We think of Wright talking then of his draughtsman Jack Howe as ‘the pencil in my hand’, of Will Alsop encouraging the citizens of Barnsley to draw their future city with him, or of a single Frank Gehry sketch serving to tell his modelmakers everything essential about the space and form of an elaborate scheme. As late as 1928, the architects of Los Angeles’ Westwood Village were rendering a new automobile mall in red chalk studies that could have been Hubert Robert’s nearly 200 years before.
Throughout the 1920s and ’30s, much of the essential discourse in American architecture was in a magazine called Pencil Points, and it was the visionary romanticism of drawings by people like Hugh Ferriss in Scientific American and Popular Mechanics that painted pictures of future cities, rather than the didactic models of Wright’s Broadacre or the schematics of Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse. Meeting points: drawing, thinking, showing Peter Eisenman: House VI, from a set of presentation For Aldo Rossi, who came to building late in a long career, the built work seemed so often to grieve for the more eloquent drawings that had conceived it, that he turned to reimagining his works after the fact, painting visual assemblies that changed their context or underlining by distortion their metaphorical relationship to their surroundings, or, as in the case shown, laying the architect’s hand on the layers of history in modern Rome. In Peter Eisenman’s House VI, drawing and building are indissoluble: the house reads effectively as a model of the axonometric dream sequence by which it was conceived (see p80). Absent, even in the proposals for Palaces of Communism with which he hoped to gain favour, is any sense of a structure likely to emerge from the act of defiance against pomp and prettiness evident on paper. In Yakov Chernikhov’s there may have been no choice, as, in Stalin’s Russia, he dreamed first of mechanistic worlds a-building and then of a metropolis of romantic pastoral concoctions already a-crumbling. In Hejduk’s case, drawing was by choice the primary pursuit. It is an essential and persistent element in the culture of architecture, and a means of portraying what John Hejduk called its ‘state of mind’. But the drawing is not a metaphor for an absent building. Drawings might test, advance or sell a design idea, and the stamped, signed drawing − even now, when we file tax returns or purchase online − is still the instrument by which a building is executed and legalised. Nothing this rich or disputed can be thought of simply as a tool of the trade. UndertakenĬ1936-41 while banned from practice or publication Of hermetic studies for socialist cities of the future. (10 x 10cm) of an urban ensemble from one of many cycles And drawing has often, as Scarpa found, been contentious.
There are some who never cared to draw, but as each new shift in technique appears, every architect who did begins to show a characteristic approach to line, or shadow, or framing, or the suggestion of space. From the 18th century on, we can watch as drawings change the thickness of line to reflect that of evolving print media adopt colour codes for materials take on the oriental isometric and axonometric projections and weave them into 19th-century schooling use coloured crayon, magic marker, strips of mylar build in photographic elements as montage take cues from film to sequence their narratives and from animation to people them. It has constantly changed, both as new materials, conventions and techniques appear, and as it responds to the changing visual climate. And it was to protest against precisely such points that his students revolted in the mid-1970s, running him out of the directorship of the institute before he had barely started.ĭrawing architecture has never been taken for granted. That was the precise point, he claimed, from which all architecture proceeds. And today, argues Nicholas Olsberg, the dexterity of the hand is still unbeatable in quickly conveying an architectural ideaĬarlo Scarpa, in a famously infamous gesture, opened all his courses in design at the University of Venice by demonstrating the art of sharpening a pencil. Read individually, drawings offer vivid and unique character portraits of their architectural authors.
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