INSIDE OUT

Charles Ellis, who is an architect and educator, wrote to express what he sees as the inside out aspects of Transparent Drawing. He goes on to say that he also like to design from the inside out.

I’m glad that Mr. Ellis suggested the concept of inside out design, which is a concept that we all have been exposed to. Certainly one of the mantras of sensitive design is designing from the inside. When you design from the inside, you truly are designing from the viewpoint of the user. Inside out design puts the user before the form. Solve for the needs and pleasures of the user, and the form will take care of itself. Who cares what the form is as long as the enclosure supports the human beings who inhabit the space.

I had honestly not thought of Transparent Drawing as a method for inside out design. Certainly the principals can be harnessed for the inside out.

I guess I would rather think of Transparent Drawing as a synthesis of external form making and inside out design. I guess one way to say this is that when in a transparent drawing state of mind, you are prompted to think about the exterior form and the interior space simultaneously.

When you can see thru your drawing, you can be looking at the interior space from the exterior, and still have a strong idea about what is happening internally. A change made either to the interior or the exterior immediately reveals the impact on the other.

My sketch above studies a small addition to a simple gable house. For each of the four solutions, because the drawing is transparent, you can’t help but get a sense of the space and form simultaneously. Each of the studies shows an integration of plan, space, form, openings and light. Of course they are very crude. Each of them was done to just test out the possibilities of very simple enclosure concepts. And you might say that neither the inside nor the outside is dominant.