Drawn to Design: Analyzing Architecture Through Freehand Drawing

3030 Pages·2013·699.83 MB·English

by  Eric J. Jenkins

Preface to the EPUB edition
Using the EPUB format for books on architecture and related fields of
design challenges the conventional notion of book design. While a double
spread of a printed book (or of a PDF of the book pages, for that matter)
with its firmly defined proportion of width and height constitutes a frame
for two-dimensional compositions of texts and images, the idea of an
EPUB file is a linear sequence of textual or pictorial elements,
represented according to the options of the software and hardware used
to look at it.
This means that what you see here depends in the first place and to a
large degree on a specific combination of parameters. While the
advanced multimedia potentials of EPUB3 are not used here (but are
planned to serve for the integration of videos in future editions of this
electronic book), the Avenir font offered by iOS 6 matches the type font
used purposefully in the print edition. The scroll mode offered by iBooks 3
seems to be a kind of representation congenial with the aforementioned
linear, sequential arrangement of the content.
The representation in any of the layout modes, by contrast, be it as single
pages or double spreads, in the book mode or the full-page mode,
inevitably has a certain degree of contingency to it, especially in the
combination or separation of images on subsequent “pages”, as the
ensuing “layout” owes more to the software and hardware setting than to
a graphic designer’s hand – at least in the case of this book where the
print version preceded the electronic version of the book, so that the
proportions of the individual image as well as the order of images do not
deny their origin in a print state of mind. In the process of preparation we
found that the double-spread, full-page mode might bring the most
satisfactory layout results.
The EPUB edition allows one to look at the roughly 450 drawings of this
book in their original sizes. When enlarged to the limits of clear
resolution, the stroke widths as drawn reveal the specific character of the
wide range of instruments used for the individual drawings. The index
function allows various non-linear readings of this book in addition to the
systematic, topical order of the material as expressed in the table of
contents; for instance, all drawings of a specific building, or of the
buildings of an individual architect, or of the buildings in a specific
location, or of drawings relating to a certain number of key topics can be
called up, with immediate access to their position in the book and the
related contextual information.
All drawings and photographs were enhanced for this edition by Günter
Hansmann of the repro house Licht & Tiefe, who also endowed the
drawings with different backgrounds according to the type of drawing
(slightly lighter for ink drawings, slightly darker for pencil drawings) and
who saw to it that the original black-and-white scans show up in beautiful
black-and-white on displays made for color representation. Christoph
Steinhof in the electronic publishing department of De Gruyter created
this edition and very patiently dealt with the varying degrees of electronic
ignorance of the others involved. Eric Jenkins put much effort and care
into all the additional material and work required for a successful EPUB
edition.
Andreas Müller, Editor for the Publisher
To my parents, Elizabeth and George
Preface
Drawing a building is a way of remembering it properly. To draw you
have to look very hard and I think it is in the looking itself that the building
is impressed upon the mind. Often I measure it and make a plan, putting
the dimensions on the drawing, because I know from experience that
only by doing that can I understand what I’m looking at.
Caroline Mauduit, An Architect in Italy1
The intention of this book is to help students develop an appreciation for
observation and learning about the designed environment through
freehand drawing. By observing I mean, as Caroline Mauduit endorses in
her introduction to An Architect in Italy, that we consider the designed,
and by extension, the natural environment carefully with a critical and
inquisitive eye. Carefulness is vital in reaching below the surface and
beyond what is literal. Unlike the casual glance or photograph, even the
fastest, literal drawing is an inherently careful and active engagement.
Drawing is a way of digesting the environment in order to come away
with a greater understanding of how the environment might have been
formed, what it contributes or does not contribute and what lessons might
be embedded in it. While I do not offer definitive methods, I do offer an
approach that might lead to a disciplined search when truly looking at
buildings. In the fifteen years of teaching freehand analysis, I have come
to believe that students need an introduction to a methodology that can
inform and guide yet not constrain them. I have made mistakes and have
constantly revised the courses and ways to introduce a methodological
approach. Some years I seem to get it and then, when I try to duplicate it
the following year, I stumble.
An essential aspect of this book is the use of freehand drawing.
Freehand drawing is helpful because, when all is said and done, the
hand is connected to our minds and intrinsically related to who we are.
The hand and its preceding iterations such as ganglia, tentacles or other
prehensile limbs shape what, how and of whom we think. The drawing
hand is linked with the least intermediary processes or devices to the
world itself. Freehand drawing is as close as we can get to the thing itself
without building. Just as hand drawing is relatively unmitigated, the hand
can never be machine-like, but at the same time it can be accurate
enough in recording the world beyond pure impression. The slip of the
finger, the varied weight of a line or the wiggle resulting from too much
coffee allows the building to remain alive.
Drawing the designed and natural environment is a process of analysis
essential to observing and, hopefully, understanding the world. There are
cautionary tales as in the fairy tale The Goose that Laid the Golden Egg.
When trying to understand a thing we should be careful not to kill it. A
danger of abstracting and diagramming analytically is that it might
destroy what we find exciting or stimulating. While a risk, diagramming or
analyzing buildings remains a primary means of understanding their
nature as both utilitarian device and vessel of experience. The nature of
architecture is one in which, as Le Corbusier writes in Towards an
Architecture, “walls rise against the sky in an order such that I am moved.
I sense your intentions.”2 More than building, architecture embodies
intentions while expressing our values and our dreams. Looking at
buildings is a combination of a phenomenological experience and one of
dimensions, properties and functions. The magic of architecture is that it
embodies both the utilitarian and the experience of place.
I would be pleased if the book is only considered. I would even be happy
if even after reading it is rejected yet helps someone look at buildings
more carefully. Either way, a student looks, truly looks at the built
environment and learns from it.
Mauduit, Caroline, An Architect in Italy. New York: C. N. Potter (1988):
10.
Le Corbusier, Towards an Architecture, trans. John Goodman. Los
Angeles: Getty Research Institute (2007): 215.
Introduction
This book really began, although I did not know it, when I was a
graduate architecture student. In fact, it was just as I neared the end of
my formal professional education that I experienced a seminal moment
that changed my life.
This moment helped me realize that I was not at all near “the end” of my
education but only just beginning to comprehend architecture and urban
design. It occurred while I was a graduate student during a summer travel
program in the small cities, villages and historical sites of western and
central Turkey. I arrived in Istanbul a day in advance of the program’s
official start to acquaint myself with the city before setting out on the
journey through the Turkish countryside. I strolled through the ancient city
with the Ayasofya (Hagia Sophia) and the Sultanahmet Camii (Blue
Mosque) as my ultimate goal. The buildings and their precincts were, of
course, spectacular and after walking around and through them, I sat in
Sultanahmet Square, looked at the Blue Mosque in the distance, opened
the first page of my new sketchbook and began to draw.
The resultant sketch was fairly conventional in that what I drew
corresponded to what I was seeing or at least represented it quite literally
much like a photographic image. And like a photograph, it illustrated an
event in time from one vantage point. Fortunately, for my self-esteem, it
was not an awful sketch. In fact, I was quite relieved that the first attempt
in the virginal sketchbook was at least adequate.
The first sketch in Turkey
The same view as in the first sketch
The next morning, my fellow students and I met our professor, William
Bechhoefer, who distributed the syllabus for his course, An Architectural