sloppiness This process starts out feeling rather sloppy. While I am enjoying these pages of thoughts, notes, references, connections, and the sort of curious complicity in knowing that you have this document open on your computer as I write, even though I can’t quite be sure if you are reading the same part as me, I keep getting quick anxious thoughts about how difficult it is to make sense of the different ideas. How to write together, how to write when you don’t really know where it might go? Maybe this is: messing around for the sake of meaningless joy – turn off the anxious voice that requires a ‘plan’ and see where things go… part of me wants to start a new document, to follow the rules of a cadavre exquis, to take it in turns, to progress in a linear manner… then this other voice is saying no, just stick with this… but how can this become publishable article? Yes, I agree: spending time to think with you about how play is or can be part of architecture is definitively bringing meaningless joy. It will not add anything to the world but this present shared bubble of thinking, discussing, imagining, letting our minds wander, and reflecting, which is pure play. I love as well how we can build this text from different places, and simultaneously, embrace this way of co-constructing thoughts, as opposed to pretending to start with the beginning and finish with the end. Related to architecture, this makes me think of architects whose creative process generously makes room for moments of collective sharing and provides a space of ‘ridiculous time- wasting that is vastly pleasurable’. This section begins with the word ‘sloppiness’, which almost feels like a rude word, a bit shocking. But it is a starting point, a way into a thinking space, a space in which to explore the relationship between that which might appear superfluous, minor, irrelevant, frivolous, pointless (messing around, time wasting) and the realm of the serious, important, worthwhile, necessary (making real and useful buildings?). I am thinking about drawing. Architects make drawings in order to ultimately make buildings. They make many more drawings than they make buildings. In the wake of each completed building will be innumerable drawings, from early sketches, to process sketches, plans, sections, façades, axonometrics, perspectives. Exploratory versions and finished versions. Then details, construction drawings. Not to mention diagrams, schemas… Even unbuilt projects generate dozens, often hundreds of drawings. But before drawings that are related to specific projects, built or unbuilt, come a multitude of other drawings. Doodles, sketches, patterns, portraits, still lifes, landscapes, cityscapes, survey drawings. Made with pencils, crayons, pens, biros, watercolours, charcoal… on ipads, on paper, in notebooks, on tablecloths... Architects’ language is drawing. The other day I leafed through a beautiful book of 700 of Peter Markli’s drawings. Consisting generally of just a
few lines and /or blocks of colour, they might appear closer to the realm of doodles or jottings, barely even sketches let alone technical drawing, yet they express hundreds of spatial and architectural ideas, suggesting plans, façades, spaces, rooms, buildings, houses, landscapes, places, structures, systems, atmospheres. Here is Markli talking about these drawings: ‘There was no client, no direct commission, for any of these drawings. Instead, they were ways of exploring the form and the expression of a house – things I was still looking for in the 1970s, and these drawings helped me find them. When I had the good luck to get a commission I was able to refer back to some of these things. Without this work, I would not have been able to build – to realise – the buildings.’ 1 And, ‘These are hardly what I’d call virtuoso drawings. They’re drawings that I’ve had to work at, correct. That is why there are so many of them. The work is not a virtuoso exercise. It’s about thinking things through, looking for something that doesn’t yet exist in this form.” This makes me think of the use of hands in the process of drawing, and the sloppiness of first drawings and sketches. The hands, using drawings or models search, explore, reveal and find, independently of the head. For this to happen, sloppiness must be allowed. The hand does not necessarily depend on the head and vice versa. The exploration, reflection and testing process of architectural ideas goes through the hand and the drawings, pictures or models. There is some playing space between head and hands. Ideas and concepts emerge in the space created between both. All that is left from that play margin is the physical mass of graphic documentation. Going back to the creative processes thread, I am thinking of participative projects, where time is made for ideas and feelings to flourish, be expressed and react to each other. The German practice Raumlabor and the Rome-based Stalker incorporate times of exchange, conviviality, and collective exploration in their projects. Spaces are established during those processes. But these spaces are not created via a regular design process (brief - conception - construction), they arise from this floppiness: times of conviviality, exchange, imagination or even protest. The way these spaces take form confers upon them more than just a spatial quality: but also an emotional, social and political dimension. This involves losing the aim of conceiving a finished space in aid of moments, periods of time, situations (as the Situationists intended), and exchanges.
1 https://drawingmatter.org/peter-markli-my-facade- material/ accessed 12.01.2024
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on site review 44 : play
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