From Models to Drawings

Imagination and Representation in Architecture

Marco Frascari, Jonathan Hale, Bradley Starkey, Marco Frascari, Jonathan Hale, Bradley Starkey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134719624
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

This edited collection addresses the vital role of the imagination in the critical interpretation of architectural representations. By challenging the contemporary tendency for computer-aided drawings to become mere 'models' for imitation in the construction of buildings, the articles explore the broader range of methods and meanings at stake in the creation and interpretation of architectural drawings, models, images and artefacts.

These critical – and often practice-led – investigations are placed alongside a range of historical studies considering the development of representational techniques such as perspective, orthography and diagramming. By also addressing the use of visual representation in a number of related disciplines such as visual arts, film, performance and literature, the book opens up debates in architecture to important developments in other fields.

This book is key reading for all students of architecture and architectural theory.

Historical perspectives

Introduction

In the opening chapter of this book, Alberto Pérez-Gómez sets out both a historical and a theoretical framework into which many of the subsequent chapters could be placed. Tracing a broad intellectual arc from Vitruvius to the present-day, he pinpoints a series of shifts in the scope, style and status of the architectural drawing, focusing on developments in the use of perspective. His skepticism as to the benefits of digital design technology (or, as he pointedly prefers to call it, ‘computer graphics’) is tempered by his contextualizing of these recent innovations in relation to previous historical ruptures in the habitual patterns of architectural vision. In Marco Frascaris’ chapter, he questions the perception of paper as merely the passive support of the finished architectural drawing. Through a detailed historical analysis of the various media in which design has traditionally taken place, he highlights the subtle influence that the materiality of paper has had on the development of architectural thinking. Given that the process of drawing does not simply involve an automatic transcription onto a surface of ideas that are already clear in the architect’s mind, he shows why the very materiality of drawings should be seen as part of the dynamic character of what he calls architectural factures, that is, the things (distinct from buildings) that architects can be properly said to ‘make’. In the following chapter, through an examination of the role of the imagination in the perception, conception and construction of architectural representations, Nader El-Bizri interrogates the claim made in the conference call for papers, that ‘the model-gaze reduces the possibilities of innovation’ and ‘stifles the pursuit of the absent referent beyond the present model’. This chapter suggests that the imagination is an integral phenomenon of direct vision and part of our perceptual experience and not simply illusory or fictional, and that it therefore plays a role within the model-gaze itself.

Raymond Quek revisits historical definitions of the problematic term disegno. By examining its use in the work of a number of philosophical commentators, he also draws out its continued relevance to contemporary debates on the notion of visual knowledge. The metaphor of Adam’s navel is also used to highlight the problem of origins in the mystery of artistic creation. His chapter also illustrates the continuing tensions and reciprocities between conception, imagination and the process of visualisation. Picking up the threads of Marco Frascari’s discussion of paper, Paul Emmons focuses on questions of scale in his historical account of architectural representation. In explaining how the use of scale makes the very process of design and comprehension possible, he also illustrates how the potential of CAD to produce one-to-one representations can actually lead to a loss of architectural understanding. Qi Zhu looks at two contrasting examples of twelfth-century Chinese architectural images. By comparing the graphical conventions common in technical drawings with those found in fine art, she illustrates the impact of both the cultural context of the production of images and the embodied actions of their producers. In their occasional misreadings of unfamiliar stylistic codes, the Chinese artisans involved in ‘copying’ technical drawings from the West often produced highly imaginative images of buildings that evoked the temporally ordered activities of their construction.

With reference to the thirteenth-century narrative of the ‘King’s Two Bodies’, Federica Goffi discusses tangible/temporal and intangible/sempiternal aspects of the twinned bodies of kings and of architecture. To expand the analogy, she examines the role of drawing in relation to Tiberio Alfarano’s ichnography of the Basilica of Saint Peter’s in the Vatican during its Renaissance renovation. Conceived within an understanding of the twin persona of architecture, the chapter argues that drawing plays a significant role in allowing the imagination to grow and develop. Teresa Stoppani discusses the spatiality of Piranesi’s Campo Marzio dell’antica Roma in contrast to that of Nolli’s Topografia di Roma. With reference to Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the smooth and the striated, she argues that, by understanding space in terms of ‘movement’ rather than by the static objects within it, Piranesi constructed spaces that anticipated the spatial and temporal complexities of the contemporary city.

With reference to the study of the ruin in early sixteenth-century Rome and the ‘fabricated’ ruin in Le Corbusier’s projects in India, this chapter discusses the theme of the ‘unfinished’ in the architectural imagination. Counter to the contemporary preoccupation with ‘finished’ states, where the messy processes of design are erased by the priority given to the uniformity of digital production, Nicholas Temple and Soumyen Bandyopadhyay discuss the redemptive potency of the unfinished in generating new horizons of creative intervention. In the final chapter in this section of the book, Antony Moulis explores the generative power of the architectural diagram by examining Le Corbusier’s forty-year preoccupation with the graphical figure of the spiral. Whether vertically or horizontally employed, implied or explicit, Moulis highlights the significance of the spiral figure as a choreographer of movement. Beyond any symbolic or aesthetic value, the spiral is seen as an organisational device – in both the completed building and, more intriguingly, in the emerging design drawing.

