drawing: August 2007 Archives

What space does drawing occupy within architecture? Does it exist to support the eventual building of an idea? Or is it something more? Basic architectural education places a heavy emphasis on drawing, on translating an idea out of the air and onto the page. The opinion on the matter swings back and forth over centuries. In a time of greater functionalism and technological push, the drawing is a construction document (Mies van der Rohe's drawings, for example). In the late 18th century and again in the mid to late 1970s, it is visionary, a matter separate of construction.

It's a question of the position of paper architecture, unbuilt commissions, competition entries, sketches. Drawing is vital to architecture, in a literal sense. It brings it architecture to bear. It's a form of meditation, of generation. It builds a future vision, yet its medium is divorced from its future construction. Étienne-Louis Boullée in Architecture, Essai sûr l'art (sometime between 1788 and 1798) that building is auxiliary, which makes the constitution of architecture the dominion of design, of paper.

It is necessary to conceive (of architecture) in order to perform it... It is this production of the mind, it is this creation that constitutes architecture that is of consequence to us: the definition of the art of production and bringing to perfection of any building. The art of building is thus but a secondary art that, in our opinion, would be suitably belong to the scientific components of architecture. [5]

Architectural drawings generate new reality by stealth. The nature of drawing reinforces that architecture doesn't need to be built in order to create or occupy social reality, a mode of interaction, a way of life. Drawings provoke and maybe seen "for what is potent in them rather than what is latent," [1] that is, for what is performed instead of than what might be read.

The verb "to draw" (according to the OED) derived from traction and attraction and was used in Old English (c. 897). Over a period of 400 years, it came to connote many other things, including the marks left by tangible items. By the 1300s, "to draw" meant tracing a line across a surface or cutting a furrow with a plow; by the 16th and 17th century, it referred to delineation and construction. From the activity came the concept of the drawing as a discrete object, "The arrangement of the lines which determine form."

James Smith addresses the performance of drawing in his expansive, 1816 tome, The Panorama of Science and Art. He writes, "Drawing, strictly speaking, includes only the art of forming the resemblance of objects by means of out~lines; but it is usual to call those performances drawings, where only a single colour, as Indian ink, is employed to produce shades."[2] Drawing maintained this strict definition stayed for nearly 150 years. The Museum of Modern Art would define drawing as "a unique work on paper" [3] in 1944, adhering to the single-color definition until 1964, when the museum expanded its description to include pastels and watercolors, and in 1971, papiers colliers and other collage forms. [4]

Alberto Pérez-Gómez, following Boullée, writes, "In a manner of speaking... the drawing is the architecture, a priviledged [sic] vehicle for expressing architectural intentions: intentions that are poetic in a profound traditional sense, as poesis, as symbol making." From the height of architectural modernism, Walter Benjamin saw the generative in a functionalist view of architectural drawing in his 1933 article, "Rigorous Study of Art." He noted the "marginal" status of architectural drawing and the way in which such drawings exclude all but practitioners of the profession, thanks to their specificity and jargon--their function as a tool for architects. (How is this different today, one has to wonder.) Nonetheless, he sees the drawing as more than just tools of instruction, but as a space for imagined experience. Benjamin writes,

As regards the images themselves, one cannot say that they re-produce architecture. They produce it in the first place, a production which less often benefits the reality of architectural planning than it does dreams... There are various indications that confirm the specificity of this world, the most important one being that such architecture is not primarily 'seen,' but rather is imagined as an objective entity and is experienced by those who approach or even enter it as a surrounding space sui generis, that is, without the distancing effect of the frame of the pictorial space. Thus, what is crucial in the consideration of architecture is not seeing but the apprehension of structures. The objective effect of the buildings on the imaginative being of the viewer is more important than their 'being seen.' In short, the most essential characteristic of the architectural drawing is that 'it does not take a pictorial detour.' [7]

It is Robin Evans' conception of architectural drawing as a distinct, particular, and generative act that so strongly resonates with architects and critics. He likens drawing to literary translation, in which the translator moves a text from one language to another without alteration: yet in the act of moving, "things can get bent, broken or lost on the way." [8] The drawing is the translation from one language to another, carrying the idea of a building into the space of communication. Evans elaborates, "for architecture, even in the solitude of pretended autonomy, there is one unfailing communicant, and that is the drawing." What differs for architects vis-à-vis painters and sculptors, however, is the fact that the architect does not work with the direct medium of endeavor.

Two possibilities emerge from this concept. One is that architecture is only what the architect directly touches and manipulates. In this way, the architect relinquishes the broader reach of architecture in the social, political and economic spheres--a fairly limited depiction of architecture's nature. The more interesting possibility (which interests Evans) speaks to the notion of translation and transmutation. In this manner, drawing brings architecture into existence: "The subject-matter (the building or space) will exist after the drawing, not before it. [...] it is not so much produced by reflection on the reality outside the drawing, as productive of a reality that will end up outside the drawing." [8]

And so, architectural drawing is not just documentation for future construction. "What goes out is not always the same as what goes in," Evans writes. Beyond this, it is realism is stood "on its head." Returning to the importance of drawing as potent, we can consider how it gains this power. It's potent, not latent: performed, not read. The act, the action creates this reality through "an enormous and largely unacknowledged generative power: by stealth."[8]