NOTE TAKING

I’ve started to draw in a slightly new way.  And the best way I can describe it is that I am taking notes.  For most of my drawings of existing buildings, I have devoted the paper to that one building.  For example, at the page Ordinary Building Japan, I drew from the two photos that I took.  And then I devoted my drawing to that one building.

Yet I have come to realize that there are many buildings that I have been able to take only one shot of.  This might be due to travel limitations:  we are on a forced march and there simply isn’t time to stop, walk around the building for the second or third shot.  Or it might be late in the day, and I am tired, or hot, and really, what is on my mind is cool liquid refreshment to soothe tire and aching muscles.

Yet even with just one photo of a building, it is still interesting.  I don’t understand fully how it functions and resolves.  Yet there is something interesting about it, or else I would not have taken the photo.

So the drawing above is devoted to more than one building.  I simply found a few single photos of buildings that I took, and then drew them across the page.  With this approach, you can still pay close attention to the details and the geometric ins and outs of the form.  Granted, you can’t provide as much detail, given the smaller size of the drawing.  But since you have only one photo anyway, then the goal is to record on the paper the basic geometry that you did capture in your photo.

And although we do not talk about technique in these pages, as in any sort of formulaic technique, I do want to point out at least what I did.  For the back of the form, I used a light grey tone which summarizes, if you will, the profile.  And then I used a sort of off brown to shape the front of the form.  So my decision was to give each of the forms a uniformity by using, more or less, the same colors for each plane.  Although you might want to make each of the forms radically different.

My use of the term note taking is somewhat of a tribute to Lauseau’s Visual Notes for Architects and Designers.  Although I have not mentioned this book till now, I believe that my note taking approach is sympathetic to what Lauseau was getting at.  And while all of the drawings in Visual Notes are representational, ours, of course, are transparent.

If this were a classroom setting, I would now say that you should find at lest two photos of buildings that you took a picture of.  And then I would say that you should draw these buildings transparently, on your paper, next to each other, and let’s see what comes from that.