For the IDEAS CITY 2015 Street Program, The Drawing Center presented Balmori Associates’ Meditation Room: Horizon, on Saturday, May 30. In this two-layer, continuous wall of paper, mounted on to a sinuous frame of galvanized tubing, the overlapping of two dot matrix systems came together to create a visible horizon. 

Meditation Room: Horizon explored basic traits of landscape, in this case, the effect of an expansive open horizon – water and sky – inside a busy urban one, chiefly distinguished by the presence of multiple horizon lines stacked one over another. 

The idea for creating Meditation Room came from Diana Balmori’s practice of a daily 10-minute meditation prior to drawing for another 10 minutes. She said, “What happens is there are different layers of concentration for seeing and therefore you begin to see more things, but it undoes that first impression. It’s only deep concentration that does that. Deep concentration means that you’re stuck in this busy highway that you have up in your mind, which is constantly telling you, “Oh, the next thing is this and the next thing is that. Have you done this, have you done that?” Drawing stops everything. It creates a meditative moment.”

The piece, installed at Sara Roosevelt Park, explored horizon and peripheral vision to decode how designers perceive landscape and draw it accordingly. “The physical response to what you look at is vital; it activates the seeing,” Balmori continued. The pleasure of drawing, she then muses, does not come from the act itself but “from enormous concentration essential to the act of drawing; from the intense looking that produces interior quiet and an imagined silence around you.”

Visitors were invited to draw their responses to this idea based on their experience inside the Meditation Room. A banquet table was prepared for this visual feast, stacked with color pencils and paper, and a rubber stamp to replicate the dot matrix on every sheet. A book and exhibition including drawings made during the festival is in the works. On-site photos by Isabel Lezcano; all photos courtesy Balmori Associates.

Drawing by Lucia Laudi, courtesy Balmori Associates