Gustav-Peichl-Awardee 2022: Emma Linnea Carlén

The Gustav Peichl Award for Architectural Drawing was launched in 2014 on the initiative of the graduates of the Gustav Peichl “Meisterschule” of Architecture with the support of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, the Society of Friends of Fine Arts and private sponsors. The award is given biennially to a student of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna for outstanding architectural drawings.

The jury has awarded the Gustav Peichl Award 2022 to Emma Linnea Carlén. It thus honours an artist whose work deal with the medium drawing as a process to define space and searching for ideas, traces, concepts. That is not only shown in her drawings, but also in her sculpture work. By that Emma Linnea Carlén is giving the medium the possibility to act 3dimensional as well.

The awardee convinces with her independent and future-oriented explorations. According to the jury’s statement, her drawings convey technical clarity and are at the same time architectural studies that make her ideas and conceptions readable in an interweaving of Disegno interno and Disegno externo—that is, as internal sketch and external representation simultaneously.

The visualization of fluidities and transitions between the body and the creation of space using different techniques is very convincing. The drawings could be seen as a permission for being successfully precise and at the same time independent from predetermined scales, creating forms of processes of transition.

The trace of movement is often regarded as evidence of that which has past; the drawing as prosthesis or an extension of an engagement of experience yet to occur, further enhances the body as an empathic instrument to apprehend that experience in the comprehension of the blurred edges of implied spatial or architectural containment. The digital is a notational score, the collage and photograph situate the thoughts, and the hand drawn is the improvised occupation. The sculptural forms and range of media in the portfolio demonstrate the ambition to constantly search for a visual voice of encounter.