drawing space

boulee's cenotaph for newton

been reading and thinking about drawing and its urge to capture and describe reality, especially when it has to also at the same time propose a new one- like so many architectural representational forms. like the plan and the section, orthographic necessities that are forms of making a drawing that will help in the technique of building.

on the other hand there are those drawings that want to bridge the gap between the lived and the represented- to make a drawing as close to reality as it is perceived. as if reality lies in the seen… or then the act of drawing as architecture- the ability think critically though the act of drawing. but as much as drawing attempts to bridge the gap between the represented and the lived- it actually does seem to make it even greater. doesn’t the act of inscribing and tracing forms as perceived or even as measured seem to distance itself from the spaces that it is trying to capture?

the book is fascinating, dense and full of examples and references from texts that i have never heard of, or have in passing. somehow the book seems intent on exploring the relationship as it were between the act of building and living; and the act of representation and imagining. it is a complicated thing leading to some interesting phenomenon- like anamorphosis where space is distorted to appear ordered from a privileged position in architectural space. as soon as the observer moves- or that architecture begins to work in time as well as pure space the illusion is shattered.

or like axonometry that removes all vestiges of the body of the observer to make the architectural object completely self referential- as if that is the only ‘truth’. what happens when the subject of the space begins to disintegrate into a point? and then what happens further when the subject is completely evicted from the space of representation as an anomaly?

in the pure space of the axonometric that we in the profession seem to so favor where does the body find its place? and without the sensual where does architecture find itself in its role to address the everyday lives of people? not merely the practical and prosaic but also the mythical and poetic aspects of life.

perhaps it is also the problem with the very discourse of architecture that aims to create perfection or purity. maybe the schism exists because architecture is seen to be a model of the universe- perfect in every way. the temple and the cemetery can be the only real architectural space then. for a stone god or for the dead. architecture, in these cases – even when built, stays merely a representation of lived space. like a diagram of an ideal. a utopia. but we are not gods and not yet dead. our everyday life comes up against there diagrams all the time.

we muddy the floor with our footprints and hang our desires on the white walls. we destroy predetermined notions of correct living by churning things through our multiple points of view; our memory and desire. and this is how we try to make our lives more rich through the spaces we inhabit and imagine for ourselves. to achieve that we need the dark as much as we need the light. the ground below our feet as much as the heavens above as we hang perpetually in between.

maybe that’s why i seem to love the collapsing perspectives and overlapping fragments in piranesi’s drawings as much as i love the bare horizonless drawings of boulees cenotaph for newton.

piranesi

these imaginations are underpinned by the only real tool in the hands of the architect- the drawing. and when the drawing is enabled by the copy paste reductivism of computer aided design softwares the schism is even more apparent. it is so easy to fall for the seduction of beguiling efficiency of production that we deny architecture its most essential role- to create space for life to thrive , especially in a time where all experience seems to be modulated completely on illusionistic projections. that is not to say, of course, that autocad is evil or to rue the increasing cybernetic nature of everyday life. but it is to, in an old fashioned sort of way, remind myself that technology will always be merely a tool and never a solution.

project of a library from tu delft