Questions of representation

The poetic origin of architecture

Alberto Pérez-Gómez

Despite all the excitement about digital media, it is still impossible to argue that the integration of these concerns in the production of architecture has had an automatic positive effect on our built environment. The digital ‘avant-garde’ has degenerated into a banal mannerism, producing homogeneous results with little regard for cultural contexts all over the world. Clearly such means of representation are here to stay, and this poses enormous questions. Addressing primarily our vision (and not other senses of embodiment), experimental video, computer-graphics and virtual images have transformed our conceptual understanding of reality. Monopolising the discourse surrounding visual representation, discussions around the so-called ‘digital revolution’ often exclude more primary issues of meaning and ethics.

Paradoxically, the fragmentation and temporalisation of space initiated by film montage and modernist collage that opened up a truly infinite realm of poetic places for the human imagination still await their translation into architecture. During the last two decades, the seductive potential of virtual space has expanded beyond all expectations, through both technological breakthroughs and artistic endeavours, yet the architectural profession is still reluctant to question certain fundamental premises concerning the transparency and homogeneity of its means of representation.

Architectural conception and realisation usually assume a one-to-one correspondence between the represented idea and the final building. The fact that digital media also make this literal transcription more feasible through automation and robotics has resulted in an unwillingness to question this premise. Absolute control is essential in our technological world. Although drawings, prints, models, photographs and computer graphics play diverse roles in the design process, they are regarded most often as necessary surrogates or automatic transcriptions of the built work. To disclose appropriate alternatives to the ideological stagnation plaguing most architectural creation at the end of the second millennium, the first crucial step is to acknowledge that value-laden tools of representation underlie the conception and realisation of architecture.

The process of creation prevalent in architecture today assumes that a conventional set of projections, at various scales from site to detail, adds up to a complete, objective idea of a building. It is this assumption of the ideal as real, a conceptual inversion with roots in early Western modernity, that constitutes the first stumbling block. Whether the architect is effectively or legally responsible for the production of construction documents (working drawings), the assumption remains. These projective representations rely on reductive syntactic connections, with each projection constituting part of a dissected whole. They are expected to be absolutely unambiguous to avoid possible (mis)interpretations, and to function as efficient neutral instruments devoid of inherent value other than their capacity for accurate transcription. The architectural profession generally has identified architectural drawing with such projective tools.

The descriptive sets of projections that we take for granted operate in a geometrised, homogeneous space that was construed as the ‘real’ space of human action during the nineteenth century. Our implicit trust in the application of a scientific methodology to architecture derives from techniques prescribed by Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand in his Précis des Leçons d’Architecture (1802 and 1813). Durand’s Mécanisme de la composition was the first design method to be thoroughly dependent on the predictive capacity of these projections. For him, descriptive geometry was the modus operandi of the architect. Although descriptive geometry promoted simplistic objectification, this projective tool is a product of a philosophical tradition and technological world-view that defines the European nineteenth century and leads to our own ‘world order’. It is, therefore, not something we can simply reject or pretend to leave behind. As Hubert Damisch has pointed out recently in his tour de force on the origins of perspective, the destructuring of perspectival depth by the avant-garde in twentieth-century art has not prompted our culture of television and cinema to make the projective distance ‘a thing of the past’. In architecture, the issue is rather to define the nature of a ‘depth’ that the work must engage in order to resist the collapse of the world into cyberspace, a depth that concerns both the spatial or formal character of the work, and its programmatic, temporal or experiential dimension.

The technological world has generally embraced the pragmatic capacity of architectural drawing over its potential to construe a symbolic order. For architects it is important to remember that a symbol is neither a contrivance nor an invention, nor is it necessarily a representation of absolute truths or transcendental theological values. Symbols embody specific historical and cultural values, and buildings often possess experiential dimensions that cannot be reproduced in a conventional representation. Expecting architectural representations to embody a symbolic order – indeed, like any other work of art – will seem controversial unless we revise the common assumptions about art and its relationship to human life that have been with us since the eighteenth century. For architecture the difficulty of manifesting a symbolic order is necessarily double, since it concerns both the project and its ‘translation’ – an unfolding that is seldom present in other arts.

Projective drawing need not be a reductive device, a tool of prosaic substitution. Projection evokes temporality and boundaries. Defining the space between light and darkness, between the Beginning and the Beyond, it illuminates the space of culture, of our individual and collective existence. Closer to the origins of our philosophical history, projection was identified with the space of representation, the site of ontological continuity between universal ideas and specific things. The labyrinth, that primordial ground plan and image of architectural endeavour, is a projection linking time and place. Representing architectural space as the time of an event, the disclosure of order between birth and death, in the unpredictable temporality of human life itself, the labyrinth was literally the hyphen between idea and experience, the figuration of a place for human culture, the Platonic chora. Like music, realised in time from a more or less ‘open’ notation, inscribed as an act of divination for a potential order, architecture is itself a projection of architectural ideas, horizontal footprints and vertical effigies, disclosing a symbolic order in time, through rituals and programs. The architect’s task, beyond the transformation of the world into a comfortable or pragmatic shelter, is the making of a physical, formal order that r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustration credits
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: models and drawings – the invisible nature of architecture
• Historical perspectives
• Emergent realities
• Critical dimensions
• Index