Scale. Project for a City distills Elena Asins’s urban imagination into a rigorously pared sculpture. A single longitudinal groove organizes a procession of stepped verticals on a black, enameled iron plane. The relief reads at once as street and skyline, section and plan. It also reads as a rule set that has been applied with musical restraint. Asins conceived this work in 2005 as part of an extended investigation of Scale where she used progressive and generative procedures to study how form grows across a field.

The Scale project began decades earlier on paper and in the computer lab. In the late 1970s and early 1980s Asins pursued serial drawings and plotter printouts that tested small operations, then unfolded them step by step across a page. The ensemble of seventy-two drawings titled Paradigm for Scale (1982–83), in the collection of Museo Reina Sofia, already treats each sheet as a unit in a larger generative plan. By the time of this sculpture, Asins had translated that method into three dimensions, letting the rule become a spatial cadence that the body can read with the eye. In her own retrospective materials, the series is described as an inquiry into the “structure of the plane” through progressive, generative forms, a description that fits the measured pulse of this relief.

Architecture was never ancillary for Asins. As a young artist she said plainly that a Mies van der Rohe floor plan moved her more than a painting by Velázquez, and she recalled wanting to be an architect. That confession clarifies the tectonic sobriety of Scale, where clarity of proportion, precise joints, and the eloquence of voids guide the eye. Later commentary on her work has also underlined the influence of architects and thinkers on her research, with Mies named alongside Ludwig Wittgenstein and Walter De Maria. The sculpture’s economy, its lucid hierarchy between primary axis and secondary articulations, and its dark, uniform finish echo a Miesian ethic that values order, proportion, and structural logic.

The subtitle Project for a City signals an ambition that exceeds objecthood. Asins treats a relief as a condensed urban model, an abstract diagram that could expand outward as a street network or sequence of pavilions. Contemporary models and maquettes from the Scale series confirm that she conceived these pieces as prototypes for built environments and public sculpture. In this light the work belongs to the long tradition of utopian planning in modern art, yet it advances that tradition by replacing grand narratives with a lean, algorithmic grammar. The city is not imposed from above. It grows from a module that recombines through rules that remain legible to the viewer.

Seen within the arc of Asins’ career, Scale. Project for a City shows drawing, computation, and sculpture converging on the question of how order becomes public space. The relief is as readable as a score, yet it is also an invitation to imagine circulation, thresholds, and pauses at the scale of a street. It is rigorous and accessible in equal measure. The facts of its making secure its place in the record, and the clarity of its structure secures its place in the present, where the idea of canon is understood not as a fixed ideal but as a generative procedure that can travel from a paper sheet to a city.

Provenance

Private collection, Spain

Acquired from the above

Exhibitions

Alicante, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Alicante - MACA, Long-term Loan 2019 - Present.

El rumor del viento es un silbido infatigable. Elena Asins, Alicante, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Alicante – MACA, February 17 – May 28, 2023. Curated by Rosa M. Castells.