A Dance to the Music of Architecture

When we draw, our hand does for the eye " something that the eye, the specific organ of vision, cannot do by itself " , says the 19th century German theorist Konrad Fiedler. In The Reflective Practitioner Donald Schön calls " virtual worlds " the drawings that allow instructors and students to test possible solutions in the architectural design studio without too much risk. Drawing is also how architecture relates to its precedents with appropriateness, in John Hancock's opinion. Curiosity is a common driver to all these activities as none of them are able to know their ends until their final configurations are accomplished. Since drawing is involved in all the described processes this paper aims to study the specific reflexiveness of drawing in artistic production, design, learning, and research. With this purpose in mind, we review in this investigation the philosophical foundations of artistic visuality, the cognitive aspects of design, and the use of drawing as a historical research tool. The pivotal notions that will guide this inquiry are the aesthetic autonomy, involved in the judgment of beauty in Immanuel Kant; visuality associated to drawing in Konrad Fiedler's philosophy of art; the designer's reflection-inaction proposed by Donald Schön as the essential characteristic of the artistry of professional practice; and, finally, the notion of historical precedents of John Hancock and Roger Clark and Michael Pause that assign to drawing the possibility of being inclusive and specific at the same time. Contemporary exaggerations of reflexiveness, important and extended distortions of its Kantian original anti-dogmatic vocation, are also enumerated at the end of the paper as a testimony, in the ambits of political economy and politically motivated architecture, that reflexiveness and drawing are in fact in our times a curse and a cure. 1 Introduction This paper vindicates the role of drawing as educational and research tool within architectural design process. If education is understood as learning (not teaching), a process in which the learner mobilizes all his/her intellectual, spiritual and physical resources in other to overcome the perplexity of an unresolved question, then, both education and research have an identical vocation for dealing with the unknown. From this point of view the differences between education and research just appear at their respective ends: education is meant to transform the student into an autonomous human being, and research to produce communicable knowledge for the advancement of the respective discipline. Research-based education, the context in which this paper should be understood, imposes that students learn from experiences that produce knowledge, and these experiences transform them into the type of citizen democratic societies aspire. An education that involves the production of knowledge should be called reflective, as reflective education implies creativity and not the faithful transmission of pre-elaborated content. In this type of education, common curiosity and discovery are part of the inspiring atmosphere of the learning environment. Research is a constituent part of reflective education, which must be supported by verifiable methods that attend to its precise ends. This paper proposes that drawing could be one of these methods of inquiry. Even more, in the same line as German theorist Konrad Fiedler stated in the 19 th century, drawing explores realms of reality and consciousness in autonomous ways that cannot be reached in any other way: " even by drawing one line or by doing a gesture that represents something as perceived by the eye one would realize that is creating for his visual representation something that the eye, the specific organ of vision, cannot do by itself " (Fiedler, 1887, p. 229). Fiedler sustains that drawing, the basic artistic activity, accomplishes the kind of " stability and verifiability " (1887, p. 231) for images that are only achievable by concepts through intellectual activity. This paper investigates the role of drawing within architectural design processes. Quality of design is normally associated with drawing. Drawing is the base of experimentation that creates " virtual worlds " (Schön, 1987, p.75) in which different hypothesis can be tested at the design studio. Drawing is also essential in the " reflection-inaction " category with which American philosopher and educator Donald Schön distinguishes practice. The notion of reflectiveness associated with drawing is the umbrella under which practice, learning, and research are studied here. Reflective means a type of intelligence that keeps an eye in its own action all the time. It is exactly the contrary of dogmatism, which was defined by 18 th century German philosopher Immanuel Kant as the " procedure of pure reason without a previous criticism of its own power " (Kant, 1781, p. 703). Ultimately, the objective of this paper is to discuss the connections between drawing and the essential notions of " visuality " (Fiedler, 1887), " Reflection-inaction " (Shön, 1983), and " Precedents " (Hancock, 1986) for the benefit of learning, designing and researching.

Leonardo: Journal of the International Society for Arts, Sciences, Technology. MIT Press; Cambridge MA. , 2007

Architectural Research Quarterly, 2018

The 1980s witnessed a sudden rise of writing and thinking about architectural drawings and their conventions. At about the same time, there also emerged a trend of a new type of presentational drawing in architecture, in which drawings were very complex to the point of undecipherability, graphically sophisticated, and sometimes seemingly created for their own sake rather than to represent a particular architectural project. Upon reviewing the texts on drawings from this period, two important insights are made about the use of presentational drawings in architectural practice and their relation to theory. First, that making of architectural drawings can constitute practice in its own right and such practice, if developed experimentally, leads theory, rather than lagging it and serving to validate it. Second, architectural drawings, over and above communicating information about their subject matter, can also function as a means to create social networks of discursive practice. These ...

