PROVIDENCE, RI.- This spring, the RISD Museum presents Drawing Ambience: Alvin Boyarsky and the Architectural Association. Co-organized with the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis, this is the first public museum exhibition of drawings from the private collection of one of the most influential figures in 20th-century design education.

Drawing Ambience , on view April 24 through August 2, 2015, highlights the impressive collection of drawings assembled by the late Alvin Boyarsky during his pivotal tenure as chairman of the Architectural Association (AA) in London. Boyarsky argued that architecture was not only a profession but also an artistic venture—an open, wide ranging practice that comprises drawing and publication as much as it engages design and construction. During his time leading the school, he orchestrated an ambitious exhibition and publication program that situated drawing as not only a representational tool, but as a form of architecture in its own right. Drawing Ambience explores Boyarsky’s role as a collector of drawings and also, metaphorically speaking, of the ideas and people that have come to define a key moment in architectural history.

John W. Smith, Director of the RISD Museum, says, “This exhibition offers a rare opportunity to display formative works by a generation of architects who are among the most celebrated figures working today—including Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Daniel Libeskind, Rem Koolhaas, and Bernard Tschumi. We are grateful to the Boyarsky Archive for the loan of 43 works on paper, and to the Fleet Library at RISD for the loan of nine folios produced at the AA.”

Boyarsky’s tenure at the AA—the United Kingdom’s oldest independent architectural school—coincided with a period of great transformation and experimentation. Under his leadership from 1971 until his death in 1990, the AA helped introduce a wide range of concepts and methodologies that remain relevant today—including new ways of thinking about public space, the connections between contemporary culture and the built environment, the influence of art on architectural practice, and the importance of international and interdisciplinary dialogue.

Through a unique constellation of exhibitions, teaching studios, and publication projects, Boyarsky encouraged young architects to embrace the emerging global culture and probe contemporary issues while defining their own visual and spatial languages. Central to this approach was Boyarsky’s conception of drawing, which he saw not only as a representational medium, but also a form of architectural inquiry unto itself.

Encompassing site plans, design proposals, unbuilt works, and theoretical investigations, Boyarsky’s collection reflects the collapse of a singular canon of modern architecture and the blossoming of new and varied approaches that are often grouped under the diverse and varied phrase “postmodern architecture.” Highlights range from Eduardo Paolozzi’s appropriations of pop culture to the technological utopianism of Archigram’s David Greene and Michael Webb to the gestural mark-making of Libeskind and Peter Wilson.

“We are excited to bring this collection to RISD,” says exhibition co-curator Jan Howard, Chief Curator and Houghton P. Metcalf Jr. Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs at the RISD Museum. “Particularly as the school’s architecture department has been emphasizing the integration of hand and digital drawing tools as a means of architectural exploration. The extraordinary range of expression and techniques represented in the Boyarsky Archive demonstrates a rich correspondence between the means and concepts in the work.”

The AA of the 1970s and ’80s is often considered one of the last great centers of hand drawing to flourish before the rise of computer-aided modeling and draftsmanship. Boyarsky’s collection of architectural drawings, culled from the work of students and practitioners who passed through the school, constitutes a visual record of an important transitional moment. At the same time, its emphasis on the tactile and exploratory foreshadows the renewed interest—in our own digital age—in links between the hand and the imagination.

In conjunction with Drawing Ambience , a large-scale sculpture from the RISD Museum’s collection fills an adjacent gallery. Falsework: Screen (1980), by Mary Miss, gained a receptive audience among architects for its use of architectural materials and forms, and attests to a period of cross-fertilization between the disciplines.

A study by Miss for an outdoor, site-specific sculpture for the Architectural Association is featured in Drawing Ambience ; its display is the incentive for reinstalling the Museum’s major sculpture for the first time in many years.