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CURIOSITY
to study and speculate within the drawing. As a consequence, the work is fresher and more engaging through its incompleteness and the ability to read into it many things (speculation). The speculative nature, the content, the process of study through drawing and the narrative, these are where ideas are worked out, not represented. Peter Zumthor in his first lecture delivered in English at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, (November 1998 http://sma.sciarc. edu/video/peter-zumthor-2/) spoke about ‘preliminary promises’ in drawings and that he liked drawings that “reach out to the reality of the object”, referring to “permeable spots which allow for our imagination to enter and our curiosity about the reality to flare up.” Figure 2 Alice Chadwick, Absent Identity, charcoal and pencil, size A2
The speculative drawing is done to establish possibilities as well as priorities and to find an architectural vocabulary; drawings that translate thoughts, research and feelings. Sometimes conjectures are uncertain and sometimes assured. Although most architectural drawings are done to have an impact on the intended observer or to provide specific pieces of information, this is not so important here. These drawings attempt to capture the spirit and essence of the work; “the stuff of angels” as Ted Cullinan once observed (Cullinan, 2006). The speculative drawing encourages and allows freedom to explore and express a thought or an idea. The speculative drawing seeks to find an authenticity and essentiality to an architecture project. It seeks to release the full architectural potential and meaning and to capture the mood and the moment. It is vital that these drawings remain in the realm of the duality between reality and imagination. They set particular and peculiar touchstones and hold great richness and a sense of potency from which architectural propositions follow and against which later designs can be constantly checked. They are reference pieces for studies that follow.
THE SPECULATIVE WHY? The approach of speculation by drawing is intended here to assist broadening the conceptual range by which architecture is produced. Within the praxis of architectural design, finding space for speculative acts is difficult and questionable. These processes