Film + Drawing: A Walk Among Lineaments

A Walk Among Lineaments Inhabiting the Architectural Line

_________________

An extended study of real and imagined lines and their role in the thinking and making of architecture. _______________________

Marcus Confino Independent Study Spring 2015 Shelley Martin

Dartmoor Time A CONTINUOUS WALK OF 24 HOURS ON DARTMOOR 11/2 HOURS OF EARLY MORNING MIST THE SPLIT SECOND CHIRRUP OF A SKYLARK SKIRTING THE BRONZE AGE GRIMSPOUND FORDING THE WEST DART RIVER IN TWO MINUTES PASSING A PILE OF STONES PLACED SIXTEEN YEARS AGO A CROW PERCHED ON GREAT GNATS’ HEAD CAIRN FOR FIVE MINUTES HOLDING A BUTTERFLY WITH A LIFESPAN OF ONE MONTH CLIMBING OVER GRANITE 350 MILLION YEARS OLD ON GREAT MIS TOR THINKING OF A FUTURE WALK EIGHT HOURS OF MOONLIGHT 55 MILES ENGLAND AUTUMN 1995

Richard Long

Marcus Confino Film + Drawing Study Fall 2014 - Spring 2015

Beginnings What is the relationship between duration and architecture?

What qualities of duration are latent in the process of line-making?

Can conceptual ideas about ‘lines’ be a means and a method for seeing and understanding architecture?

What is the relationship between lines drawn on a page and lines found in the world?

“There is a real duration, the heterogeneous moments of which permeate one another; each moment, however, can be brought into relation with a state of the external world [space] which is contemporaneous with it...

Two elements in motion: (1) the space traversed, which is homogeneous and divisible; (2) the act of traversing, indivisible and real only for consciousness.�

Henri Bergson

What is the relationship between duration and architecture?

Duration is the internal, subjective, purely qualitative, whole, and continuous experience of the external world.

Duration implies more than the passage of time.

The exploration of a “theoretical” line is used as a vehicle to study duration and its relation to time, space, and experience within the context of architecture. The line can be seen as the link between space and duration. Duration is purely qualitative, and thus does not exist spatially. A line is a carrier of both time and space; it represents duration both spatially and temporally. The line becomes a means of understanding the internal experience of the external environment.

The processes of drawing, photographing, and filming this durational line generated multiple ways to begin to understand, describe, and convey the metaphysical qualities of duration. The act of line-making serves as a way to understand, observe and experience durational qualities. As the drawing progresses, the drawn line becomes a spatial representation of the duration itself.

The act of inhabiting the line as a physical movement through space is documented through photography and a written record. The goal is to study space and duration, and derive

their specific relation to time. The act of walking becomes a way to actively participate in time, space, and duration simultaneously. This empiric investigation offers two interpretations of time in relation to space and duration.

The external environment can be described in terms of “endurance” and the internal experience (duration) of that environment in terms of “temporality”; the former being “over time”, the latter being “in time”. Thus a connection between space, time, and duration is made.

Drawing is weaved through the process, as a way of reflecting on duration retrospectively. The diagram (to the right) is an attempt to draw duration in terms of time and space. The drawing describes an experience in time, affected by an enduring physical space.

As stated previously, duration does not exist in space. By drawing duration, duration is brought into the world of space; it is spatialized.

Filming the line-making process creates the opportunity for an adjacent participation with the drawing. The observer views duration from a third person perspective. By watching the lines being made, the observer develops empathy for the process, a mutual understanding of the process. A common (inter-subjective) experience of the line can be had.

What qualities of duration are latent in the process of line-making?

This exercise studies the simultaneity between the physicality of line-making and the experience of drawing. In this context, the line belongs to both the physical space of the page and the mental space of the mind.

The process consists of repeatedly drawing lines of graphite on a vellum sheet, without predetermined parameters regarding weight, pace, starting or ending point, or final appearance.

Allowing the line to exist in an autonomous state brings the experience of the drawing to the forefront.

Each line is singular and distinct in its occupation of space and time. Yet each line is also part of a collective whole. The repeated lines build and collect to form a larger drawing and fill the space of the page.

Duration represents a collection of experience occuring across time and through space. In this way, line-making is latent with this quality of duration.

The line is both a physical record of the drawing process and a mental recordcontaining the subjective qualities of the line’s creation.

24� x 48� graphite on vellum

Notes on Line-Making Following a Line of Thought Inhabiting the Drawn Line

A Six-Minute Line and a Three-Minute Walk

A 12’ Charcoal Line

“The air is full of infinite lines, straight and radiating, intercrossing and interweaving without ever coinciding one with another; and they represent for every object the true form of their reason (or their explanation).�

Leonardo da Vinci

Can these conceptual ideas about ‘lines’ be a means and a method for seeing and understanding architecture?

This study of ‘lines’ is a search for a consistent means of seeing and understanding architecture.

The discipline of architecture is rich with diverse theoretical positions faced with complex constructive realites. The built environment is complex and diverse, in both its physical forms and ideological proposals.

A line is a way to find consistency within the complex nature of architecture.

To paraphrase Alberti, the source of beauty lies in the search for the lines that connect various works of architecture and understanding their relationship to each other.

This study seeks to understand the nature of a line and its relationship to the thinking and making of architecture.

