Every single day for the year of 2020, artist and architect Shaun Gaylard sat down after work, and set about drawing an architectural illustration of 365 of the country’s most iconic buildings.
After he was finished, he’d post his distinctive work on Instagram: one a day for an entire year. "I used to finish work at around five o’clock, take about half an hour break, and then do the drawing and go to bed," he recalls. Then he’d wake up and do it all over again.
Each drawing took him four to five hours. "In 2021, I think I posted two pictures," he laughs.
Gaylard has earned a name for himself with his beautifully restrained and delicately executed architectural drawings since he first started doing them under the moniker Blank Ink Design in 2013.
He’s been included in some pretty prestigious collections since then, including the Brenthurst Library, and was commissioned to design the SA25 gold coin, which was issued to commemorate 25 years of constitutional democracy in SA. (No points for guessing the building he chose … answer: the Constitutional Court.)
His architectural city guides, named for their airport codes — PTA, JHB, LDN, NYC and HKG — are popular among ordinary punters and architecture aficionados alike.
But this undertaking — conceived, surprisingly, before the pandemic, though it no doubt played a role in galvanising it — took his project to a whole new level.
He was absolutely delighted when Spier bought the entire collection, first, he says, because the collection will remain unified, and second, because the Spier Collection has undertaken to show it from time to time at architecture biennales and the like, so it won’t disappear indefinitely into an archive.
Gaylard says that for him, seeing all his drawings exhibited together presents a unique opportunity to consider the buildings "on an equal footing". It’s as if each building has been distilled into its pure architectural form, without context and signage; even stripped of colour.
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Gaylard says that as he studied pictures and photographs of the buildings he selected (and went to see them — he took two sight-seeing road trips around SA) he found himself contemplating both the personal and the political aspects of their designs. (The technical too — he points out that looking at their roofs on Google Earth helped him to understand how each building "works".)
As he draws, he says, "I often think about the architect and [wonder] what they were thinking when they built the building. I sometimes … wonder why they did this, or why they added that."
At the same time, contemplating these buildings has given him a sense of the sweep of history, and the commentary our built environment embodies. "You can see what’s happening in the world at that time" he says. "It speaks to the kind of government that is in power … and where people are socially."
From the decorative Victorian and early 20th-century buildings, through the rise of modernism and Apartheid brutalism, to the more recent developer-led architecture when, Gaylard says, buildings "become very boring", these illustrations tell us about ourselves: about how values and aspirations take form and quite literally shape the world.
"Some of the buildings I might not even like, but I think that they add to the narrative of SA architecture," he admits. He’s redrawn some old favourites to fit the scale and style of the series, too, and included some that bring us right up to date in 2020. (He notes, by the way, that architecture in SA is getting interesting again, and that we’ve realised that "we can’t just cover everything in glass".)
While the Spier Collection might have snapped up the originals, limited-edition prints are available at blankinkdesign.com, and a book is in the pipeline, due out in July (you can preorder online at the same address).
And now that he’s had a year to recover? "I am planning on doing Australia next," he says.
*RSA 365 is on at the Spier Arts Trust, Union House, Cape Town, until April 14 2022
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