(Left) Michiko Sumi, ‘Timepiece, Reconstructing Robben Island’, 2009. MArch Architecture Unit 17
Drawing
(Left) Dan Slavinsky, ‘In Arcadia at the End of Time: Fragment of Arcadia’, 2010. MArch Unit 19
(Right) Stefano Passeri, ‘Fly-Fishing Centre’, 2008. BSc Architecture Year 1
From 1990 onwards, the school put a huge emphasis on drawing. There were immediate improvements in technique and method, which began to incorporate digital image-making; these developments also transformed the purpose and potential of drawing as the motive force of design and research practice. Professor of experimental architecture Nat Chard, now back at The Bartlett after an absence of more than a decade, explains: ‘One of the pleasures in the drawings that have been emerging from The Bartlett for the past 25 years is that they are often made to have a presence in their own right. Unlike many drawings that are made in practice, where the drawing is created in service of a subsequent building, much of the work at The Bartlett is made with an acknowledgement that the drawing or model is the end (as they are student projects, they will not be built). Many of the drawings are constructed with the sort of critical attention to materials and process as one might hope for when building architecture.’ The drawing, in other words, holds a different status in an academic context to practice. Not just a repository of information or instruction, it is primarily a means of exploration. Luke Pearson takes up this point. Referencing a distinction made by the early 20th-century architectural draughtsman Hugh Ferriss, he points out that ‘The Bartlett is chasing the “authentic” drawing, rather than the “correct” version … the one that truly holds the idea … The school opens the possibility for architects to speculate and propose ideas on many levels of the world around us as they used to so often’. The result is a different relationship between drawing and content, as the drawing becomes an ‘advocate for the architecture being proposed’. It can be the end point or part of a longer process, or even stand slightly outside the process but act as a mirror or a lens into it. In this formulation the drawing is an integral part of the culture of architecture, but it can have many roles within that culture. The richer and more sophisticated character that drawings acquired brought new forms of recognition, from RIBA President’s Medals to the Museum of Modern Art acquiring the diploma portfolio of Colin Fournier’s student John Puttick, and more lately an extensive and growing presence of Bartlett staff and student work in The Royal Academy Summer Show’s Architecture Room.