BordeLINE Manifesto

By exploring the transitions between a house and its idea, the exhibition staged in the Hungarian Pavilion seeks to find and present that smallest visually comprehensible element that can be regarded as the nuclear unit of architecture.

The installation in the Hungarian Pavilion places at its focus the LINE instead of the HOUSE as the origin of the architectural idea, and thus highlights the primary state of architecture. The radical manifesto proposed by the exhibition is that architects do not build houses; architects do not create space, but rather draw. They draw lines with computers, and with pens and pencils. Lines which by merit of their sheer existence do not create spaces since they almost always only appear on two-dimensional surfaces. However, the line is the primeval mode of expression for the architect, and is a a medium that represents the idea of architecture to the same degree that a house does. To illustrate this notion, the exhibition places at its centre the architects’ drawings, drawing techniques and generally the line, which is regarded as the raw material of architecture, with the intention of guiding the visitor back to the primary experience captured by the creative act and architecture, i.e. to the line and the act of drawing it.

The drawing and discovery of the line take place in a “space” which is neither local nor international, amateur nor professional, geographical nor utopian but rather universal. This universal space is one for drawing, and in a wider sense, for leaving a mark. The exhibition concept is built upon the notion – which is of course subjective – that the universe represented by the LINE and drawing by necessity bridges the gap between the architecture of nations. It is our conviction that the act of drawing is the common denominator of the work of all architects. Moreover, it is the act of drawing where the professional and the amateur, the old and the young meet.

People meet in drawing.

The central ideas of the project being the birth of the line and its organisation into architecture create a truly architectural exhibition in a non-architectural vein. This concept is based not merely on the drawing but rather its creation, and not only on the line but also its translation into a living architectural idea.

The films about drawing made with the participation of Hungarian and foreign architects, as well as the screenings about the birth of lines will be presented in an installation medium that will allow the line to break out of its heteronomous, two-dimensional existence and appear as an independent, physical entity and a form of architectural organisation. Entering space lines create a new state which alludes to the link between the mass and the body as well as between graphic art and architecture.

The installation programme (BorderLINE) therefore relates to the borders between genres and the communication between them. It equally relates to the geographical sensation of borderlineness in just the same way as the state of mind of the designer split between current and atavistic trends. Finally, it refers to the birth of drawing and architecture and the dichotomy between here and there, the external and the internal, the I and THE OTHER.