SITELESS

I just bought the book Siteless by Francois Blanciak. Seems like I am always finding out about books way after I should. This was published in 2008. And I only found out about it because of an Amazon recommendation. Given the books that I have bought thru Amazon, you would think that their recommendation algorithm would be more finely tuned. Or more likely the problem is simply me; I must be under some sort of rock.

Anyway, Siteless is a small format book with 1001 hand drawings, which the author calls “building forms.” The book was the result of 5 years of work. Mr. Blanciak is an architect, who made these drawings while working in various cities for various architects. And because the drawings are analogue and deal with the built form, I thought this merits a look thru the lens of Transparent Drawing.

The drawings are fun. There are interesting shapes. They are all axonometric. All are drawn opaquely with shading. There are 12 drawings per page. Each is given a number and a title. The last chapter takes one of the forms and proceeds to turn it into a building via models and sections.

As I said, all of the drawings are opaque. So there is nothing transparent about them. Although with the basic symmetry of the forms, you can complete the composition easily. My drawing at the top of the page took Mr. Blanciak’s form # 522, titled Structural Rendering, and gave it the transparent treatment. I have taken the liberty of reproducing page 56, which gives you a feel for the book and it shows form # 522.

My drawing used a perspective projection, rather than the axonometric of Mr. Blanciak’s. I can’t avoid wanting to see all drawings like these done transparently. I have said before that once you start to draw transparently, once you start to see transparently, opaquely drawn forms just seem limited.

In Transparent Drawing, I endeavor to show the provenance of the forms. Whether I base the drawing on hanji script, DT18 jet engine parts, F1, or Chinese junks, the cultural connection is revealed. All too often new forms are plunked down in front of us, and we are not given a cultural tag for reference. At the conceptual level of the Siteless drawings, it is my belief that some sort of cultural thread needs to be demonstrated. This cultural link then gets us all beyond, yet again, just another pretty picture.

So what I would really like to see is the provenance of the forms. Where did they come from? What was Mr. Blanciak looking at? What sorts of combinations were made? Was there an additive or subtractive process in the making of the drawings? Was the form the result of a doodle? Was the form a product of a drawing iteration?

I think that the coolest part of the book are the titles that he applied to the drawings. You can see the titles on the example page that I have provided. Most of these titles have a unique and fun combination. So for example, the title “cubical dome” could easily serve as an inspiration for a drawing, and you would not have had to see Mr. Blanciak’s drawing to get some sort of image from the title cubical dome. This makes me wonder if there is more power in the titles of the drawings rather than the drawings themselves.

As should be evident, I am enjoying Siteless. If anyone has a hankering to do a transparent drawing and is in need of form inspiration, any of Mr. Blanciak’s forms would be a good place to start.

Link to Mr Blanciak’s website here.

1. Blanciak, Francois. Siteless. The MIT Press: Cambridge. 2008. P 56.