Since the 1970s, Nancy Wolf has created fantastical drawings of architectural and urban landscapes. Her style evolved from satirical depictions of iconic designs and parodies of modernist urban utopias, rendered in graphite and ink, to mockeries of postmodern urban scenography in colorful acrylic and gouache. With their striking critical character, her drawings register transformations, tensions, and clashes in the contemporary built environment and in the ways it has been imagined, produced, used, changed, replaced, and represented.
This dialogue asked what Wolf’s drawings tell us about the recent history of architecture and urbanism, how her work has been received, and where it stands in the history of paper architecture.