STUDENT TRANSPARENT DRAWING

I taught both design and gave a lecture survey course last fall. My goal in the course was to give a broad pictorial overview of architecture. And as you might guess, I had the students sketching in their sketchbooks from the photos that we were discussing that were projected on the wall. Another broad goal was to begin to understand the culture from which the buildings sprang.

My students were first year design students and most of them were fresh out of high school. They had not been given any sort of formal architectural drawing course. So the abilities that they had when they came to college were unsullied. They did not know what an axonometric was. They could not construct a three dimensional perspective. For most of them, the images of say Ronchamp Chapel that I projected on the wall were the first they had seen of this building.

 drawing above by Juan Martin Ramos Veron;  used with permission

For fun, I introduced the concept of Transparent Drawing and asked them to draw some of the famous and current buildings that we were looking at transparently. At that time, I had not made a formal study of Transparent Drawing.  So it was not like I was teaching this per se. Nevertheless, I did present the overall concept of drawing a complete enclosure, etc.

Juan’s drawing above is of the De Young Museum in San Francisco by Herzog & de Meuron.  I find the most compelling feature of the design are the voids that are created out of this more or less solid mass.  And Juan captured this essence in his 3 or so minute sketch.  The form is resolved.  The voids are represented.

above photograph used with permission http://philip.greenspun.com/

And I think this is successful. Always remember that there are no bad drawings. There are only drawings that work harder than others. And I believe that Juan’s drawing works.