Peter Davidson
A Fine Line
12 April - 19 May 2012
Peter Davidson is an internationally renowned architect, best known for designing Melbourne’s Federation Square as co-director of LAB architecture studio. He has also had a distinguished career teaching and lecturing worldwide. Less well known has been Davidson’s life-long obsession with drawing. Since suffering a major and debilitating stroke in 2010 he has focussed on drawing and on intensive rehabilitation. The works in A Fine Line have been selected from more than a thousand drawings that Davidson has created over the past 18 months. Using his non-dominant hand, Davidson’s drawings are meticulous and intricate, tracing a multitude of patterns and forms through the strict constraint of black lines on paper. The line, as architect Daniel Libeskind has noted, is a human structure; “You can hold onto a line, in the sense that people hold onto a hope”. Davidson’s recent drawings take his relentless desire to explore the line in architecture to a different dimension of artistic expression.
Peter Davidson graduated in 1980 from the NSW Institute of Technology in Sydney (now UTS), after which he moved to London and ran his own practice while simultaneously teaching at various institutions. Davidson has taught and lectured internationally including at the AA, London; Bartlett School of Architecture, London; as Adjunct Professor at UTS in Sydney; Visiting Professor at Cooper Union, New York and MIT, Boston. In 1994 Peter Davidson co-founded LAB architecture studio and won the competition to design Federation Square in 1997, at which time he moved from London to Melbourne.