2014

I did not of course invent all this myself. Le Corbusier was, during the last century, motivated by the same impulse: "La construction c'est pour faire tenir, l'architecture c'est pour émouvoir." And: "Architecture c'est rapports, c'est pure création d'esprit." (Le Corbusier, 1923) Architecture is an experience. This means that the design and the activity of design are required to meet considerable demands. To design entails a quest for the 'Gesamtkunstwerk': an architecture in which all facets of the design have been properly integrated. Not a miserable accumulation of shell, installations, interior and façade as autonomous parts that have nothing to do with each other but the creation of a whole. With these aims, the essence of the profession for me lies in the 'making' of things: the clever detail, the beautiful drawing, the excitement of the moment when the concrete is released from the formwork, the sensation of the first pile being driven into the ground, striding across the building site early in the morning dressed in your hard hat and your safety shoes, the smell of fresh plaster and concrete. Ultimately, that's what you do it for.

2017

The paper explores architectural design methods and related tools of drawing in research of historical cases and interpretation of architecture theory by a new generation of digital design trained architects and students from the University of Belgrade (Serbia), University of Zagreb (Croatia), ETH Zurich (Switzerland) and RWTH Aachen (Germany). The object of study is modern architecture in the Mediterranean, and the historical cases are two summer houses designed by the architect Nikola Dobrović (1897, Pécs– 1967, Belgrade), on the island of Lopud in the Adriatic: Villa Vesna, designed in 1937 and constructed in 1939, and the unrealized design for the architect’s own house from 1965, for the site by the sea shore in the intermediate vicinity of the first house. The paper is based on archival and photographic documentation and sources that were studied and interpreted in the process of conceiving and executing the architectural drawings exhibition “Originally on Nikola Dobrović: Contemporary Architecture Drawing Glossary”, held in the gallery of the Cultural Centre of Belgrade as part of the Belgrade International Week of Architecture, BINA 2017. The paper addresses issues related to, consequences and effects of using architect’s tool of drawing analysis and digital drawing techniques in history and theory research and design theory. We will open with a glossary of terms theorized by Dobrović in 1950s and 1960s in his text books Contemporary Architecture, volumes 1-5, as interpreted sixty odd years later by M. Arch. students in the elective course work “Contemporary Architecture Theories” through analytical drawings of Dobrović’s modernist architecture. The two – glossary and drawings – formed the basis for a series of international workshops on architectural drawing and on exhibiting architectural drawing. The main discussion focuses on 15 detailed analytical drawings produced by digital means, that came through the workshops. Drawings present the outcome of a convoluted process of teaching and learning by delving into and demystification of Dobrović’s technique of building and design, through detailed re-projecting the meaning of chosen notions such as “stich”, “volume”, “trace”, “water”, “level”, “landscape”, “Mediterranean”, “lightness”, “heaviness” and “textile”. Study focused on construction details and joints of materials and functions, whereby the existing villa served as a manual for construction drawings of the unbuilt house next to it. Considered equal, the built and the unbuilt were studied in parallel as contemporaneous to each other, despite a 30-year gap between the two projects, aiming to extract from the historical cases the theoretical notions that are usable for current design preoccupations. In conclusion, we will discuss issues of exhibiting and public, that is, lay perception of architectural drawings, executed and presented not as actual project drawings but as artwork in a gallery. How abstract are concrete construction details when drawn as part of an art project; is the drawing a medium that allows both abstract projection of the lay beholder and concrete projection of the trained eye; finally, could it be argued that the building lays in the eyes of the drawing’s beholder?

