Lenard Smith
Entropy of Form
October 3–November 7, 2026
Press Release / Images
Traditional architectural models were built from physical materials such as wood or cardboard. Often, a human figure was placed against the model to clarify the building’s scale. As digital tools have become more prevalent, physical models have become less common—most architects today create virtual models designed in an essentially scaleless digital space. The objects that appear across Lenard Smith’s iterative photographic constructions could easily have been composed from the scraps from an old-school model shop.
Notwithstanding the speculative importance of what is termed “paper architecture,” architects generally conceptualize structures that they expect will be built. Architectural drawings in the form of diagrams, sketches, floor plans, sections, details, etc. are instrumental drawings used to study and ultimately build the design. Architectural representations are partial representations of their subject—they are neither buildings themselves nor autonomous works of visual art.
Architecture is, of course, bound by the forces of gravity. Photography, on the other hand, inherently defies gravity. Unlike a building, which needs to stand up, the photograph’s subject only needs to “stand” long enough for the camera to record it. Many of Smith’s objects appear to defy the forces of gravity—interestingly, the modern cantilever originated in the mid-nineteenth century, not long after the discovery of photography.
Early twentieth-century images, art, models, buildings, and monuments were both formally radical and ideologically charged: they were utopian in conceit and often heroic in nature. Today, although we live in the aftermath of twentieth-century modernism, this utopian impulse has been largely discredited. In his 1931 essay “A Short History of Photography,” written just before fascism took hold in Germany, Walter Benjamin quotes Bertolt Brecht in a passage that speaks to the relation of photography and works of modern architecture. For Brecht, he writes, the situation is “‘complicated by the fact that less than at any time does a simple reproduction of reality tell us anything about reality. A photograph of the Krupp works or [AEG] yields almost nothing about these institutions. Reality proper has slipped into the functional. The reification of human relationships, the factory, let’s say, no longer reveals these relationships. Therefore something has actually to be constructed, something artificial, something set up.’”1
So what is it that’s constructed, made artificial, or set up in Smith’s photographs? Are they studies for potential structures, buildings, or monuments? What are we to make of these images, which seem to oscillate between the flatness of photography and the three-dimensionality of architecture? Associations with domesticity and habitability emerge from the photographs, which initially read as purely abstract: does the form denote a roof, a fireplace flue, a bench, a covered porch, a group of towers on a plinth, a group of towers without a plinth?
Though I’ve been a practicing architect for over thirty years, photography was my first love. Prior to studying architecture, I studied photography at CalArts with the late writer and photographer Allan Sekula in the late 1980s. At the time, in certain critical and academic circles, the idea that meaningful (i.e., political) photographs needed to be grounded—anchored or captioned with words—was prevalent. So when Lenard asked me to write the press release for this exhibition, I was apprehensive. I could hear Allan’s voice in the back of my head:
Allan: Peter, where is your text?
Peter: I am working on it.
—Peter Tolkin, TOLO Architecture
- Walter Benjamin, “A Short History of Photography,” trans. Stanley Mitchell (Berlin: Die literarische Welt, 1931; repr. London: monogram, 1972), 24. ↩︎
Lenard Smith is a first-generation Ghanaian-American artist and educator who lives and works in Los Angeles. He has exhibited his work throughout the United States and abroad. Smith is a 2024 MacDowell Fellow. His work is included in the permanent collections of The Wallis Annenberg Photography Department at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Whitney and Lee Kaplan African American Visual Culture Collection at the Getty Research Institute, California Museum of Photography, and Light Work, among others. He is currently teaching Large Format Photography at USC Roski School of Art and Design.