ON ARCHITECTURAL DRAWING MARGARITA JOVER
“In a line, the world comes together; with a line, the world is divided. Drawing is both beautiful and terrible.” Eduardo Chillida, Preguntas, 1994.
Essays
Drawing as a medium
326
Using architectural drawing as a medium, one can operate in three different ways. If we classify them according to their role, beginning from the most public sphere and ending with the most private, first we have the drawings that are drafted as instructions for construction: a precise tool to communicate the form and material qualities of the design. Next, there is the drawing as a graphic medium to express different architectural ideas for different audiences. Finally, in the studio or in more private spheres, there is the drawing as the expression of an intuitive pursuit to explore ideas. In each of these three roles, the drawing takes on different levels of resolution, where resolution is understood as the amount of information necessary to communicate certain ideas. Depending on the category in which the drawing is operating, certain aspects of the architecture will have high levels of resolution, and others will have very low levels of resolution. In the first level of drawing, which belongs to the more public spheres and is used to communicate the construction of a building, the drawing shows high levels of resolution in technical aspects such as form, materials, costs or methods of assembly; at the same time, it loses all resolution in the information associated with understanding the architectural object as an urban element. On the other
hand, the second level of drawing can synthesize the urban role of a building very well, but it omits entirely any information related to material qualities. This second type of drawing sometimes acts like a thematic diagram or compass; other times it takes the form of a poetic act that clearly reflects a specific aspect of the architectural reality. On that same second level, perhaps the most complex, we find different families of architectural drawings that aren’t a means to physically build an object, but rather an end in themselves to communicate architectural ideas. We find diagrams in plan, in section, and other two-dimensional montages with high levels of resolution in various spatial, material and cultural aspects of the architecture. The third level of drawing is an investigation; it asks questions of itself as it is produced. Its relationship with thought is immediate. It is a drawing that tries to capture the ideas flowing through the drawer’s mind. It encircles them, pursues them, and works by trial and error. This type of drawing can operate in plan or in section, in any abstraction of reality, in an iterative way. Each iteration questions the others, obtains a response and answers with another iteration. The process requires a means for each iteration to see the previous one and intuit the next one in a flexible space-time sequence. This is the case of explorations that are often done using layers of tracing paper in architecture studios. The degree of
transparency or opacity is critical to this process, because it defines the margin of maneuverability for operation. If the paper is extremely transparent, it is impossible to move mentally and visually beyond the present iteration. If it is too opaque, it is impossible to see the past. But if it is semitransparent, the past and the present can enter into dialogue to construct the future. These explorations operate with predefined levels of resolution, necessary and sufficient to generate the dialogue between the present, past and future formal, spatial or ideological configuration. In this context, defining the medium and the means for one’s work becomes the most significant creative task, which provides the foundation for a certain type of thought to flow. Physical medium and digital medium Working with traditional media, we find materials that have specific properties, like semi-transparent paper, pencils or paint; and they are imbued with certain rules that indicate possibilities and impossibilities. Working with digital media is the same. The medium has rules like a chess board: there are things you can do and things you cannot. An in-depth familiarity with each drawing software lets you understand which medium to choose for exploring one idea or another. Certain programs allow a particular kind of question and,