NYIT WORKSHOP – DRAWING 2

This is the second part of the Transparent Drawing workshop held in Professor Frangos’ first year design studio at New York Institute of Technology last week. The first installment can be found on the previous page.

In the first drawing, students developed transparent forms based on the paintings of Ellsworth Kelly.

Their second drawing directly related to their semester studio project; an artists’ residence on the Palisades overlooking the Hudson River. Because their site is sloped at about a 45 degree angle, a requirement of the project is to build both into the hillside and on the hillside.

Transparent Drawing allows them the ability to study this in the ground / out of the ground dynamic in one drawing. The interplay of the steep site and the forms that they introduce is immediately understood, transparency hides nothing.

So what becomes interesting in their drawings is this interplay between the site and their structure. Some students were inspired to draw programmatic rectangles into the site. Others were inspired to draw, for example, a curving shape. In both instances, their intervention is depicted simultaneously in and out of the ground.

Just look at Benjamin Sather’s concept above!  I really don’t think he could have realized this vision without Transparent Drawing.

And I think this is a very important point. In their first drawing, they were immediately grappling with the entire project. If they had taken the more typical route, and started to draw plans and sections, this in the ground / out of the ground dynamic would have taken longer for them to wrap their minds around. Given that they were working in an axonometric projection, their first drawing schematically encompassed the heart of the design problem.

Another important point is that with their watercolors, they were drawing the surfaces both of their site and of their building form. It is this depiction of surfaces that also reads them very quickly into what their enclosure and building envelope might be.

So for basically a three hour class, I think that the students did fantastic. Most of them had never done watercolors before.

After completing drawing 2, many students continued to draw small, thumbnail, transparent drawings to continue to test out ideas.

It is amazing how ideas flow when you have the power of Transparent Drawing. If you get an idea, any idea, you can quickly get it down. And because you have the watercolor tones, even these quick and quirky studies communicate an amazing amount of information.