Exhibit: Adèle Naudé Santos: Drawing Experience

For immediate release
Adèle Naudé Santos: Drawing Experience

On view starting February 16, 2024 

MIT Keller Gallery, 77 Mass Ave, 7-408, Cambridge, MA
 

Cambridge, MA, February 12, 2024 – MIT announced that Adèle Naudé Santos: Drawing Experience – an exhibition celebrating the release of Santos’s inaugural monograph – is on view at the MIT Keller Gallery through March 15, 2024.

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In her new monograph, A Form of Practice, Adèle Naudé Santos writes: “It is not enough to solve the problem at hand but the enhancement of the experience. An appropriate architecture finds a deliberate fit within the context, through incorporation or deliberate opposition.” This exhibition takes on the monograph as its context, emphasizing how Santos’s commitment to the “enhancement of the experience” is realized through her chosen form of expression: drawing. Drawing Experience is dedicated to the architect’s four decades of practice, defined by a steadfast devotion to envisioning and constructing from the user’s perspective. Central here are Santos’s narrative sketches, emblematic of her design philosophy and characterized by her signature arrows. As guiding forces within her designs, these arrows offer us glimpses into the career she has committed to uniting people with one another and with their environment. The exhibition mirrors the monograph’s four chapters, tracing Santos’s journey from her early years in Cape Town to her tenure as dean of the School of Architecture and Planning at MIT from 2004 to 2015. Drawing Experience, ultimately, is a testament to her drawing experience. But more importantly, it serves as a tribute to a design ethos that projects outward, from the human to the sky, embodying all the values that such direction entails. Through their depth of analysis, their visual clarity, and their emphasis on the duty of architecture to serve those who engage it, Santos’s drawings still point an important path forward for the teaching, and practice, of architecture.

About the MIT Department of Architecture

The MIT Department of Architecture opened its doors in 1868 as the first Architecture department in the United States. MIT Architecture is currently home to around 250 graduate and undergraduate students. Numbered among the Department’s over 5,000 alumni are Sophia Hayden ’1890, Robert R. Taylor ’1892, I.M. Pei ’40, and Charles Correa ’55.
 

Special Thanks

J. Yolande Daniels, Joel Carela, Chris Grimley, Ashley Simone, Brooke Biro, and Jim Harrington.
 

Curation and Exhibition Design

Mohamad Nahleh, Lecturer in Architecture and Urbanism

Nicholas de Monchaux, Professor and Head of Architecture
 

Visitor Information

MIT Keller Gallery, 77 Mass Ave, 7-408, Cambridge, MA
 

Monday through Saturday, 9AM to 6PM
 

Media contact
Joel Carela
Communications Coordinator, MIT Department of Architecture
jcarela@mit.edu / 617-253-0692