DRAWING MATERIALITY – CUT
Cut a mark. Cut into soft, wet, acrylic paint with a pencil: make a mark. Cut into dry liquid graphite with a Dremel Tool: make a mark. Cut is action. Make cuts.
Author: Kurt
LIFE LINES
The lines you have made on your paper will tell you what to do. The key is for each element that you apply to your drawing to have life. Each action is one of...
STILL AND MOVING
Humans produce still images (paintings, photographs, etc) and moving images (films, videos, slide displays, etc.). There are no still images in human visual perception: the area of light that is focused on your retina...
WORKING BALANCE
What are the marks that you make on the surface? What is your working balance? Are they lines? Does the term line confuse the issue? A line as defined by Euclidian modalities does...
FORMNICATION
Formnication noun 1. the imparting or exchanging of information between forms2. a process by which one form is modified by another one“This is the result of the formnication of the cylinder...
THE PROCESS IS THE MASSAGE
“What is needed is a process approach: each visual representation should be linked with its context of production.” Pauwels.
TAKE A DOT FOR A WALK
Paul Klee famously stated that a line is “a dot that went for a walk.” You make a dot when your pencil touches your paper, and that dot goes for a walk because of...
THE MATH OF HOUSES
The design of a house can be expressed in a mathematical formula. So let us see how we can incorporate mathematical equations as part of our design process. When a client approaches...
THE ARCHITECT SHALL DESIGN A FORM
The fundamental task of a designer is to design a form. Before any problem is solved there must be a form. Yet, designers are seen as problem solvers. A client may say, I...
SIMULTANEOUS DRAWING
In Transparent Drawing, I used the words simultaneous, and simultaneously, 20 times. Drawing simultaneously is one of my central concepts. As I took these photos a few days ago in the countryside of Girona,...
AUTHENTIC ANONYMITY
Rowe makes the point that Mies was concerned with anonymity. In Mies’ view, the idea was superordinant. The fact and the form were secondary. And this anonymity was deeply rooted in classicism. Beaux Arts...
LET’S DESIGN THE PROFESSION
There have been a spate of articles asking the question, will AI (Artificial Intelligence) make architects obsolete? Oliver Wainwright’s article in The Guardian is worth focusing on. In the article, Wainwright interviews Ethan Mills,...
BRAIN DUMP
I’ve been wanting to put together a page like this for awhile. I have assembled sequential pages from a sketchbook, to see if my brain dump gives insight. The date range is from 7...
SCORES AND SKETCHES
Architecture is what happens between your ears. The act of form generation has the greatest purity in your mind. Purity is reduced the more that the process moves toward a form that exists. ...
YOU SEE SHAPE
I happened upon course planning material for early grade teachers. These sources use the terms 2D Shapes, and 3D Shapes. They never use the term form. Shapes are not Forms. So let’s say...
FUNCTION IS FAKE
You can’t understand architecture with regard to function. Function is a bore. Function has never made sense. Function is fake. “Culture imposes accepted understanding of function.” Deetz. “Where function enters into the...
EVERYBODY’S BUSINESS
“Design is everybody’s business because we live in it, we eat in it, we pray and play in it. And still the appreciation of design, good or bad, is considered as the privilege of...
THE CULTURAL DIALOGUE OF FORMS
The forms that you design becomes markers of social order. Our forms, our stuff, our crap, becomes talismans of cultural value. Forms are a cultural road map: they are in direct conversation with the...
DESIGN COMPETENCE
Architects, to maintain their license to practice, need to earn a certain number of what are called Continuing Education credits per year. Many of you readers are architects, and are of course familiar with...
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