GAS TANK CITY

Architectural Association, Bedford Square, London WC1B 3ES

​The Architectural Association presents an exhibition by Andrew Holmes to coincide with the publication of the book GAS TANK CITY.

For 50 years Andrew Holmes has pursued the trucks, trailers, tanks and highways of the American West, capturing them in a series of identically sized
large-scale hyperreal colour pencil drawings. In this exhibition at the AA, Holmes presents a selection of 17 of these drawings.

In Holmes’ deliberately balanced compositions, viewers glimpse the fetishes of blue collar America: the classical Kenworth truck, the baroque curve of the stainless container and the pearlised gleam of a custom car. Viewed as a series, the drawings are a record of a vanishing civilisation: the era of oil.

They are an attempt to get down the feelings of an architect encountering a momentary vision of an anonymous architecture, which is beyond the powers
of the profession to produce. Its anonymity derives in part from mass-produced industrial components. The tolerances involved call for expertise in custom manufacture that no architect could individually command. Their construction depends upon practical wisdom provided by contractors and
skilled workmen. Such structures are subject to rapid decay if not rigorously and sensitively maintained. The building is, therefore, not a fixed thing, but exists along a trajectory in time of purposeful social activity.

Once architecture is reconceived in this way, there is no reason not to expand the term to cover the entire system of supply by road in which the urban oasis of Los Angeles is suspended. Complex industrial structures of remarkable scale and intricacy are in continual motion through this system, manoeuvred and maintained by highly skilled individuals. As architecture it cannot be
encompassed by plan or rendering; merely to conceive its extent is to grasp one’s inability to do more than glimpse temporary fragments, and it will be
only through these that it can be represented. The process of drawing is the process of investing a photographic trace of the fragment with the sense of its
sublime, ungraspable whole. The investment is effected through all the small decisions over emphasis, contrast, and simplification taken through time. The
self-denying discipline involved yields a palpable tension in the works, particularly in the achingly sustained areas of unbroken colour.

The book, GAS TANK CITY, presents over 100 of Holmes’ drawings, along with commentaries by art historian Thomas E Crow, architects Mark Fisher and Cedric Price, and Holmes himself.

Andrew Holmes said: “David Greene said I am a monk, but a monk in a car. If the car and the drawing board are my cell I have spent over 20 years alone in
it.”

Ingrid Schroder, Director of the Architectural Association, said: ‘This exhibition is a testament to the extremes of fascination, and what this fascination, and its
manifestation through drawing, can make possible.’