NYIT WORKSHOP – DRAWING 1

Naomi Frangos, Associate Professor of Architecture at New York Institute of Technology, Old Westbury Campus, Long Island, heroically invited me to give a Transparent Drawing workshop for her first year architecture design studio. The workshop took place during her normal class time on Monday. As has been said before and I’ll say it again here, the teacher typically learns more than the students.

Actually, I have come to believe that when there is a positive energy in the studio setting, both the teacher and the students learn equally. And there was definitely a positive energy in Professor Frangos’ studio. One mantra of the workshop included the proclamation that we are not simply artists, we are also problem solvers!

The students took to Transparent Drawing like you would not believe. We first started with what I will call a cube projection. The students took the simple and elegant geometry of Ellsworth Kelly as a form generator. They projected the plan geometry into their cube. Then they applied watercolor to the surfaces. While some students made vertical projections, others were immediately inspired to draw curved, coiled and overlapping lines. All good.  And given that this was the first time that most students had picked up a watercolor brush, the results are even more amazing.

This first drawing was a fantasy exercise in analogue form generation. And with the very simple input of Mr. Kelly’s paintings, forms were generated that were pleasantly surprising. While doing this drawing, the joke going around the class was that nobody knew what they were drawing. They were just drawing. And I reminded them of Picasso’s statement that when he started to draw, he does not know where he will end up.

Suspend rationality. See if you can surprise yourself.

What happens at the very beginning of a design effort has huge import. The time that you spend in a dialogue with your imagination as you put your first lines to paper has near religious import. The ability to remain outside of the rational and objective for as long as you can is totemic. Yet none of us are really taught how to do that.

From Professor Frangos:

“I came across Kurt’s “Transparent Drawing” site just by using those 2 words together when doing research for my fall course on wireframe axonometric. The idea of using water color to create transparent drawings in the spring class resonated with the course’s Joseph Albers color exercises on the illusion of transparency and layered space using opaque color-aid. As the students embark on their first architectural project that involves a real program and a real site – a Cliff Dwelling in the Palisades, NY – I thought this was the perfect opportunity to learn how to employ color to generate 3D idea and space diagrams, and define the possibilities of how the various programmatic spaces come together poetically: private, public, service and circulation.”

The gridded reality and ordering systems of buildings will require attention soon enough. The imagination enrichment of a method like Transparent Drawing serves as a vehicle which permits this reality suspension. Floating in the poetics of the solution is a very precious segment of the design process.

Hopefully, one of the takeaways of the workshop is that Transparent Drawing allows you to extend the floating poetics. It allows you to extend and structure the dreamtime.

The next post will continue with more student drawings from the NYIT workshop in Professor Frangos’ studio.