Drawing Time
Marco Frascari
'A single drawing' exercise from: Eleven Excercises in the Art of Architectural Drawing (2011)
“For this exercise, the drawing is restricted to a single sheet of paper for the entire development. All work is to be developed on one surface including
sketching, study of precedents, technical detailing, and all this is done, using at the same time, multiple drawing scales. An abbreviated description of this
drawing exercise might include the following steps: 1. Use only a single sheet of 70 x 100 drawing paper (double-ply Bristol board or similar). 2. Start by transferring a few small topic-appropriate images (line-work transfers better than photos) to the board perimeter with a xylene transfer marker. 3. Draw some light construction lines of existing conditions of the site at a scale that takes up approximately 1⁄5 of the board. Use darker pencils and inks only after you are sure about your decision. 4. While all work must be done on the board, sketches can be done in notebooks and can then be transfered to the board at a reduced scale. 5. Collage can contribute to the evolution of the drawing, but use sparingly as it is opaque and difficult to draw over. 6. Thin translucence paper can be glued over so that a palimpsest of lines, tones, and images accrues over the time of the facture of the drawing.” 7. Light erasures are allowed but the notion is to maintain bits of everything drawn visible. 8. Instead of erasure, a light translucent gesso layer can mask
modifications. 9. Colors should be used, but not in a natural way; no green grass, no blue water, no red bricks. 10. The drawing should be scanned periodically at high definition and part of it should be cropped and modified in Photoshop, or similar graphic programs, and used in collages for a final presentation. 11. Remember that you can also use the verso of the sheet, especially if some of the inks or colors bleed through and can be incorporated in
the drawing."
Stewart Brand
How Building's Learn (1994)
"New College, Oxford, is of rather late foundation, hence the name. It was founded around the late 14th century. It has, like other colleges, a great dining hall with big oak beams across the top, yes? These might be two feet square, forty-five feet long. A century ago, so I am told, some busy entomologist went up into the roof of the dining hall with a penknife and poked at the beams and found that they were full of beetles. This was reported to the College Council, who met in some dismay, because where would they get beams of that caliber nowadays? One of the Junior Fellows stuck his neck out and suggested that there might be on College lands some oak. These colleges are endowed with pieces of land scattered across the country. So they called in the College Forester, who of course had not been near the college itself for some years, and asked him about oaks. 1990 - The new oak beams of New College, Oxford, were installed in 1865 by Gothic Revivalist Gilbert Scott, using timbers from college estates at Great Horwood and Akely in north Buckinghamshire. The building is the oldest surviving college hall at Oxford, completed in 1386 by Bishop William of Wykeham (master mason, William Wynford). The nowwindowed opening in the roof was originally to let out smoke from an open fire in the center of the hall. And he pulled his forelock and said, “Well sirs, we was wonderin’ when you’d be askin’.” Upon further inquiry it was discovered that when the College was founded, a grove of oaks had been planted to replace the beams in the dining hall when they became beetly, because oak beams always become beetly in the end. This plan had been passed down from one Forester to the next for five hundred years. “You don’t cut them oaks. Them’s for the College Hall.” A nice story. That’s the way to run a culture. Every time I’ve retold this story since I first heard it from Gregory in the 1970s, someone always asks, “What about for the next time? Has a new grove of oaks been planted and protected?” I forwarded the question to the authorities at New College—the College Archivist and the Clerk of Works. They had no idea."
Kevin Lynch
What Time is This Place? (1970)
Lynch proffers some radical avenues for re-establishing a relationship with time in our built environment so that “our fluid and chaotic urban landscapes may once again seem legible and meaningful.”(Lynch, 1972, ch.10) Some of these concepts have already come to fruition, such as the provision of 24hr services. Others are still unorthodox; proposals for dissemination and testing of future strategies of living, including “nostalgic, progresssheltered communities,” although he cautions against providing “permanent and convincing frauds” (Lynch, 1972, ch10). More applicable is his motion to create “a sense of local continuity – the tangible presentation of historical context, one or two generations deep, in all our living space- over the saving of special things. That continuity should extend to the near future as well as the near and middle-range past”(Lynch, 1972, ch10).
Tim Ingold
The Turn of the Present and the Future's Past (2022)
"People who continue to follow their ancestors are not backward. All too often, the belief that they are stuck in the past, left behind by history, has been adduced to justify the colonization of their lands. It is a belief that comes, as we have seen, from putting tradition behind us. To join with tradition, facing frontward, promises otherwise, to open a future that, far from converging on any projected end, is indefinitely renewable. This is what it means to say of the future that it is sustainable. A sustainable world affords the possibility for life to carry on, forever. This is not to substitute long-term for short-term solutions. Only in the rearward view of a pivotal present can time appear as a nested series of scales. Genuine sustainability cannot be balanced on any scale, for every moment contains within itself the promise of eternity."
Bruno Latour
Down to Earth; Politics in the New Climatic Regime (2018)
‘How can the feeling of being protected be provided without an immediate return to identity and the defence of borders?’ And we can now envisage an answer: ‘By two complementary movements that modernization has made contradictory: attaching oneself to the soil on the one hand, becoming attached to the world on the other.’ . . . we must agree to define a dwelling place as that on which a terrestrial depends for its survival, while asking what other terrestrials also depend on it? It is unlikely that this territory will coincide with a classic legal, spatial, administrative, or geographic entity. On the contrary, the configurations will traverse all scales of space and time. (Latour, 2018 pp.92-95)
Marco Frascari
Eleven Excercises in the Art of Architectural Drawing (2011)
“Non-trivial drawings are the place where architectural ethics occur because in the drawings architects considered the mode of action to deliver
change, especially to enhance the quality of life. Not only does drawing involve the ability to decide how to achieve a certain end, but also the ability to reflect upon it and determine the achievement of a beatific life, a vita beata, a merging in a single embodiment of three complementary arts: the art of drawing well, living well and building well.” P. 7
