in which Parry, in conversation with exhibition curator, Owen Hopkins, discusses his drawing practice and its centrality to his very conception of architecture. The publication, designed by John Morgan studio, also includes a newly commissioned essay by David Leatherbarrow, Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, USA.

Owen Hopkins, Senior Curator at Sir John Soane’s Museum, said: ‘Eric Parry is one of Britain’s leading architects who, like Sir John Soane, sees drawing as central not only to how architecture is designed, but to the way it connects to history, memory, people and place. This exhibition will offer a unique and privileged insight into Parry’s drawing practice over the last four decades – revealing its role as both design tool and a way of thinking.’

Eric Parry said: ‘I was honoured to be asked to place an exhibition of my drawings in Sir John Soane’s Museum, a context of such significance and intimacy. I have responded to the unique setting by showing works on paper in an ongoing process of observation, design and construction.

Eric Parry studied architecture at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, the Royal College of Art and the Architectural Association. He spent a year studying nomadic settlement in Iran and low cost housing in Kuwait and India in 1974-75.

He established his practice, Eric Parry Architects in 1983 the year Eric was appointed as a lecturer in architecture at the University of Cambridge where he taught until 1997. He maintains a key involvement in all the practices’ projects, particularly in their design development and under his leadership the practice has developed a reputation for delivering beautifully crafted and well considered buildings.

In 2006 he was elected Royal Academician (RA).