Christo's Corridor Store Front: Social Isolation and the Wildly Ordinary

This essay was written during a COVID-19 lockdown period. It was prompted while contemplating an image of Christo’s Corridor Store Front project, which spurred a rumination on architectural drawings as portraiture, on the reciprocity between the drawer and viewer of an image, and on the capacity for a drawing’s construction to invite an active exchange. These concepts are discussed alongside an observation regarding beauty and pleasure in the midst of social isolation and confinement—the contraction of spatial experience—that has taken place during the global pandemic. In this historical moment, a profusion of impromptu artworks has emerged across social media channels. This essay suggests that everyday happenings occurring in people’s homes have found an attuned audience who have engaged with their environments with aesthetic perception and captured incidental and temporal compositions around them. The mundane has, in this way, been collectively transposed into the phenomenal. Finally, the essay asks whether architectural drawings can deliberately preserve space for their completion in the mind of a viewer, and proposes that familiarity could be understood as an invitation into imaginative attention.