Within this context, the line is manifested physically in the construction of a building and is manifested conceptually in the mind of the architectural participant. Thus the line becomes a way to see the reality of architecture and understand its conceptual foundation. _____ Photography and film are used as a method for finding and documenting found lines. Drawing is used as a means for re-interpretation or re-presentation of those lines. Drawing is an effort to understand the relationship between a physical line and a conceptual line.

Free-Hand Pen lines 9” x 12” Medium, Fine, Small, Extra Small

“...[the] purpose of lineaments lies in finding the correct, infalliable way of joining and fitting together those lines and angles which define and enclose the surfaces of the building... let lineaments be the precise and correct outline, conceived in the mind, made up of lines and angles, and perfected in the learned intellect and imagination.�

Leon Battista Alberti

Undergraduate Thesis Work A line becomes part of drawing. The autonomous line is now a method of rendering architectural form.

Light Renders Form Visible interaction of mutable and stable lines

“Perhaps the observation of things has remained my most important formal education; for observation later becomes transformed into memory. Now I seem to see all things I have observed arranged like tools in a neat row; they are aligned as in a botanical chart, or a catalogue, or a dictionary. But this catalogue, lying somewhere between imagination and memory, is not neutral; it always reappears in several objects and constitutes their deformation, and in some way, their evolution.�

Aldo Rossi

What is the relationship between lines drawn on a page and lines found in the world?

The study considers the relationship between ‘real-world’ lines and lines drawn ‘on a page’. It is informed by observation as an act of collection and drawing as an act of reflection.

The study is concerned with finding the role of lines as the connection between observation, reflection and conception.

‘Real-world’ lines are found lines that describe existing conditions and define the unique ualities of a work or architecture or natural site. Found lines are ‘collected’ as part of a collective experiential duration.

Lines ‘on a page’ are drawn lines that become a physical record of found lines. A line transforms observation into memory through the process of drawing. A drawn line is a method

of studying and reflecting upon an inhabited space or place.

Lines are a medium of communication, a universal language allowing the existing world to inform the conception and design of new works of architecture.

structural lines

material lines

formal lines

figural lines

construction lines

geometric lines

spatial lines, elemental lines, formal lines

landscape lines, natural lines, horizon lines

light, color, reflection

shadow renders form visible

light renders form visible

light defines the limit of a surface

edge between building and sky

lines make an edge, a corner, a turn

symmetry, order, facade, material, layering

built lines cause shadow lines

The act of collecting lines is an act of reflection.

The lines of the sky enter the space of the building.

The structural lines intersect with the lines of the ground.

The figural line defines the character of the facade.

Material lines inform construction and relationship to site.

Shadow lines as the consquence of built lines.

The autonomous line is brought to the scale of a room. The built lines of the space are rendered on the unrolled paper by the charcoal. The lines trace the surface of the wall, turn at the corner of two walls, reflect the changing of materials. The physical act of tracing the outline of the volume transforms the line into a line of measure. The room is measured in lines.

The line has moved from the space of a page to the space of the room. One can begin to inhabit the space of the line as a quality of the room.

The movement and space of the two-dimensional line registers the visible and non-visible conditions of the three-dimensional room.

The Floor

A Turn

The Wall

Intersection of Planes

A Corner

Change in Material

Change in Material

Endings and Beginnings

A line is a method of rendering form, a limit of a surface, the trace of a moving point.

A line is an autonomous element, free of pre-suppositions or pre-conceptions.

It is a carrier of time and space as well as sensibility and thought. A line is the productive tension between making and thinking. It is physical and imagined. It connects and de-lineates. It collects and builds. It ends and begins.

————— When a line is imbued with information it begins to represent ideas beyond itself by bringing reality to forms conceived in the mind. The line becomes part of a drawing. Lines build and cohere to render what the mind first imagined. Each drawn line is latent with architectural thoughts and images unique to its creator.

The built line is a physical construction.

It becomes part of a building. It marks the limit of a surface, an edge, a corner, a joint. The lines of enclosure ‘domesticate limitless space’1 and mark a place in the landscape. The line marks the edge where the building stops and the sky begins. The lines of the built structure intersect with the lines of the ground. The line describes and defines the materials of the building. It

becomes the floor and the ceiling, the wall, the door and the window. The line is a consequence of both a physical act and mental conception.

The perceived line is a mental re-construction, gradually building a collective duration. The mind of the observer collects the lines of the building, making connections, generating a history, weaving a subjective memory. The architectural participant inhabits the lines of the building, interacting with its surfaces and moving through its spaces.

The line belongs to both the space of the building and the space of the mind.

————— A line is a form of collected knowledge.

It begins again in the pages of a sketchbook, as the student discovers and contemplates the architectural world. The line is now a drawing of something real, of something existing in-the-world.

Built lines are drawn, just as drawn lines were built. And so a line is drawn as an act of making and an act of thinking. In doing so it belongs to the world of architecture: to drawing, to building, and to experiencing.

The observed and collected lines in the world lead to the creation of a new architectural construct. Something conceived through the observation and collection of real and imagiend lines.

Re-combined in the ‘learned intellect’. The collected lines are not neutral, they form a unique perspective on the world and provide a truth for the architect. The lines provide a reason for design, a method for rendering space visible in a physical architectural form.

appendices Film: Repetition + Duration Trace of a Moving Point: The Perspectival Line Presence of the Photographer The Research Environment

Stills taken from the orginial film ‘Repetition and Duration’

Trace of a Moving Point: The Perspectival Line

“Drawing is taking a line for a walk.”

Paul Klee