Drawing used to be my life; I drew my way through school, drew every project in the offices I worked in, taught drawing in many architecture schools. The last serious drawings I did were thirty early 20th century timber dancehalls in Texas: mapped, measured, drafted for the historical record. Then I started my dissertation and in reading through acres of theory, text took over. Now I just write, I don’t draw, and half my brain is missing. I think of drawings, which is not the same as drawing. After getting On Site review 36: our material future out the door last winter all I wanted to do was look at drawings and paintings, and I wrote the call for submissions hoping everyone else was similarly tired of slippery, complicated, dissimulating text where every word invites interrogation. Drawings, even complex and layered ones, speak straight, to me. In laying out this issue, the closest thing I get to arranging things on paper these days, two things I’d not thought of before stand out. One is how scale arbitrates between drawing, the material thing made, and image, which one might say is the text of the drawing. Our pages are 9 x 13”; it would be beyond coincidence that everyone’s drawings were also 9 x 13”, so what are the consequences? We are so used to viewing images, scaleless, placeless, virtual, that a drawing at any scale other than 1:1 becomes simply image – casually scanned, scoped in a glance, as one does. The cover is Tom Ngo’s 1:1 drawing of the specifications for an On Site review spread. It defies image-making. The other thing is a realisation that drawing is a performative act very much bound up in our identity as architects, or designers, or artists, or engineers. We were taught to draw; taught a history of conventions, of acceptable mark-making, of clarity, of how to use a 6H lead and a 2B pencil, how to use CAD and Rhino. The rules are either so ancient or so embedded that even deliberately breaking them simply acknowledges their persistence. These two things, scale and performativity — well, three things if we include image , are an interesting lens with which to view the drawings here. Whether by hand, in Illustrator or combinations that switch and translate back and forth, these drawings are built. folio introduction,
Maya Lin. Vietnam War Memorial competition entry, 1981. https://www.wdl.org/en/item/222/
I wrote this in 2009: While browsing through the World Digital Library I came across the original panel Maya Lin had done for the Vietnam War Memorial competition when she was an architecture student at Yale. Her black granite walls cut into the green sward, the terrific power of the thousands and thousands of individual names, the absolute simplicity of the idea – all of these things mark a division between pre- and post-Vietnam War memorial projects. Finding the original panel was a shock. The chalk and charcoal drawings were widely reproduced at the time, and in my mind they were large - maybe 3’ wide. However, in reality these iconic works were small, sketchbook-sized. The text describing the project is hand-written and glued onto the panel – in fact all the pieces are glued onto a piece of tan matboard. As presentation goes, so accustomed are we to computer generated layouts, Maya Lin’s panel appears clumsy, unaligned, naïve, un-formed and yet, and yet, these are the drawings that outlined, in an open competition, the most powerful monument of the twentieth century since Vimy Ridge. This is a document from a time when the medium simply put the message forward. It wasn’t the message itself, and it certainly did not dominate or even obscure the message to the extent that we see today. I don’t think this is a case of my not being able to ‘read’ the layers of photoshopped composite images, but rather that drawings today are validated by the complexity of the processes that produce them. Were Maya Lin’s chalk sketches and simple hand- written text the last of the clear relationship between hand and thought? In 1982 when the Memorial was dedicated most architectural offices had their new Macs. Adobe Illustrator was launched in 1986, Photoshop in 1987. The computer is only a tool, like a pen, or a knife, but it is a willful tool and makes complexity very easy to do. At some point we have to ask, is complexity what we need?
Stephanie White, editor
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on site review 37: drawings
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