aae2016 Research Based Education - Volume One
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DRAWING FROM THE PAST AND DRAWING FOR THE FUTURE Drawing as the main tool for managing precedents, create visual totalities or virtual worlds able to imitate the comprehensiveness of history but preventing the limitations of the immersive knowledge of tradition. Cultural material coming from history and tradition can be critically transformed into sources of design ideas – spatial organizations, patterns, archetypal forms, ready-made principles- through drawing. Designers use different types of representations in order to reflect upon prior work of architecture and to learn by example. In this context, orthographic drawings, archetypal diagrams and conceptual sketches become interpretations in which cultural and historical sources can be critically manipulated, arranged and included as material that inform design ideas. In this view, drawing, rather than just an action or a tool for inquiry within the design process, is considered a rigorous method to analyze selections in an effective way (Hancock, 1986). Three modalities of drawing would define the original and fertile methodological research of precedents: Analytical (orthographic drawing addressing space, plan-organization, zones, façade compositions, spatial relationships, etc.). Experiential (sketches that involve itineraries, texture, ornament, character, etc.) and transformational, applying Derridanian principles of deconstruction for manipulating form (Hancock, 1986). In the proposal Precedents in Architecture by Clark and Pause, diagrams keep a balanced dependency to the spatial and formal essence of architecture. The emphasis that abstraction produces in diagrams is used to connect the “commonalities of architectural ideas” (1996). In this case, no context, no socio-political, no technological issues are involved, just formative patterns, design parties and archetypes are considered important as they may lead to new design ideas. No periods, no styles, no names and dates is the conscious approach to the history of architecture. The use of diagrams, understood as visual abstractions that pretend to illustrate the “architecture of the idea itself” (Garcia, 2010), has become increasingly popular in architecture since the mid-1980s. The analysis of architects’ sketches offered by Kendra Shank (2005) offers the rigor of having the drawings and their ad-hoc linguistic critique together: this makes this approach a useful instrument in training to talk about what we see. In Groat and Wang´s Architectural Research Methods (2002), the authors declare faithfulness to Kantian art´s autonomy faithfulness in which is, maybe, the most important effort done for connecting architectural design and academic research. When drawing does not pursue visuality but it turns a communication media, virtualism is round the corner. “Virtual Architecture” (Jaime, 2002) is more related to politics than to architecture. Even considering drawing as the motive force of architecture, the virtual architectural experiments show that their focus is not space but iconography. Defined as attacks of drawers against spoken or written statements (Cook, 2008), the socio-cultural motivation of virtual architecture generates another sense of the virtual worlds totally different from those Schön talks about. In politically motivated architecture, representation has more temporal than spatial connotations. In these cases, verisimilitude becomes more important because images have different motivations than the particular “representation as seen” (Fiedler, 1887). This type of drawn architecture aspires to illustrate utopias which, in contemporary world, have become neoliberal projects that use its revolutionary powers for keeping things as they are (Gray, 2008).