ORDINARY BUILDING 2
For many people of our ilk, the brakes on our cars sure get a workout. We know the routine. We are driving along, typically trying to get someplace on time. And then there is...
Author: Kurt
FIRE PHONE
Amazon introduced their new Fire Phone. A technology perk that tries to distinguish the Fire from any other phone is what Amazon calls “dynamic perspective.” The cameras on the device tracks the position that...
BEAUX-ARTS BLAME GAME 2
There was a building boom in America after the Civil War. American architects were very concerned regarding both the low quality of the design and construction of these buildings. Thus there was a large...
PAUL KLEE AND TRANSPARENCY
Paul Klee seems to be thinking transparently in this watercolor. He seems to be employing what to this point we would call a Byzantine space time understanding. It is not an isometric drawing where...
QUICK START
If you have persevered thru any of this, you might be wondering how you would start to do a transparent drawing. You might have an urge to find a piece of paper, a pencil,...
BEAUX ARTS BLAME GAME 1
The Ecole des Beaux-Arts has been and continues to be a huge influence on our profession. It was a very prestigious arts and architecture school in Paris. It traced it’s roots back to 1648...
BYZANTINE MOSAIC
This photograph was taken from a mosaic on the ceiling of the Chora Church in Istanbul. As we have seen, the medieval artist did not have a cohesive and geometrically correct framework for their...
INDUSTRIAL DESIGNERS DO IT BETTER
Industrial designers draw transparently. And this makes sense. They are designing objects. Their objects, although smaller than buildings of course, nevertheless need to be a complete enclosure. Industrial designers have many of the same...
DURAND AND REPRESENTATION
I am of course not the first to question the place of representation in the depiction of architecture. Durand, writing in the early 1800s in his Mecanisme de la composition, stated the inextricable link...
LOOS VILLA MUELLER
I have been looking more at the residential work of Adolph Loos. This Transparent Drawing of the Mueller House, or Villa Mueller, is a result. I assembled this drawing from the multiple photographs and...
BYZANTINE SPACETIME
I photographed this fresco in the Chora Church in Istanbul. In the reconstructed image, one can see the inconsistent use of perspective geometry. This Byzantine painting was done most likely in the 1300s, well...
TACTILE TRACES
Nicolaides in The Natural Way to Draw describes the essential drawing phenomenon as tracing with your eye. That is, you move your pencil in the same manner that your eye sees the object that...
SENSORY MEMORY
One of the prime texts which we are typically all given is The Natural Way To Draw by Nicolides. He writes of sensory memory, which is within all of us. We gain sensory memory...
HAGIA SOPHIA
This has to be one of the most compelling buildings in the world. My first impression was that it looked almost like a ruin, given the multitude of elements that have been constructed around...
PERSPECTIVE POWER
Desargues was a French mathematician, engineer and architect who lived at the beginning of the 17th Century. In the 1640s, he stated that perspective theory was seen as a tool to help moderate between...
ST. GREGORY
St. Gregory of Nazianzos Church, Guzelyurt-Cappadocia We visited one of the first Byzantine Churches in Guzulyert, Turkey. This building has been called the inspiration and model for Hagia Sophia and was built in the...
BYZANTINE CHURCHES
We just had a fantastic trip to Turkey. So expect continual postings from this trip. A huge revelation revelation was how the Byzantines used domes. They employed a cascading assembly of full domes, half...
VILLA SAVOYE
Of all of the iconic buildings that I have been bombarded with over the decades, Villa Savoye always seems to be near the top. Every time that I see an image of this building,...
PAZZI CHAPEL
Years ago during a family trip to Italy, I dutifully brought along my sketchbook. We stayed almost a week in Florence. This is a pencil sketch that I completed during that trip. I made...
CHING AND TRANSPARENCY
A book that we have all been given as a basic drawing resource is Architectural Graphics, by Francis Ching. Almost every drawing in the book is opaquely drawn. Yet Ching does address transparency in...
LA TOURETTE
I’ve never been to La Tourette, which as you may know, is the Dominican monastery designed by LeCorbusier. I became curious about La Tourette as I gave a monastery project to my design students. ...
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