David Macaulay could be called the wizard of architectural history. In 23 books over three decades, his arresting pen-and-ink illustrations have explored everything from the construction of ancient pyramids to the subterranean systems that support a modern metropolis.
Often marketed to children, these books are equally popular with adults, who appreciate their ability to use a primarily visual language to make history, architecture and engineering clear to laymen.
The first major retrospective of the 60-year-old Macaulay's work opened last week at the National Building Museum here: David Macaulay: The Art of Drawing Architecture, a tour of his work and his methods. Macaulay assisted with the exhibition and was present for The Big Draw, an opening-day event in which visitors may try their own hands at drawing exercises. The show, in fact, encourages this sort of family-friendly viewer participation with sketching stations throughout the gallery.
Macaulay was trained as an architect at the Rhode Island School of Design, but never practiced. Instead, after brief stints as an interior designer and high school art teacher, he returned to the college as an illustration instructor, a position he still holds.
His first children's book, Cathedral, detailing the methods used to build Gothic churches, was published in 1973 and established a formula he has returned to many times - in Pyramid and Castle, for example. He examined the construction of a Roman town in City and the maze of pipes and tunnels under modern cities in Underground. He is perhaps best known for The Way Things Work, which reveals the mechanical and electronic innards of everything from radio telescopes to automatic transmissions.
Much as Macaulay's books deconstruct the built world, the retrospective seeks to "explode and explain" his creative process, said Kathleen Franz, an assistant professor of history at American University, who served as the exhibition's curator. This is most apparent in the first section, Visual Archaeology, which tries to reverse-engineer Mosque, his latest book, published in 2003.
Mosque, which Macaulay has called his response to the events of Sept. 11, explores the construction of 16th-century Ottoman mosques. Visitors to the museum watch an edited version of the home video that Macaulay shot during a research trip to Istanbul, and may page through a reproduction of the sketchbook he kept on the trip. Some of the hundreds of preliminary drawings he made as he chose images for the book are also displayed. (Tellingly, Macaulay refers to his own creative process as "linear chaos.")
In a world of computer-aided design, he continues to do all his drawings by hand, in pen and ink. For this book he also built and photographed a paper architectural model to capture more effectively various angles of the mosque's interior.
Macaulay is known for selecting surprising points of view, and this aspect is highlighted in a section of the show called Playing With Perspective. Here you find his pioneering "worm's eye" depictions of building foundations and city traffic from Underground; his fish-eye view of a medieval hall from Castle; and his pigeon's-eye panoramas of Rome from his fable of love, Rome Antics.
To reinforce the theme, the curators have blown up some of Macaulay's sketches and affixed them to the floor, suspended them from the ceiling or transferred them to glass panes, forcing the viewer to engage in the action - looking down, up or through - suggested by the illustration's perspective.
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