South Atlantic Quarterly, 2002

There is at present a fashion for the application of images onto building facades. The most common line of comment on this phenomenon is to fetishize "the image." According to such accounts, images have changed their status, or locale, and become monstrous hybrids of human consciousness and the Internet. They have come to be on buildings through some will or teleology of their own, lessening the materiality of building and threatening the culture of architecture. 1 Or so the story goes. Few remark on another obvious aspect of this trend, which is that of the relatively recent availability and rapid uptake of the technical means for the application of images onto buildings. As early as the !"#$s, José Luis Sert, Fernand Léger, and Sigfried Giedion were calling for a new civic iconography of kinetic sculpture, which was to include fireworks and large-scale projection and murals. 2 None of this was very practical, however, until the last few years when megascreens and large-scale banner printing became available. Similarly, we have only recently gone beyond nineteenth-century techniques in the etching of images into glass and masonry. To a certain extent, these two observations reverberate within the work of Walter Benjamin and his famous attempt to argue at a most general level for an interrelation of histories of technology and mentality. 3 Benjamin understood vision as containing an opposition between optical and tactile perception that related to the articulation of art and architecture. 4 These ideas, developed to describe the role of cinema in the !"%$s, undoubtedly has something to tell us about more recent phenomena such as themes parks, where images become tangible, and the Internet, which has made tactility the principle of the computer screen. Yet Benjamin's ideas cannot be used simply to describe the present circumstance. To do so would be to forget the historicity of those ideas, and to indulge a greater essentialism in which architects and artists seek to describe the image as nature, existing outside of art. 5 Typically, such an approach supposes that popular image culture is a natural outgrowth of perception, which unfolds unselfconsciously. I argue that the image has indeed changed for architects, but not because of changes in human perception, perceptual technology, or some putatively unconscious popular image culture. The topics, themes, and materials on which cultural disciplines such as architecture work are not given so directly. The logic of architecture is an internal logic, a nonconceptual yet rational set of operations that develop historically from past architectural issues. What architecture works on is not the present problematic of the image, but rather the earlier forms of this problem, such as the relation of cinema to art and architecture that Benjamin described in the !"%$s. This has become internalized and formalized as a thematic and indeed as a repertoire of techniques. As Theodor Adorno says, "Form is sedimented content." 6 The images applied to buildings today relate not to the Internet, but to the social and technical context of the arts in the !"%$s. It is this dialectic across history that makes architecture so useless in any current program to reconcile culture. Yet, it is this uselessness that opens a critical dialectic in the present between, on the one hand, an apparently free, aesthetic use of

This Thing Called Theory, 2017

This paper explores the apprehension of meaning in architectural drawing afforded through each drawing's structuring 'diagram'. Rather than being confi ned to technique alone, the 'diagram' of an architectural drawing helps to inform its delivery of visual meaning. Through their diagram, architectural drawings, and more specifi cally presentation drawings, anticipate a response to the theoretical proposition of the architecture portrayed. In this manner, and in order to deliver meaning beyond technical representation, architectural drawings can anticipate a role for a viewing subject that frames the bodily interaction between viewer and viewed image.

2018

According to the philosopher C.S. Peirce the diagram is a system of interrelated parts that operates in a manner similar to another system of interrelated parts. It is a mental map of relations. It drives an open-ended inquiry on a given problem. In architectural discourse a diagram is often defined as a particular form of drawing. It is a simplified image and/or it uses a notation system. In this context, the latter is termed a digital diagram. However, an architectural medium has material properties that influence both the making and the translation of the drawing. It is both a singular artefact and a set of instructions for actions undertaken in another space than that of the medium. This article introduces the notion of an immanent diagram to discuss how the composition of a drawing is distributed. The proposition is that the architectural diagrammatic inquiry operates in the struggle between digital and analogue diagrams. I develop the argument using a traditional architectural...

Marianna Charitonidou’s book Architectural Drawings as Investigating Devices (2023) presents a survey and key insights into the recent history of representation in architecture. Marianna’s focus is through architects that challenged the discipline through key revolutionary drawings. With examples ranging from Le Corbusier’s Dom-Ino diagram to Mies’ collages, the book investigates insights into the Modern Movement. But it also includes certain tensions that make it relevant and interesting, for instance, John Hejduk’s axonometric projections experiments and Peter Eisenman’s formal axonometric diagrams are placed in contrast to Tschumi’s axonometrics. While Hejduk and Eisenman are presented as representational and formal, Tschumi’s drawings are rather political acts based on the semantics of the architecture program.

Conference Proceedings for Conference on Architectural Education “Design Pedagogies: Analyzing current trends and shaping the future", 2018

The first semester of B. Arch at NFC-IET Multan is geared towards opening the young architect-in-making’s mind towards the possibilities in architecture using drawing as a medium to observing, recording, imagining and communicating their ideas. A key project in this regard, that also led the students to discovering the two fundamental intangible building blocks of architecture; light and space, and familiarized them with the basic design principles, was introduced in the second half of the Fall 2017 semester. 5 works by master painters were dissected and analyzed by the students through lenses as varied as light, space, texture and hierarchy etc. and their findings were presented through their own versions of these paintings. The results were varied and quite encouraging as students found their own correlations between various elements of a composition. This paper is an attempt to record the process and criticize the project as a whole from conception to final results and assess its role as a viable project for 1st year of architectural studies.